Jump to content

Talk:2023 Canary Islands migrant boat disaster

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Title

[edit]

The subject of the article, unfortunately, needs to be identified in the title with the month and year, probably even the day. As of July 2019 there had already been 116 recorded Canary Islands migrant boat disasters: [1]. JECE (talk) 03:43, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@JECE: But only these have Wikipedia articles, too, and we need to disambiguate them. See WP:EVENT and WP:NCEVENTS - including WP:NOYEAR. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 11:46, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Cameron Dewe I take it that you agree with me that the title needs to be changed, then? That article that I link to above mentions another Canary Islands migrant boat disaster on 19 July 2007 which left 48 people missing. We're talking about an average of at least 16 people missing for each of the 116 Canary Islands migrant boat disasters that one news organization happened to record over a 20-year span.
Here is an update on the subject of the current article, by the way: [2]. Also on Wednesday and into the early morning hours of Thursday more than 165 migrants were rescued from three other boats. JECE (talk) 16:00, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: I see that this article has now been moved to a new title another editor being bold, and adding the year 2023 to the article title. This follows the naming conventions for events, which recommend the questions "When?", "Where?" and "What?" be addressed by an article's title, to be consistent with the titles of other similar articles. So your question is somewhat moot. However, I feel I need to address it in order to explain myself. In the broader scheme of things, editors need to remember that editing Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia, not merely reporting what is said in the news media. The title of an article needs to reflect the article's contents, and that depends upon what material is covered by the article as well as the subject that is expected to be covered by the article that the title invokes in both readers and editors expectations. No, I do not agree with you that the title needed to be changed, it is a perfectly good title, especially if this disaster was a unique event, or as a disambiguation page, if Wikipedia happened to have more than one article about different Canary Islands migrant boat disasters. Which is the point I was trying to make. At the beginning, any article can have a range of possibilities that it could evolve into. For example, one could pluralize the title and write about all 117 disasters that have been recorded, and include any research about what these had in common as to why they all happened. To me, that would be a far more encyclopedic article. The issue with writing about current events is that it is hard to tell which ones are historically significant until they are historical events, perhaps ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred year afterwards, and what aspects of this disaster distinguishes it from the previous 116, and any subsequent ones that might occur over the coming years. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 23:45, 23 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
At least three more migrant boats were reported to have been lost at sea after also attempting to travel from continental Africa to the Canary Islands. One boat had about 200 people onboard, another boat had about 65 people onboard and a third boat had about 55 people onboard. These three boats left from the Casamance, not Western Sahara, but they also left continental Africa in June. [3] If this article is to be maintained in its current state, the title needs to specify the day of the tragedy.--JECE (talk) 22:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: At this stage, none of the news stories about those lost boats have resulted in a Wikipedia article being written about any of them. Before disambiguating this disaster from those other lost boats, Wikipedia must have articles written about those other disasters. Until that is done, Wikipedian will not know what those other articles will be called nor whether or not Wikipedia will need to disambiguate the titles of those articles by using the month and date. Please remember that Wikipedia is not a news website, so individual articles about these sorts of disasters need to be considered notable enough to warrant having a separate article about each event. If you read the naming conventions for events, it states that "... The month or days should not be used in the title unless other descriptors are insufficient to establish the identity of the incident, ..." So, unless more articles are written about all these Canary Islands migrant boat disasters that happened in June 2023, there is no need to be more precise than having the year in the article title, because we currently only have one existing article about migrant boat disasters in the vicinity of the Canary Islands. However, feel free to write separate articles about each of these disasters, because then the need for using the day abd month will become more obvious. Also, if you then feel that this article needs to move to a new title, please feel free to request a page move by using the requesting a single page move process. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 10:48, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]