Talk:Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Wrong infobox template

This article is using the organisation infobox, which is a little weird because MMIW is not an organisation. The article says MMIW is an epidemic of violence.... I'm not entirely sure which template would be better, and that's why I'm posting here. Maybe Template:Infobox civilian attack? Or, if the infobox is intended to describe a social movement responding to the epidemic of violence (as appears to be the current approach) maybe Template:Infobox civil conflict would be appropriate?

And maybe it's fine as it is for now, but it's a bit confusing, because MMIW was never 'formed' and doesn't really have 'affiliations' in the way that an organisation would have. Any thoughts here? Larataguera (talk) 03:27, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 1 April 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women → Missing and murdered Indigenous women – This is not a proper name and should not be capitalized. It is a set phrase used in public discourse, but is not the name of a specific organization. It is abbreviated MMIWG (in all caps), but initialisms when expanded do not necessarily take capitals MOS:EXPABBR. Indefatigable (talk) 18:24, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Note: had to bypass the redirect, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, that resulted from moving back to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women following an undiscussed rename. The RMCD bot does not recognize redirects as eligible current titles in move requests. Editor Indefatigable, the nom, should feel free to alter the new, target title if he deems it to be appropriate. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 01:05, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose title change and move. The title of this page is a well-known initialism: MMIW (still the most common name in sources and in usage). MMIWG and others are more recent and less common. The title is capitalized. @Treetoes023: you need to be discussing these moves, as I would not categorize all of them as "non controversial". This should not have been moved without discussion, so I moved it back to MMIW. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 19:05, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose title change and move. The title is well known as-is. Indigenous girl (talk) 19:40, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose title change and move. MMIW is the WP:COMMONNAME and the alternative name is already in the lead as well.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 20:15, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. When I opened the move discussion I hadn't realized that the article had just been moved (without discussion) from Missing and murdered Indigenous women to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. If I had realized this, I would have requested moving it back to the title it has had for several years. I stand by my assertion that it's a lower case common noun phrase and that murdered and women should not have capitals. Indefatigable (talk) 21:19, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

  It's commonly capitalized in sources. Per MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." It's very similar to Black Lives Matter which is also capitalized on this site.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 21:25, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose title change and move Well established title and in compliance with WP:COMMONNAME as pointed out above. It should remain as is. --ARoseWolf 20:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
• Support—in the absence of further consideration, ‘missing and murdered [x]’ would be usual, without capitalisation. If capitalisation were common, I’d oppose. But that doesn’t seem to be so going on the top Google News results. See also the CBC which is one of the top results on a simple Google search: ‘murdered’ is capitalised in title case but in running text we simply have ‘missing and murdered Indigenous women’. The top results on Google for me do capitalise ‘murdered’ but only in title case and do not capitalise in running text. References to missing and murdered indigenous women in Australia seem to capitalise ‘murdered’, but that presumably isn’t relevant here. (I also know the Mail is rightly deprecated.) I should also add that given the description of the subject of the page as an ‘epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in Canada and the United States’, the page really should be disambiguated. Murders still count even if they’re not in Canada or the United States. Docentation (talk) 16:27, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  I also appear to have missed the capitalisation of ‘women’ to which analogous considerations apply. Docentation (talk) 16:30, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  It's a movement to raise awareness of the disproportionate violence experienced by Indigenous Canadian and Native American women and the lack of effort to solve the cases. It's not just a list of murders. Similar to Black Lives Matter. Also, I mentioned below that there was no section about Mexico or Latin America and if it should be added then it can be mentioned in the lead. The same can apply to Indigenous women from Australia if the sources are there to support it, so I disagree with your statement that this should be a disambiguation page at this stage. The article can be split into different articles for different countries/regions if it expands the coverage.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 17:03, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  1. BLM illustrates the proposer’s point—there’s a distinction between a phenomenon and a movement seeking to address it. I take it that you accept that, up to WP:COMMONNAME, the name of a phenomenon shouldn’t be capitalised.
  2. If it were a movement, it wouldn’t be obvious that title case should be used. That would still be a matter of WP:COMMONNAME.
  3. The article isn’t obviously about a movement. It’s about murdered women. So even if movements should be capitalised e.g. via title case, it wouldn’t follow that ‘murdered’ and ‘women’ should be capitalised. See § 2 (Statistics for Canada): it documents a phenomenon, not a movement seeking to address it.
  4. It’s far from clear that there’s a ‘movement’. There are obviously people trying to do something about the murders. That doesn’t mean that they form a movement, in the absence of reliable sources pointing to one.
  5. Even if there is a movement, the usual use (modulo capitalisation) of ‘murdered and missing indigenous women’ is, on the citations above, not about that movement, but refers to the murders instead.

