Talk:Lists of serial killers

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Crime and Criminal Biography: Serial, mass, and spree killers Low‑importance

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Redundancy in lists of serial killers[edit]

I don’t see why Wikipedia needs separate killer lists by country, by date, by number of victims, et cetera. Tables have little thingies at the top of each column so the table can be re-ordered however the reader wants. Per WP:Summary style:

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Size guidelines apply somewhat less to disambiguation pages and to list articles, especially if splitting them would require breaking up a sortable table…. Long stand-alone lists may be split alphanumerically or chronologically or in another way that simplifies maintenance without regard to individual notability of the subsections (common selection criteria: lists created explicitly because most or all of the listed items do not warrant independent articles; short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group). However, a split by subtopic is preferable.

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I suggest one sortable table per time period, e.g. per millennium, or (if the list gets too long) per century or (if the list gets too long) per decade. That’s all. No tables by country, or by number of victims, or by anything else. That would greatly simplify maintenance, and avoid redundancy. The default ordering should be by date when a killer’s killings started, and then readers can sort however they want. A default ordering by number of victims would make it look like a competition. Also no flags, because killers are not representing their countries, or anything like that, see MOS:FLAG. If we go ahead and have only one list article for serial killers in each time period, then that would still be a lot more articles than we have at List of serial rapists. Per WP:CLS:

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Categories, lists, and navigation templates are three different ways to group and organize articles. Although they each have their own advantages and disadvantages, each method complements the others.

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Reducing these lists to one list per time period would still allow whatever categories and navigation templates people think are appropriate. Past discussions about deleting or merging some of the serial killer lists were as follows:

Probably the best way to proceed would be to propose merging the pertinent lists into a new List of serial killers after 1900, with the understanding that this new list could be split up by time period if it gets too large. Any info in the pre-merger lists pertaining to the pre-1900 period could be deleted as redundant in view of List of serial killers before 1900. The new list would be in sortable table format, and one column could be for nicknames. Regarding List of serial killers before 1900, why should it include multiple tables instead of a single one? Anythingyouwant (talk) 01:15, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I would support such a change. —Of the universe (say hello) 02:59, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]