Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Catholic Criminals

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:16, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] List of Catholic Criminals

Redundant with categories. If something like this is to exist at all, it should be like Category:Criminals by nationality. There is nothing principally wrong with organizing criminals by their religion, despite the obvious potential for abusive and frivolous entries, but the added value seems too questionable to warrant it. On the positive side of the relevance scale, you could consider a list of criminals subject to parental abuse. On the negative side, consider list of Catholic investment bankers. This list does not mention how their religion was relevant to the crimes committed by the people on it, because it usually simply wasn't. Weighing costs and benefits, I'd say delete it. JRM · Talk 09:07, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

• Delete. There may be a gray area between clearly appropriate list articles and clearly inappropriate ones, but I don't think this inhabits that space. The topic lends itself too easily to ugly wars between editors, and it isn't useful enough to make up for that. Add to that the difficulty in deciding who counts as Catholic and what counts as a crime (Nelson Mandela, for example, counts as a criminal according to one standard definition, but I'm sure all of us would be appalled to see him listed next to serial killers, rapists, and embezzlers). Jwrosenzweig 09:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete because the topic is inappropriate, not because of a conflict with categories. Zoe 09:19, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete : Criminals categorized based on nationality is reasonable because the criminals often operate in certain geographical areas so geographical categorization is okay by me. However, categorization based on nuances of faith is like "Criminals with a tattoo on the left arm". This seems arbitrary as catholic criminals affect everyone, not just catholics. Manik Raina 09:25, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. I realize now the category remark is way off. Actually this would be exactly what you'd use a list for, since lists have ways of annotating entries and categories don't. However, my original reasoning stands: without (sufficient) redeeming value. I don't agree with Zoe that the topic is inappropriate, though; it's too easy to condemn articles based on that. JRM · Talk 09:26, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Bebe Rebozo wasn't even a criminal. POV list to attack the Catholic church. David | Talk 09:26, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete - at least borderline POV. Listing a criminal under religious definition is irrelevant unless he states religion as his main motivation (and even then, they may use it as an excuse). At the very least, they did not follow the commandments of the religion. There were also several gangsters who were supposedly practicing Jews, but I would not regard list of Jewish criminals as a good idea - Skysmith 10:32, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete - or will we have a list of Jewish/Islamic/Methodist/Agnostic/Atheist ect - if we had a list of people prominent because of their faith who were convicted of crimes - I could see the point, but in most cases here faith is incidental to the criminality - we might as well have a List of big-nosed criminals --Doc (?) 12:38, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  List of criminals with "nose" in their nickname? :-) JRM · Talk 12:52, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  Perhaps List of criminals racked with guilt, or List of criminals who blame it all on their mothers? I'd quite like to start List of criminals whose crimes were never detected. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 15:17, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  Ah, list of perfect murders? That would make for a fascinating read. JRM · Talk 15:26, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

• Delete. Any single List of [insert your favorite religion/sexual orientation/political party here] is relatively harmless. However, the information, unless the listing criterion is tied to the individuals listed in some substantive way, just doesn't belong in any encyclopedia. Information about any individual's religion, politics, etc. isn't encyclopedic, unless that information is part of what makes that person notable, a la Jerry Falwell and the like. It just doesn't matter that, for example, Cordwainer Smith was a non-observant Anglican, because it doesn't say anything about the man. And the same is true of almost everyone on every List of X here, where X is any label by which people have conventionally divided into "us" and "them". Ken ^{talk|contribs} 13:04, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete inappropriate, and a copy-cat disruption magnet. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:22, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, POV, inappropriate, etc. ral315 14:52, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. A little history: I nominated the comprehensive list of Catholics for being overly broad: Votes for deletion/List of Roman Catholics. The article was kept, but many wanted to break it up into smaller articles. This article was a section of List of Roman Catholics, and was recently split off into a separate article, as were many other sections. If it gets deleted it will just be returned as a section of the original article. We might as well keep the smaller lists, but in the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter, the information will end up somewhere. It feels like we are going back and forth on this issue. NoSeptember 14:53, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  Not a good reason to keep this list. Delete it, and delete mention of it from the larger list. Personally, I'd have deleted the whole list of RC's - but there's no consensus there. --Doc (?) 15:13, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  Well I nominated the whole RC list (categories would do I thought), but if the community says keep it, we shouldn't pick and choose which sections to keep or throw away. None of the new smaller articles list people who are notable in their field because they are Catholics, they just list people in job X who happen to be Catholics. There is nothing inherently wrong with a list of criminals of a certain faith, as long as it is made clear that they are notable for their criminality, and not because of their faith. NoSeptember 15:46, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  If the list is of people whose criminality and religion have nothing to do with each other, and who weren't notable for their religion, what purpose does it serve? That would make it no more informative than "criminals who worked in hardware stores" or "left-handed criminals" or "criminals between 6 and 7 feet tall". Isomorphic 03:39, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