  Docentation (talk) 17:27, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  As for disambiguation, the name of an article should reflect what it presently contains, not what it could. This article is presently exclusively about North America. Especially if there is a movement, it seems far from clear that activists against murders of women Adivasis are in the same ‘movement’ as those working against these murders in Canada, or that the latter are in the same ‘movement’ as those working against such murders in the United States. Nor (to my knowledge) does the Indian press refer to ‘missing and murdered indigenous women’. Given the generality of the title, it very much should be disambiguated, since it would presumably be incorrect to expand the article to mention e.g. murders of women Adivasis, especially if it concerns a ‘movement’. Docentation (talk) 17:31, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  I’d also point out that the lede is now incoherent. ‘Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women …is a movement…A mass movement in the US and Canada works to raise awareness of MMIW’—so a mass movement works to raise awareness of a movement? And what is the semantic connexion to the actual murdered women concerned, given the obvious term by which we’d refer to them now apparently refers to a movement instead? Docentation (talk) 17:34, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  • "The movement in the U.S. and Canada around Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, sometimes referred to as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, exists to spread awareness about how Indigenous people are more likely to be victims of violence than people of other races." per MPR News
  • "The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement aims to reveal this reality by leading marches, gathering data and telling their stories." per Seattle Times
  • "With movements like MMIW bringing attention to the issue, media, social media, movies, and television shows have started to include storylines surrounding the topic." per Smoky Mountain Times
  • "Group of men trek across America to bring awareness to #MMIW movement" per Tribal Tribune
  • MMIW stands for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It’s a movement that advocates for the end of violence against Native women. per We Are Native
  • "A red hand over the mouth has become the symbol of a growing movement, the MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing sisters whose voices are not heard." per Native Hope
  • "It is a community-based grassroots movement raising awareness and addressing the lack of response when a Native women or girl goes missing or is murdered" Per Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women
  • "On May 7, 2022, supporters gathered at the Choctaw Community Center in Antlers, Oklahoma, to walk in honor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIW/MMIWG) movement" per Choctaw Nation

   oncamera  _{(talk page)} 17:47, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  1. Are these the first results for ‘missing and murdered indigenous women’ for you? The top results for me (see above) use the term as I and not you describe.
  2. At best this demonstrates that references with the capitalisation are to the movement; there are plenty of citations referring to the murdered women and not movement without the capitalisation. The question then returns to what the article actually describes.
  3. Obviously appending ‘movement’ is going to change what a term means. Whether x refers to a movement is different to whether ‘x movement’ refers to a movement. Similarly in the hashtag case. That applies to the first, second, fourth, and last quotations.

  Docentation (talk) 18:20, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not sure why your results are different than mine, perhaps you are in a different region and that's not my IT problem to resolve.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 18:36, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  1. The existence of people in different countries is not an IT problem, as important as whatever locality in which you live may be. Neither my nor your search results are obviously of more moment.
  2. We don’t even know that the search results differ. I accounted for the top results from Google News and Google Search for the term ‘missing and murdered indigenous women’. What did you search and how did you choose between the results?
  3. In searching for ‘missing and murdered indigenous women movement’ I do obtain some of the results (MPR, Seattle Times). But what exactly is the argument from these citations? I don’t dispute that
     • people use the phrase ‘missing and murdered indigenous women movement’
     • some refer to that movement omitting ‘movement’ (rather confusingly), and
     • both when referring to the murdered women and the movement responding to their murders, ‘murdered’ and ‘women’ are sometimes capitalised, and not always in title case.
  4. The question is what the commonest use is. There are presumably lots of results either way, so merely citing some results doesn’t help. That’s why I used the crude heuristic of citing the top result for me; it would be more helpful for you to indicate whether you did that too.
  5. In particular, the commonest use of ‘missing and murdered indigenous women’ appears to be in reference to the name and/or the phenomenon of these murders and disappearances, not to the movement, and without capitalisation.
  6. One relatively neutral way of searching is to use archive websites. Consider [1]this archive result. We can go through the results in iorder.
     1. The Spokesman-Review does not capitalise ‘murdered’ or women.
     2. GMA News Online, distributing a Reuters article, doesn’t capitalise either, either.
     3. Nor does Insider.
     4. Nor does The Guardian.
     5. The first result to capitalise is Choctaw Nation which capitalises in title case and in the name of a run, and so doesn’t tell us about running text.
     6. The next is mixed: the caption in running text uses ‘missing and murdered’, then in running text refers to the ‘Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons crisis’, and finally refers to ’missing and murdered Indigenous women’. It’s also self-published.
     7. Oregon Public Broadcasting doesn’t capitalise.
     8. Nor does The Conversation, referring to an Australian senate inquiry.
     9. Nor does CBS News.
     10. Nor does The Seattle Times.
  7. Perhaps all the top results for you capitalise, and perhaps you have some argument that your search results are more important than everybody else’s, but I cannot see how that argument would go.

