Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Charlie Keever

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep. Looks like there might be some consensus to merge into one article, and I'll leave that to the editors interested in the article, but at the very least the consensus here is to keep the info. —Cleared as filed. 00:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Charlie Keever, Jonathan Sellers, Scott Erskine

Delete well-written and touching articles about two murder victims and their killer. That said, they're not encyclopedic, at least not based on what's written here. Nothing to indicate that the case broke new ground in the law, in the use of evidence, or to cause a law to be passed, all of which would certainly cause the articles to be encyclopedic. The event was certainly newsworthy, but it is simply not encyclopedic. Outside immediate friends and family, they simply will not be remembered becaused these deaths, as tragic as they were, had no impact on the wider community. Wikipedia is not a repository of memorials. Caerwine 21:57, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

• Keep, Keep, Strong Keep - Even if the case broke no new legal ground, it was a very high profile case and is well-known. Erskine is most definately notebale. I support keeping the pages of the victims as auxiliaries to the suspect's article. At very most they should be merged into his. -Meegs 22:49, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
• Merge them all in to one article. Not notable enough for separate articles. Zordrac 23:15, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

• This murder was sadistic and caused a lot of fear in San Diego County. It took nearly 10 years to solve it. Erskine is a serial killer and rapist. I don't understand why it should be deleted it. It was written objectively. Erskine is a very unusual offender; his victims were all over the place. Adults, children male and female, at all ages. Including his family. TripleH1976 9:21, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

• Redirect the first two into the third and Keep it. The murderer is quite notorious. B.Wind 01:02, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

• Keep, Keep, Keep. Three separate articles. Three good reasons to keep them. 1. These articles should not be candidates for deletion per policy since they have encyclopedic information in them. Merger should be discussed on the talk pages of the articles. 2. We're not writing for the future, we're writing for today. Sometime off in the distant future maybe one article. Today a large segment of the U.S. population wants to read about child murder victims not just the killer. Let's make these three articles an example of how to do it right. Please, think this through. This isn’t a smart move. Picture this: Someone writes a nice article about a child murder victim. They proudly announce it to people that care. It's deleted for lack of notability. Someone looks for the article, can’t find it, reads the deletion page, and notifies high profile child victim advocates. John Walsh, Marc Klaas, Nancy Grace, Dan Abrams, Greta Van Suteren, and more. Now picture this: Newspaper articles. Talk radio. Jimbo paired off against one of these advocates on cable news explaining why we delete well written articles about child murder victims, but keep thousands of dreadful articles. A foolish way to discover notability. 3. This is a famous case. The boys were killed in a horrific manner. It was a cold case for almost a decade. Then a new DNA testing program was started. This case was one of the first cold cases solved by checking crime scene DNA against prisoner DNA database. I suggest we close this deletion case ASAP and move the discussion to the talk pages. --FloNight 03:38, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment I still don't see anything encyclopedic in these articles. Then again, I think it would be far more useful if CourtTV covered tennis, racketball, and other court sports instead of the overhyped celebrity-related court cases which they depend on to pay their bills. Based on this discussion, I doubt if I will nominate an article about a serial killer again. While I don't consider all such persons inherently notable, it is clear that my opinion is in the minority. Taking a look again at the articles for the two victims, they certainly don't have anything in them that convey any degree of notabilty. Their deaths while tragic are at best (or in this case worst) notable only because of who killed them and they fail to indicate why their killer was notable. They need either improvement to indicate why they are "notable" or merger. Caerwine Caerwhine 04:41, 7 December 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 a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.