Talk:List of rampage killers (workplace killings)

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Some rules in this article that are questionable[edit]

The rules in question are: "Rampage killings with 6 or more dead Rampage killings with at least 4 people killed and least ten victims overall (dead plus injured) Rampage killings with at least 2 people killed and least 12 victims overall (dead plus injured)"

Why were these arbitrary figures used to define rampage killings? Given that the definition apparently comes from this article: http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Rampage_Killer, several of the killings listed in that article involved fewer people and thus aren't included in this list. Even according to Wikipedia, a spree killer "is someone who kills two or more victims in a short time..." The criminalminds Wikia seems to group spree killers and mass murderers under the heading of rampage killers. I admit that if we do take the more general definition, then the list would be lengthy. If that is the sole reason though I would suggest that this page should be marked for deletion rather than just arbitrarily decide that if two people are killed, then there should be 12 victims overall. On the other hand, I don't see any reason why we can't go with the more expansive definition of someone who kills 2 or more people with the understanding that the list would likely be incomplete for some time. DanStevens (talk) 08:03, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Better, write on the main page.Unknown4321unknown (talk) 10:21, 26 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Empty lines[edit]

I'd recommend removing the empty delimiter lines. They'd mess up expansion and they are lost after pressing any of the sort buttons. NVO (talk) 07:15, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why separate military?[edit]

Why is the military singled out as a separate section?

Anti-military? Why not women and men accused killers? Or Western Hemisphere versus Eastern? Or pre-2000 and after 1.1.2000?

Or just combine the two?

I think that it happens more in civilian life so separating them and having a large military section may lead some to think that the military has a lot of crazy killers, which I don't think is true. Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 19:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the seperation has several reasons. First, if you take a look, the age-profile of the perpetrators in the two groups is clearly different. Second, the workplace shootings are very much an American phenomenon, while the ones involving soldiers are not. Third, I think it is something different, if a civilian attacks other civilians, or if a soldier, who after all was trained to kill, snaps and turns on his fellow soldiers. And, although more mass murders are committed by civilians, the number of soldiers committing them is rather striking and I've seen quite a few studies mentioning them explicitly. A study by Joseph Westermeyer about 18 amok cases in Laos e.g. stated that all of them were committed by people in the military. Another study I remember mentioned that about 20% of all the mass shootings they've found were committed by soldiers. So they are a group that stands out quite a bit, and as this list is about workplace murders I assume it is justified to make a distinction between one group that comprises of about 50% of all the entries and the rest. (Lord Gøn (talk) 05:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC))[reply]

Is there any reliable source that discusses the difference between military and civilian killings? Otherwise, creating new ways of looking at things could be original research, which is prohibited. Perhaps the article could be separated into two with a "related article" link between the two?

Also quoting you:

First, if you take a look, the age-profile of the perpetrators in the two groups is clearly different.[citation needed]

Third, I think it is something different, if a civilian attacks other civilians, or if a soldier, who after all was trained to kill, snaps and turns on his fellow soldiers.[citation needed] Aren't many soldiers not trained to kill? Cooks, nurses, helicopter pilots, tank drivers, firemen, etc.?

In Wikipedia, we often let things go and not savagely fight for all errors. But, let's try our best to be good editors. Suomi Finland 2009 (talk) 18:38, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't think it would qualify as original research to make a separate section for soldiers, after all no conclusion is drawn by doing so. They just make up a huge junk of the list, so separating them feels natural and is a cheap way to give additional information about the perpetrators.
Anyway, there might be scientific studies that deal exclusively with murders in the military or committed by (former) soldiers in civilian settings, given that mental health problems in soldiers are quite a big deal, though I have to admit that I don't know of any. Mass murders are rare, the ones committed by soldiers going berserk even rarer, so they will likely be examined in a broader context I am not familiar with. But if you want my own opinion, I don't think there is any significant difference in the psychological background of civilian and military mass murderers, though soldiers might have to deal with problems that rarely can be found in the life of a civilian. What seems to be a major difference is that they often have their guns ready at hand and were trained to overcome any inhibition to use them against other people, so it might be easier for them to lash out against whoever they have identified as their enemy. They also might be more prone to get into extremely stressful and psychologically harmful situations, with no possibility to get out. As a common worker you've always the possibility to quit your job when you realise that it destroys you. A soldier often does not have the choice to go by himself, but has to wait for his dismissal, thus leaving him trapped in the cause of his misery. Another difference is that soldiers have access to weapons a normal civilian has not, like automatic weapons or hand grenades. Whatever the reason behind it, the number of mass shooters with a military profession is matched by no other group of workers.
About the age profile, well, you are allowed to call this original research, though if you mind taking a look, you will see that about 1/3 of those in the workers section are over 40 years of age, while those under 25 are rather rare. Its the other way round in the other group, where none is over 40, while more than 1/3 are under 25, so it is quite save to say that the average age of a soldier killing his comrades is way below that of someone killing his co-workers. I think this difference is quite easy to explain, but I don't want to bore you by going into too much detail.
It might very well be that many soldiers don't get too much training in the handling of weapons and their use against others, though as far as I can remember all of those in the soldiers-section, with the exception of Hasan, were literally part of the armed forces, no cooks, nurses, drivers or engineers present, only your common soldier with his rifle. (Lord Gøn (talk) 08:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC))[reply]

