Talk:Murder of Jason Gage/Archive 1

Go Ahead and Delete Them All
I am no longer an active contributor to Wikipedia. I haven't been for years. I stopped adding hate crimes cases to Wikipedia when I realized the notability requirement negated the very cases I wanted to highlight. (I should note that the Nizah Morris article slated for deletion appeared on the front page of Wikipedia in the "Did You Know" box, FWIW -- which is apparently not much.) Instead I established my own freestanding site, where I can post and update entries on these crimes. I'd mention the site here, but that would be self-promotion.

I started this project because I was writing a post about hate crimes, and went to Wikipedia as a resource. I realized that of the cases I wanted to cover, only a handful were entered into Wikipedia. To look at Wikipedia, one would think that hate crimes are I set about trying to change that and -- as you've no doubt seen -- got pretty far before I started running into the notability guidelines, and started seeing entries removed. I quickly abandoned Wikipedia for reasons I'll spell out below.

These are cases that are virtually unknown, because they never made major headlines, catalyzed public response, caused major legislation, etc. The names and faces of the victims are unknown to most people. News articles about the crimes committed against them never got reported beyond local media, and have long since been buried behind the paywalls of local news outlets. I used my research skills and resources to get behind those paywalls, to try and create a publicly accessible record of their stories. Once I got started, I found that researching one story would often lead me to one or more that I added to a long backlog of stories I've yet to research. I'll never get to them all, but I will record as many as I can.

Occasionally, I will get an email from friends and family of the victims, thanking me for me for making a public record of their love-one's stories, and for ensuring that they were not forgotten. But beyond that, they are forgotten. And Wikipedia's notability guidelines suggest they should be.

So, no amount of editing is going to make them worthy of note -- certainly not enough to save them from deletion.

At this point, it looks like just about every contribution I've made to Wikipedia is slated for deletion. So be it. I've already preserved them elsewhere, and recorded many, many more that I never bothered trying to to enter into Wikipedia, because I'd learned my lesson at that point.

I've long since learned that Wikipedia is useless to me in the work I want to do. Its limitations make it so. It is useless to me as a resource, as it is unlikely to contain information about the kinds of cases I want to record, in order to make them accessible beyond the paywalls of local media archives, and also to give some inkling of the long history of hate crimes, the regularity with which they occur, and the diversity of the victims.

In that sense, I guess I believe they are worthy of note. But they will never notable enough for Wikipedia. So, delete them all.

TerranceDC (talk) 15:34, 18 September 2012 (UTC)