Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Timeline of the Casey Anthony case

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to Death of Caylee Anthony. If there's nothing further worth merging, then someone can simply redirect the title there. But we have a pretty clear consensus this doesn't belong as a standalone article. Courcelles (talk) 13:31, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline of the Casey Anthony case[edit]

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The article is an extremely detailed timeline of the Casey Anthony case. I think it's fair to call the timeline granular. We learn that, for example, at 1:44 p.m. on June 16, 2008, Casey called a friend (who's name is included), and that the call ended at 2:21 p.m. The next piece of information offered is that, according to George Anthony's later testimony, he left work at 2:30 p.m. But most of the timeline is geared towards the trial—with day-by-day descriptions of testimony offered. (I should also say that a few of the entries, I think problematically, fail to indicate that they were from testimony.)

I've worked on a few high-profile criminal cases now, and I've seen cases in which separate articles for the court case exist, but usually those cases involve appeals. Compare 1984 New York City Subway shooting#Criminal trial with People v. Goetz, covering one of the many appeals. Conversely, see the many examples of event articles that don't have separate case articles— Central Park jogger case, Murder of Laci Peterson, Killing of Hae Min Lee. We could do a detailed play-by-play of each of those cases—the events leading up to them, the trials, the appeals. But we don't. Maybe that's just because no one has been willing to write them, but I think it's because this kind of granular detail isn't generally appropriate for a encyclopedia.

Normally, I would just suggest a merger, but in this case I've already taken a few of the relevant events that weren't in the Death of Caylee Anthony article ... and I don't think there's anything else here that should be included. The trial section in that article was already overlong before I cut it (and, frankly, it's still a bit long). To perform that cut, I looked at summaries of the trial and what they emphasized. Everything that's left in the timeline article—which, to be clear, documents what happened on every day of the 6-week trial—isn't in those summaries, and I don't think anything in it would add to the article while still complying with summary style. --Jerome Frank Disciple 17:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Crime-related deletion discussions. Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 17:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Florida-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 17:36, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Non-standard trial/case summary better converted to prose than staying in a timeline form. Nate • (chatter) 18:38, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I am confused by the nominator. What is the exact reasoning based on Wikipedia policies for wanting to delete this article? – The Grid (talk) 19:30, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm confused, too! Here I guess I'm defaulting to the ol' "unencyclopedic" rationale (WP:DEL-REASON 14—Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia.), but I concede it's mostly vibes. That said, I do think there are some policies that make this kind of content questionable. For example, we normally have to consider WP:DUE WEIGHT and MOS:TIMELINE, which says, "Ensure that list items have the same importance to the subject as would be required for the item to be included in the text of the article ...." But if the article is the timeline ... can that really mean anything goes? No detail is too small? At what point does a timeline become just a split-off chronological trivia section? (To some degree, this is all dancing around WP:INDISCRIMINATE.) As I said, I very well could have gone with a merge, but that, too, would've resulted in an immense amount of content being deleted, because, quite frankly, most of that content wouldn't be appropriate in the Death of Caylee Anthony article. I thought bringing an AfD would be the better option and more fair to anyone who wants to preserve the timeline, but if there's a consensus that a merge is the better option, I'll go for that. (I am, after all, currently merging what I can.)--Jerome Frank Disciple 19:39, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the reply, I was more confused as there's definitely information that can be merged into the article versus completely deleting it. It would be a prime candidate to merge as a alternative to deleting. – The Grid (talk) 12:43, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Fair point—And yeah, I do want to make clear I am working on merging the information, but since so much of that information will end up being ... not merged (er, deleted), and I'd imagine anyone that likes the Timeline as it is would consider that a deletion, it felt to me that a deletion discussion would be appropriate, but perhaps that was a mistake.--Jerome Frank Disciple 14:29, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Merge into the main article about the case. 15 years later I don't think it helps to know when a cell phone call started and ended. Broadly covered in the article about the case, this level of detail doesn't help the narrative at this point in time. Oaktree b (talk) 19:41, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep or Merge: because it is well sourced enough, and the few entries that don't mention they were from testimony can be fixed to explicitly say so, and are easily figured out as such by existing context anyway. Don't usually participate in these, but came across the notice doing my typical gnome work... Huggums537 (talk) 11:14, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete or Merge I have a tendency to stuff every detail I can find into an article, but I think this is way overdone. - Donald Albury 15:24, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.