Valery Fabrikant[edit]

Valery Fabrikant of the Concordia University massacre should be on this list but I don't know how to add it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.100.215.221 (talk) 10:49, 15 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

With four people killed and one wounded the shooting is not included in this list. (Lord Gøn (talk) 15:45, 15 December 2012 (UTC))[reply]

My recent edits[edit]

You reverted them, saying that you didn't see why they were necessary. You could have asked me before reverting. However, here are the reasons.

See MOS:Overlink Do not link:

  • "everyday words (expressions, phrases, terminology, etc.) understood by most readers in context". This is the reason for unlinking hand. I would also have removed the entirely unnecessary link to [[rock (geology)|stone]] if I had noticed it at the time
  • "names of major geographic features and locations". This is the reason for unlinking United States (23 times) and other major countries

See MOS:Special considerations

  • "...abbreviations of place names (e.g. Calif. (California), TX (Texas), Yorks (Yorkshire) should not be used to stand in for the full names..". This is the reason for converting all the state abbreviations to state names.

See MOS:General_points_on_linking_style.

  • "When possible, avoid placing links next to each other so that they look like a single link". There is no benefit to the separate state link (when would anyone use that link?), so it's better to combine the city and state link into one, matching the title of the WP article on the city. For some well-known cities such as such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, the WP article title does not use the state name at all, so the link doesn't need to specify it either. Colonies Chris (talk) 16:12, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Well, in all honesty, my note left in the edit summary was a cheap way out, because explaining the poblems I had and still have with your edit takes a little bit more space than is available there, and I really hoped you didn't care enough to revert which would've spared me from investing more time than absolutely necessary on the subject. But alas, it seems I will have to go into much more detail.
First of all, and this is probably a minor complaint, you have removed the italics from some major news agencies, such as the BBC or the Associated Press, in the given references, even though they serve the purpose to differentiate the news outlet from the news headline. This is consistently applied throughout the list, and I'd be interested to know, why you think they should be removed in these few cases, but kept in all the others, or why this bothered you in the first place.
Second, your unlinking of those countries which you apparently consider "major geographic locations" gives the impression of being inconsistent and fraught with western bias. For example, you unlinked South Korea in LoRK: Workplace killings, but not in LoRK: Asia, and while I can see that this simply slipped past your attention, I do not understand, why you think Pakistan is major enough to be unlinked, but not Afghanistan, why you unlink Greece, but not Colombia, or Venezuela. Or why do you consider Belgium, or even Luxembourg a major location, and therefore unlink them, but not the Ukraine, or Serbia, or Thailand. To me this doesn't make any sense and seems completely arbitrary, and no matter what you'd do, it would stay that way. Someone in South Africa would in all probability have less problems pinpointing Mocambique on a world map than Portugal, so what actually constitutes a major location will always be subject to somebody's background.
What creates even more problems is the fact that you unlink e.g. todays India, but retain any wikilink leading the reader to the British Raj. As a common reader the impression I'd get from this is that the wikilinks are not only arbitrarily, but also inconsistently used, and the only way I can see to circumvent this is by putting wikilinks on all of them. Furthermore, there are a lot of people out there who are a lot less savvy in geography than you may be, and while you may know very well where a country like France is located, there are probably quite a few who do not. And even though WP:MOS may discourage wikilinking countries like the United States, ask yourselves, does it hurt anyone, if it is done anyway? The manual of style is a guideline, and not a law cast in stone, and while I can see, how overlinking could be a problem in normal articles and be disruptive to reading, the same is not the case for lists. On the contrary, I find the inconsistency created by linking some countries, while not linking others detrimental to the lists visual appearence. And then there's the fact, that a template like {{flag|USA}} produces  USA, so by default includes a wikilink to that country, which makes me ask myself, why is it handled that way, if we should not, per WP:MOS, link to major geographic locations? And, would the links be ok, if I'd replace all the [[United States]] with {{flag|USA}}?
Third, to use abbreviations for the US states was not merely a design choice, but serves the purpose to reduce the space the location-column takes up, because even though there are practically no constraints to Wikipedia, the hardware people use to read its articles is not so lucky. And overall I do not think there should be too many problems with these abbreviations, since all you have to do, to know what they actually mean is putting your cursor over the link and wait for a second. So, we could discuss if it is better to replace [[Louisville, Kentucky|Louisville]], [[Kentucky|KY]] with [[Louisville, Kentucky|Louisville, KY]], but writing out all of those states seems like a bad choice to me. It takes too much space in my eyes. And leaving out the states for cities like Atlanta or Honolulu again creates inconsistencies in the layout. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:22, 19 March 2013 (UTC))[reply]