  This is part of the broader discussion on what lists should and shouldn't be doing, and you're quite right that there's no consensus on that. For the record, I would agree with deleting this information from the main article too, as my original arguments apply regardless of where this list is. This is a matter of opinion, yes, as it boils down to "relevance" again, that old bugaboo we can't ever seem to get consensus about, especially when it comes to lists. If Wikipedia contains all "information" there is to contain, it will be less useful simply by virtue of being indiscriminate. If on the other hand it's picky people will complain what it's picky about, as any piece of information will be useful to someone. See also Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of Jews.
  A lot of support for deletion of this article is of course more a result of the "OMG POV/vandal magnet" angle than the relevance angle, and there is something to say for that, too. "A criminal who also happened to be a Roman Catholic" is not the first image that springs to mind for "list of Catholic criminals"; rather you'd think "list of criminals notable for being Catholic", a dubious concept to say the least. JRM · Talk 15:23, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

• Delete, not encyclo. Radiant_>|< 09:51, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete for the same reason I voted to delete the RC actors: This is not just some small nationality or a minority somewhere, but the majority religion of the Americas and large parts of Europe, as well as a prominent minority in many other countries in the world. Unless you want to probe into every individual's faith, this would include almost every criminal from France, Italy, Spain, Poland, (Republic of) Ireland, large parts of Germany etc. Unmaintainable and ridiculous. Tupsharru 13:36, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
• Strong Keep This list is probably more intriguing than writers', politicians' etc. lists. Anyway- this "lists stuff" has been debated ad nauseam. I don't see the reason for this delete-obsession since you got criminals and other unpleasant people on Jewish & other lists. Mir Harven 17:43, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
• delete the list itself admits the persons contained therein are not notable for being Catholic.--Tim Pope 08:46, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
• Keep This list is a valid list and should be kept! But if people want to pretend that Catholics do no crimes?! Dwain 12:10, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep This will be of interest to people and is not inflamatory in any way. Doohickey 16:47, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. If you look at the page's edit history, you'll see I was about to put this up for deletion, but I changed my mind when I couldn't figure out how to make my case for deleting it. Bottom line is, I think Wikipedia would be better off without this page. Too little benefit and too much room for abuse. Only reason I can imagine people using this list is for flaming and abuse. Coffee 19:05, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete Wikipedia already has lots of useless lists, but most of them aren't blatantly offensive. Rast 20:35, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

This list isn't offensive at all (anyway- the people who made it are , I'd say, Catholics themselves). It just enumerates various sorts of people that were or are nominally Catholic. For instance, along with painters, writers, criminals, politicians,..other lists will have appeared (natural scientists will be broken into mathematicians, physicists, chemists,..., adventurers will be expanded to include explorers like Columbus, royalty list (list including links to royal houses of Europe etc.). This "criminals list" is just one among others and is here for information and fun. Mir Harven 09:07, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

• Merge with List of people who are criminally catholic (which may redirect to The Pope). --francis 21:02, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete - I tend to err on the side of Keep, but see no merit here as articulated above --M-filecastle 06:37, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete 1800's criminal is 2004's activist. gren グレン 12:23, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.