Talk:1984 Dallas nightclub shooting

Worst claim

Claiming that this event "... is the worst mass murder in Dallas history." needs some sort of evidence or analysis to support it. In who's opinion was it the "worst", and why? How does one quantify mass murders? If one is using death toll then does "worst" equate to "most fatal"? If so, the the article should refer to other mass murders in Dallas, in order to provide a comparison. One cannot something is "worst" without comparing it to other similar situations that are merely "bad". - Cameron Dewe (talk) 03:01, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough, that was just the language used in the sources so I didn't think too much about it. Would deadliest be better? PARAKANYAA (talk) 03:21, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA: The best idea is to cite the source of such superlative statement. This is so that readers can work out how the comparison has been made, because "worst" is a matter of opinion, and a subjective judgement call made by the person giving that opinion. The term "deadliest" is a matter of fact, because the number of dead bodies is factual comparison that can be made with other shootings. However, being the "deadliest" and being the "worst" are not necessarily equivalent, because the manner of death and additional injuries are not necessary captured by simply counting the number of fatalities. Because judgement is used for assessing something being the "worst", the basis for making that judgement means it is possible that a less deadly shooting could be considered worse than a more deadly one, because of additional factors, such as the way in which people were killed, the cruelty of the acts, the additional numbers of injured and seriousness of those injuries, as well as the overall costs to the victims and social harm involved. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 23:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Ah, okay. I think I did something to that affect. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Date of Death

@PARAKANYAA: You posed the following question on my Talk page, but I think it is better answered here. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 22:22, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

"I'd like to ask your advice on how to fix a specific issue you pointed out, though.

"Belachheb died October 19th, 2017. Considering that Belachheb is a fairly obscure case even in Dallas, no news reported it. The source on him being dead is this. While normally I would consider this website an unreliable source considering it can be added to by anybody, the specific uploader of the image of his gravestone and date of death is actually Gary Lavergne, who probably knows more about Belachheb than anyone else and was the writer of the book that a large portion of the article uses as a source, so I consider it a reliable indication that he is dead. What am I supposed to do in this scenario? Am I supposed to just pretend he's not dead because I don't have any sources for it that are in the news? PARAKANYAA (talk) 03:13, 8 July 2023 (UTC)"

While Find-a-Grave might not be a reliable source for Wikipedia content, if it is the only available source of the facts, such as date of death and place of burial, for a notable person, and the entry is credible, those facts are better than nothing at all as evidence of death. External links to Find-a-Grave should use the Find a Grave template. However, for these basic vital facts, you should not confine yourself to just using news sources to obtain statements of fact such as the date of death. Primary sources can be sources of vital statistics, such as the date of death. For example: Some cemeteries publish their burial records on-line, also, some state and federal agencies publish birth, death, or prisoner records on-line too. However, such information is often held in on-line databases that require specific knowledge about an individual, such as a person's full name or a specific identity number, so that these can be searched for. Sometimes, obtaining this information involves payment of a fee, obtaining it could be seen as original research. Also, query results often do not appear in search engines because robots are blocked from conducting searches or the search results do not have a permanent URL link. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 22:22, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. I will add the template to the page for now as a citation and see if I can find a better source in the meantime. Thanks. PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:54, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA: @Cameron Dewe: Not sure if this is a better source: [1] But that link goes to the Texas Justice Initiative website, and their organization tracks deaths in custody/deaths in Texas prisons and lists them all in an excel spreadsheet. It lists the inmate's DOB, DOD, and death cause, which is probably where Find a Grave even found the info on Belachheb to begin with. Pretty useful website, but you have to download the excel document at the link provided to actually view this info, not sure how or what the best way is to cite the link though given you have to download the excel file at that link I provided. Inexpiable (talk) 10:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Inexpiable for pointing that out. If you read how the Texas Justice Initiative compiles its data you will notice it primarily extracts its information from official reports obtained from the Texas Attorney General's office. It then interprets those reports, extracting and publishing the data in its spreadsheets. I think that puts it into the rhelm of being a secondary source. They also comment on the accuracy, or otherwise, of this data and have taken steps to improve the data quality by trying to locate additional confirming sources. This is the sort of transparency that one should expect of a reliable source. While Wikipedia editors need to download the spreadsheets to view their data, I think that citing the web-page link where the data can be analysed and downloaded from ought to be sufficient, provided the citation notes that data has a spreadsheet format. The website citation template also has parameters that allow editors to specify the type of content and page format that the URL refers to. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 02:26, 14 July 2023 (UTC)