Talk:Death of Nizah Morris

This article was nominated for deletion on 19 September 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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A fact from Death of Nizah Morris appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 31 July 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that when Nizah Morris, an African American transgender woman, was murdered, the medical examiner immediately labeled it a homicide, but the Philadelphia police took over a month to do so?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/July.

Wikipedia

Untitled

I have added a link to a new online archive of materials pertaining to the investigation into the death of Roberta Nizah Morris. My name is Elizabeth Sherry. I am also known by the name dandypants. I have been documenting this case on video since January 2003 and plan on archiving my filmic materials both online and at the William Way Community Center in Center City, Philadelphia. I had finished the process of creating DVD archives by the spring of 2009, but my apartment was burglarized on September 29, 2009 and the files were stolen by a law enforcement official named Paula Luu, who is still based in San Francisco, California. Luu was given orders to destroy the DVD files on my computer, as well as take the printed DVD copies, which were made by a Philadelphia based editor named Valerie Keller. I suspect that Representative Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Representatives Chaka Fattah and Robert Brady of Philadelphia and Representative Allyson Schwartz of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania were involved in providing payments through offshore accounts linked to my family, in order to ensure that Luu and other dirty law enforcement could steal the Nizah DVD archives. Fortunately, I have the master copies, but of course this requires that I spend additional thousands of dollars to re-create the DVD files and make copies. If you are an editor and would like to assist me in this process, please contact me. My information can be found at the Scribd.com archive page. I also recently had my entire photo negatives archive stolen from my residence in the San Francisco Bay Area during May 2011, as well, which was reported to the police. If you have any further details on these burglarizations, please also let me know. Dandypantsfilms (talk 02:05, 9 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

...and???

This article just kinda ends in January 2007. Has there been nothing new discovered? What were the results of the commission? There is no wrap-up here. It just sorta ends. Celynn (talk) 06:20, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Go Ahead and Delete Them All

I am no longer an active contributor to Wikipedia. I haven't been for years. I stopped adding hate crimes cases to Wikipedia when I realized the notability requirement negated the very cases I wanted to highlight. (I should note that the Nizah Morris article slated for deletion appeared on the front page of Wikipedia in the "Did You Know" box, FWIW -- which is apparently not much.) Instead I established my own freestanding site, where I can post and update entries on these crimes. I'd mention the site here, but that would be self-promotion.

I started this project because I was writing a post about hate crimes, and went to Wikipedia as a resource. I realized that of the cases I wanted to cover, only a handful were entered into Wikipedia. To look at Wikipedia, one would think that hate crimes are I set about trying to change that and -- as you've no doubt seen -- got pretty far before I started running into the notability guidelines, and started seeing entries removed. I quickly abandoned Wikipedia for reasons I'll spell out below.

These are cases that are virtually unknown, because they never made major headlines, catalyzed public response, caused major legislation, etc. The names and faces of the victims are unknown to most people. News articles about the crimes committed against them never got reported beyond local media, and have long since been buried behind the paywalls of local news outlets. I used my research skills and resources to get behind those paywalls, to try and create a publicly accessible record of their stories. Once I got started, I found that researching one story would often lead me to one or more that I added to a long backlog of stories I've yet to research. I'll never get to them all, but I will record as many as I can.

Occasionally, I will get an email from friends and family of the victims, thanking me for me for making a public record of their love-one's stories, and for ensuring that they were not forgotten. But beyond that, they are forgotten. And Wikipedia's notability guidelines suggest they should be.

So, no amount of editing is going to make them worthy of note -- certainly not enough to save them from deletion.

At this point, it looks like just about every contribution I've made to Wikipedia is slated for deletion. So be it. I've already preserved them elsewhere, and recorded many, many more that I never bothered trying to to enter into Wikipedia, because I'd learned my lesson at that point.

I've long since learned that Wikipedia is useless to me in the work I want to do. Its limitations make it so. It is useless to me as a resource, as it is unlikely to contain information about the kinds of cases I want to record, in order to make them accessible beyond the paywalls of local media archives, and also to give some inkling of the long history of hate crimes, the regularity with which they occur, and the diversity of the victims.

In that sense, I guess I believe they are worthy of note. But they will never notable enough for Wikipedia. So, delete them all.

TerranceDC (talk) 15:27, 18 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]