Let's go back to the fundamentals and ask what purpose this set of articles serves. Essentially, being a sortable list, it's a way for a reader to locate a specific incident when they only have part of the information about it. As such, the only links that are truly useful are those to the named individuals, or the article about the actual event. Why would a reader of this article, discovering that someone killed, say, 9 people in a city in a lesser-known country, want to go to the article about the country, or even the city? It would have no relevance to the incident that this article exists to document - it quite probably wouldn't even mention it - and the country link is doubly superfluous given that there's already a link to the specific city in that country. In fact, it would be better to have only links to the individuals/events. Compare, for example, a similar article such as List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft, where the only links are to the actual incident.
BTW, you raise a good point about the {{flag}} template. It should have an option to switch off automatic linking of the country. I'll request it. Colonies Chris (talk) 15:10, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The fact aside that you have conveniently ignored addressing any of the issues I have raised, if or why somebody would click on a link is totally irrelevant. You could as well ask why would somebody click on a link to Charlestown, Massachusetts in an article about Howie Long, or Indonesia in an article about Barack Obama. I would say in all probability the reason is either, because that person does not know where it is, or simply wants to know more about it. And to compare this list with the List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft is a little bit far fetched, since the layouts are completely different. And there are other lists who do wikilink all the countries, like List of famines, or List of epidemics. As far as I'm concerned I would say you either link all of them, or none, and I am certainly in the link-them-all camp, since it doesn't hurt anyone, while being potentially helpful to those who are interested. But to arbitrarily put wikilinks here and there, but not elsewhere seems pretty illogical. (Lord Gøn (talk) 21:14, 20 March 2013 (UTC))[reply]
Well then, since you don't seem to bother to reply, I suspect you won't mind, if I am going to revert. Also it seems there is probably a reason we have {{flag}} besides {{flagu}} and since I don't see why it should be ok to have something like  USA, but not a simple United States in the list, I suppose there is no issue with linking all the countries. (Lord Gøn (talk) 19:21, 25 March 2013 (UTC))[reply]
Apologies for the silence, I've been working away for a week. The whole point of having recommendations against overlinking is that it does constitute a problem. Otherwise we would be linking every word just in case someone might find that link useful. Unnecessary linking distracts attention from the really useful links. I'd prefer to see none of the countries linked, as they're completely superfluous when there's already a link to the city. There is precedent for meeting your concern about space in a table by using the state abbreviation; however, a separate link for the state is neither necessary nor desirable. Why worry so much about consistency of appearance for US cities when the state isn't required? Since not every city around the world (or even in North America) is normally identified in that format, the appearance can never be fully consistent. As for your question about italics: usual WP citation style is to italicise publications (e.g. Time), but not to italicise publishers (BBC) or news agencies (Associated Press); see the documentation at Template:Cite news. And about flags; I expect we have {{flag|US}} for completeness and because it dates from the days before overlinking was much considered. I've only just heard about the existence of {{flagu}} and I'll certainly be using it in the future. Colonies Chris (talk) 17:34, 27 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As I have noted above I can see how overlinking could be a problem in a normal article, but lists are a totally different beast. As WP:OVERLINK states: Overlinking makes "it difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding significantly." This is obviously not true for a list with a layout like the one used here, where everything is strictly ordered. Nobody with some brains left would've a problem to distinguish any links to articles about the crimes, or their perpetrators from those to cities and countries, because they are in separate columns. So, overlinking is not a problem here. Also the linking does serve another purpose. There are quite a few cases listed that occurred in countries (or colonies) that do not exist anymore under their former names. So you face the problem that cases that essentially occurred in the same country, e.g. Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, or British Raj/India, would, after sorting, either not be grouped together (when using the country's name at the time of the crime's occurrence), or it would give the false impression the crime had happened in a country that did not even exist at that time. [[Dutch East Indies|Indonesia]] would circumvent this problem, because all Indonesian cases would be sorted in a row, while the link would make clear enough that the country was actually the Dutch East Indies at that time.
About the US states: There are basically two reasons for this. The first one is that it seems common practice to add the state whenever naming a not too well known US city, so I do that, and since the cities that do not require this little annex are in a clear minority I still add it in these few cases just for consistencies sake. This city-state-naming convention is not normally used in other countries, so I use it only for US-cities. The second reason for this is that I use this list as some sort of statistics and research table, and since a lot of the rampage killings listed happened in the USA, I find it quite helpful the have the information right there to see in which part of the US each case occurred.
Finally to the italics. First, the cite news-template is not used here, so how it is handled there is of no interest to me. Second, news agencies are generally not given here, only who published the article. Whenever there is a BBC, or AP, or AFP given as the origin of the source, either the provided link goes there, not to some other publication, or, in case of an unlinked source, the article was directly acquired from AP etc, so agency and publication are essentially the same here. And therefore all of them are (and imo should be) in italics. (Lord Gøn (talk) 14:34, 3 April 2013 (UTC))[reply]

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