Talk:Black widow (criminology slang)

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[edit] Famous or Infamous

Would it not be infamous rather than famous? Kaeso Dio 21:23, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article again

Perhaps this aritcle, Female Serial Killers, could be used to add more specific details about a black widow killer. It provides a more comprehensive list of women deemed black widows and provides a percentage of women who used poisoning as a method of killing, as well as a subsample showing how many of these women killed for monetary reasons. (Uhhuhhim 18:05, 2 November 2007 (UTC))

While I understand your concern regarding the lack of content and the substantialness of it, I created the page not to provide a definition, but to show that this type of behavior can be seen as a mental condition suffered by a majority of women who have been deemed serial killers. Therefore, I feel like it does have some relevance. The article's simplicity is due to the fact that I did not want to include too much text from the original source to avoid plagiarism. However, if a more experienced user would like to provide direct quotes from the author's text, maybe that would be more effective? Perhaps changing the title of the article to "Black widow syndrome" would be more appropriate if evidence could be included in the article to support the idea that it is in fact a documented syndrome and not just a slang term. (Uhhuhhim 17:46, 2 November 2007 (UTC))

Note, that on in July, an article at this location was successfully prod-deleted based on: Wikipedia is not a dictionary, especially not a dictionary of slang terms. "Black Widow syndrome" gets only 58 google hits. Discussions like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gun Nut are comparable. There is a lack of content and substantial context here. Consider writing a more encyclopedic article such as Female murderers, or redirect to List of women who have murdered their husbands. While there is nothing in this version that mentions black widow syndrome, I still have similar concerns that a slang term only has limited encyclopedic value, and writing a more holistic article on female murderers would be better, with a section that describes the term "black widow" in addition to other topics. -Andrew c [talk] 22:52, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No male equivalent term?

I'm not entirely convinced enough to edit this page, but I'm sure I've seen the term Bluebeard used to describe a male serial killer who kills spouses or lovers. It's certainly less commonly used than Black Widow, but I'm convinced I've seen it used.

You may have seen it used, and there certainly are some references to Bluebeard around, but there's no way it's as instantly recognisable as the term Black Widow. Imagine walking up to ten random people on the street, pointing at a man and telling them, "He's a real Bluebeard, that one." I'm pretty sure the majority of your answers would be, "A what?" Not so with 'black widow', hence the inclusion of no real male equivalent in the article. Think of it this way - a book entitled "Black Widows" would be instantly assumed to be about murdering wives. A book entitled "Bluebeard" would be assumed to be about a pirate. :) Lenky (talk) 03:07, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Keep in mind we can't publish original research on wikipedia. Do we have any sources that make this claim? If not, it should be removed, because we can't be the first place to publish claims. -Andrew c [talk] 03:57, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
No, you're right, it's more of a 'thing you just know' kind of entry. Tell you what, I'll go have a good big look around and if I can't find anything, I'll get rid of it. Or maybe it can have its own little section within the article discussing Buebeard as well. Lenky (talk) 01:59, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
It may be good to add a link to Bluebeard in a see also section. I agree with you personally that I can't think of an exact equivalent term, but it is a bit bold to put it into writing definitively that there isn't. I appreciate any research you put towards this. Thanks.-Andrew c [talk] 02:07, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge or redirect

This page appears to be a mere dictionary definition (something which Wikipedia is [[WP:WINAD|not). It explains the meaning and origin of a term and provides a link to a page of woman who have been labelled with the term. Options to fix it include:

  1. Expand the page with encyclopedic content - that is, content that goes well beyond the merely lexical.
  2. Redirect the page to a more general page on criminology slang.
  3. Replace the current contents with a soft-redirect to Wiktionary (usually done using the {{wi}} template).

The one bit of possibly encyclopedic content in the latest version was the brief discussion of motivation and method. Unfortunately, when I actually reviewed the citation provided for those claims, the article did not in fact support what the Wikipedia page said. The examples of murderers on that page of the crimelibrary article primarily used arsenic but the author does not make the general claim that all or even that a significant minority of women use arsenic. (I'll also offer the opinion that the piece read more like a pop-psychology thriller than a serious academic study. I'm not sure that it is the kind of reliable source that we'd want to base a proper encyclopedia article on.)

Unless we can find a better source and find encyclopedic content that can be used to properly expand the article, I believe we're better off pointing to Wiktionary for now. Rossami (talk) 23:25, 6 February 2008 (UTC)