User talk:Mlm42

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I appreciate anybody's suggestions to improve the List of rampage killers, and the W-column is certainly one of the things people are complaining most about, though I am not sure why it is such a big deal that 'Weapons' is not written out, since an explanation is given at the end of the list what all those cryptic letters actually mean. There don't seem to be any problems with the abbreviations in this list, for example, even though some of them aren't explained anywhere; somebody interested in American football might very well know what INT or Sck stands for, but a person like me can't even guess what it is supposed to mean (not that I'd be interested to know).
Anyway, back in the year 2008, when I created the List of rampage killers, I didn't even include any information about the weapons used, since I feared that it would clutter the list with unnecessary information (especially in cases where entire arsenals were utilized, e.g. Charles Whitman). But as it is quite helpful to be able to distinguish shootings from stabbings etc. I tried to find a way to include the info in a way that was as concise as possible, and the W-column was the result.
So, if we'd write out 'Weapons' I think that on the one hand the visual appearence of the tables would suffer quite a bit. At least I don't find it that appealing when single letters are floating in a lot of empty space, and as it is now, the column looks pretty tight and doesn't attract too much undue attention. On the other hand, if we can write 'weapons', why not also shotgun, knife, or Beretta 92FS? At least that would put the empty space into good use, at the loss of the columns concision, of course, and since this concision is the reason this column exists in the first place, giving it up seems counterintuitive to me. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:25, 15 December 2012 (UTC))[reply]

Thanks for the reply; regarding the sports lists, it's not really a fair comparison, for a few reasons.. the main one being that the readers who are most likely to come to, and be interested in sports lists already know the standard abbreviations (although I think they should at least be explained somewhere on the page!). On articles like the rampage killings, you get flurries of activity (like right now) where people are coming to this list who have never seen a list like this before, and might not being able to guess what the column is even about. The first time I saw it, I passed over the "W" column as meaningless information. Then I wondered what weapons were being used, and thought "that's odd, they should have included the weapon in the list".. only then did I guess what the W column was.

Anyway, I think your suggestion about being even more specific about the weapon is a good one. Certainly the media are focusing on this issue of weapon quite a lot (even internationally). But you're right, it's hard to judge how much information to put.. My impression is that distinctions like "knife", "handgun", "automatic weapon" are common ones that the media uses, and also helpful.. specific makes of weapons aren't necessarily more helpful, since it might not be obvious to everyone what a "Beretta 92FS" is. If someone uses many weapons, maybe we could list two or three and then say "and others"; or just say "multiple guns and explosives", or something.

Regarding horizontal space, we could squeeze a bit more by using "Inj." instead of "Injured", since it's obvious enough what that would mean, and I think it would shrink the column.

Broadly speaking, I think the weapons column is important, and worthy of more space. When people want to know about mass killings, they want to know how many people were killed / injured, when, where, who, and how. The tables do a great job for all of these things, except the "how". For example, "F" covers such a wide range of possibilities, from a single pistol to three AK-47's. Conversations about gun laws are taking place right now, and people will be talking about regulating, or not, certain types of gun instead of others; and they may even be referencing articles like this during their arguments. That's why I think it's important to improve this column. What do you think? Mlm42 (talk) 08:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but my point about a more detailed weapons-column wasn't really meant as a suggestion. What I wanted to say was that if you'd write out "Weapon" you could as well do the same with all the other letters since there'd be no point in keeping them, but then the column wouldn't be a small one anymore, which it was supposed to be, but a pretty large one. Quite a few of those entries that are now just one or two lines would balloon into something like the Starkweather/Fugate-entry here (Nr. 14 on the list). Yes, it may be mostly just a matter of taste, but I think that the list would then be a pretty unsteady sight and those entries which would remain one-liners thanks to a lack of information would look squeezed and sandwiched between those that are bigger. As it is now, pretty much all of those entries get almost the same amount of space and therefore can be treated as equals by our brain. Would some of them get more space I suspect that many of those one-liners would simply be skipped by people looking at the table, because they would subconsciously process them as something of minor importance.
Furthermore there are many cases where it is either not known at all what weapons were used, since it was only reported that the people were 'killed', therefore leading to an increased amount of blank space, or where the news remained so vague that you can only guess, since the only thing you can work with is that the victims were 'shot' or 'stabbed'.
What also speaks for keeping the current layout in my eyes is, that by sorting the W-column you have all cases where only firearms or melee weapons were used grouped together. Would we use more detailed descriptions they would be all over the place since handguns and rifles would be separated by, say, knives. Sure, this problem could be addressed, but with over 1200 entries fixing this would be a lot of work, and do you think anyody would volunteer to do it? Since I'm the only one really trying to keep the list up do date and consistent, I'm pretty sure in the end it would be me who would've to finish a job somebody else has started. It's the same with the flags that were added by someone to the country-column on the main-page. He simply stopped halfway through, and I had to fix the mess he had created. As it is now, it is still unfinished, since I am waiting for commenters to tell me if they are an improvement, because if they are not, I won't waste my time to add them to the rest of the lists, but would revert and return the page to a flag-free state. (As of now, there are no comments, so probably nobody would care if I removed them).
Also I am not a person who likes to sacrifice efficiency for simplicity, especially since it is not that difficult to memorize what those handful of abbreviations mean. With the single-letter approach a quick glance is enough to see what type of weapon was used; I don't think that would be possible if they were all written out.
Though I have to admit that at one point I played with the idea to make the weapons-column more detailed, in the same way I did with the "other weapons" (indicated by "O") which were split into arson, explosives etc. Then K would've been for knives, X for axes, H for handguns, R for rifles, and so on, but I dropped it, since I deemed it too complex to be used by people who are only casually dropping by to have a quick look, and it would create a great number of letter-combinations whereas now they are fairly limited.
One last thing. There is a reason why the tables look the way they do now. You see, when I started the list, I still used a 17" CRT-monitor and at the time I added the weapons-column the list already was filled to the limit, and to avoid that on my screen all those entries look like this:

4.

Doe, John Frederick, 27

Oct. 25/ 26

2018

Serpiente Roja de Floresta

Funnyland

3

11

Firearm Melee weapon Arson

Committed suicide or shot by police

the column had to be very small. And I'm still thinking that people with older computer equipment should be able to have a list that doesn't look like
a
row
of
disjointed
words. (Lord Gøn (talk) 18:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC))[reply]

Yes, I see where you're coming from, but there are other possible solutions to the width problem. I think the single letter abbreviations are a problem. I think at least having "Weap." as the heading is a start, because the reader at least then realizes that the symbols "F" and "M" mean weapons of some kind.

Other ideas to shrink the width is to merge columns - merging the two date columns, and the two place columns are the obvious ones. Both of these, but especially the location one, would save a significant amount of space. The date issue is being discussed elsewhere; merging the city and country, you could still make it so it sorts by country. Remember, the ability to sort is a handy feature, but not as important as readily available information.. currently information about the weapon is not apparent in the table. When you say "a quick glance is enough to see what type of weapon was used," I'd have to disagree.. because "F" or even "Firearm" isn't really very much information.. maybe it's a slingshot - who knows? So I think sacrificing sortability for clarity might be a good idea.

Anyway, quite a few of the entries are on multiple lines for me anyway, due to the names. If you think inconsistency is a problem, then you could always force at least two lines per entry, say by stacking the city on top of the country. Just a few ideas.. Mlm42 (talk) 21:20, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So, you are proposing to go back to this? I see several problems with the layout I have dropped in about a week after creating the list. First, I like it to sort by date and year separately, but let's just assume we'd throw them together again, the result would look like this:

1994

Feb. 2, 1995

March 13, 1995

Oct. 26, 1995

April 1, 1996

April 19, 1996

Jan. 1997

As you can see the years are jumping left and right which makes it quite a bit more difficult to follow them, especially since the exact date of the killings is pretty often unknown. Compared to the table below I think it's definitely a step backwards.

	1994
Feb. 2	1995
March 13	1995
Oct. 26	1995
April 1	1996
April 19	1996
Jan.	1997

You could avoid that of course, by putting the years before the dates, like 1994-01-25, but that is not a way the general population writes a date; at least not where I come from. The same goes for the locations-column. Sorting by country would create an unworkable mess.

Steamboat "Africa"

Cairo, Egypt

Ras Burqa, Egypt

Kitale, Kenya

Marakwet District, Kenya

Kareeboomvloer, Namibia

Yemen

Bait al-Aqari, Yemen

There are cases where besides the country the exact location is not known, and more than once you'll find cases that were perpetrated on ships far from any land, so your eyes would constantly have to jump left and right, to see what country you are dealing with, and I don't see how anybody could prefer the table above, when you can have it this way:

Steamboat "Africa"
Cairo	Egypt
Ras Burqa	Egypt
Kitale	Kenya
Marakwet District	Kenya
Kareeboomvloer	Namibia
	Yemen
Bait al-Aqari	Yemen

To avoid that you'd have to put the country in front of the city, and even though this might be the norm in places like Japan, western countries normally don't do that.

About the slingshots, well, there are no cases listed where any slingshots were used. In pretty much all of those cases with an F guns were the weapon of choice, and I can think of only three entries where this is not (only) true, being once each, a flamethrawoer, a bow, and a grenade launcher (besides an assault rifle). Personally I think that detailed information about the weapons used belongs into an article about the killings, or the perpetrator, but not necessarily into a list. Also I remember a case where a woman simply threw a couple of kids down a well, killing six of them. Right now she has an MO in her weapons entry, but if you want to get more detailed what do you write? Hands? That wouldn't be the whole story. Hands and water then? Sounds weird to me. Fact is you won't get the point across what happened, if you don't go into a lot more detail, and the same is true for a few other cases where the methods of killing were rather unconventional. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:06, 16 December 2012 (UTC))[reply]

Firstly, I think you could still sort by country using Template:Sortkey, if you wanted (i.e. {{sort|United States|Newtown, CT, United States}}). I see your points, so I've just scanned through a bunch of featured lists to see how they overcome these problems.. and I think the best way forward is to aim for a table more formatted like this: List of houses and associated buildings by John Douglas. If we had two or three lines per entry, then you could stack the name, date, and place, and the first three columns (name, date, place) would not take of very much horizontal space at all. Then you could spend the remainder by merging the "Additional notes" and "W" columns into a "Description" column, which would allow a sentence or two for description. Like this:

One downside is this means you can't sort by "F" or "M", but it seems apparent that due to the importance of individual circumstances, this isn't much of a loss. That small loss would be far outweighed by an actually good description. "Threw six children down a well", or "Shot 20 first graders, 6 staff, his mother and himself." Just the headline, you know? Or, if desired, a little more detail. Forcing multiple lines per entry, frees up horizontal space to provide good descriptions. This seems to be a common technique among featured lists, so maybe it's something we should aim for. Mlm42 (talk) 10:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]