  Docentation (talk) 20:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  • "Lackluster responses and languishing cases are the norm for many families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), an epidemic in the US and Canada that has in recent years received significant national media attention, though few answers for loved ones." per the Guardian
  • "By displaying the piece (which Ms. Spitzer and Mr. Luger say was created “in solidarity”), the Gardiner hopes to bring visitors face to face with a horrific issue known by variations of M.M.I.W.: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women." per the New York Times
  • "Combined, this crisis is often referred to as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or MMIW, but many organizers are increasingly using the gender-neutral Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives to account for the experiences of men and the LGBTQ community." Per the Washington Post

   oncamera  _{(talk page)} 20:57, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  Again, we can trade citations, or we can attempt to work out what’s commoner from a common base, e.g., the top results from Google searches according to neutral third parties such as archive.ph. The mere fact that some sources capitalise ‘murdered’ is unconvincing. The citations you give also are mostly not exactly definitive.

  • Your Guardian citation only capitalises ‘murdered’ ⅓ times.
  • The New York Times article is definitive qua citation if not overall.
  • Your Washington Post article in running text refers to ‘missing and murdered Indigenous women’ without capitalisation and hardly is convincing either way.

  Docentation (talk) 21:24, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  Per MOS:CAPSACRS and WP:COMMONNAME, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman is capitalized as an acronym (MMIW) and in both sources when it's fully written out and when it's in the abbreviated form. You certainly can find uncapitalized text on the internet, but organizations and government bodies directly relating to the movement capitalize it.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 21:51, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

  1. Not only does MOS:CAPSACRS not mention the expansion of initialisms, but it says the opposite—expanded forms aren’t automatically capitalised and the question is decided case by case.
  2. Nearly this entire exchange is about what the common name is, so merely repeating that it’s relevant is not obviously helpful.
  3. ‘On the internet’—yes, in RS, as WP:COMMON NAME dictates. All our examples have been ‘on the internet’. ‘Government bodies’ should not obviously be prioritised, and do not uniformly capitalise: see p 313 at [2]. It’s helpful of you to try to do something other than trading citations but this doesn’t advance the case for capitalisation much.

  Docentation (talk) 22:25, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

References

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Latin America or Mexico

In the lead, it mentions taskforce in Mexico and statistics in "Latin America" but the article body doesn't cover these topics (it's Canada and the United States) therefore I will remove them from the lead since it should cover what's written in the article per MOS:LEAD. Someone can cover those topics and add them back when that's completed.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 23:01, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Technoculture 320-01

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 8 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Noahbei (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by ACHorwitz (talk) 16:18, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Kotzebue, Alaska: A long history of domestic violence, sexual assault, and murder

ProPublica, alongside Anchorage Daily News, has published a massive investigation into Mayor Clement Richards Sr' sons and their history of domestic violence of multiple women and likely murder of two women, all of which has been actively covered up and not criminally pursued by the local prosecutors and judicial magistrates. This also falls into the broader topic here of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, of which the two murdered women were. Is there a good place to add a sentence or so of this into the article? Silverseren^C 20:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

There's been a follow-up article now discussing how the police have refused to re-open one of the murder cases that they labeled a suicide despite the coroner saying there were signs of strangulation. They also claim the other strangulation murder found on the Mayor's property was referred to the state, but state officials said no such case was ever given to them. Silverseren^C 23:38, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Hundreds gather at California Capitol to Honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous People

In May 2023, nearly 800 people gathered at the California State Capitol for a candlelight vigil to honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). Organized by Assemblyman James Ramos and various tribal leaders, the event aimed to raise awareness of the crisis. Ramos emphasized the need for equal justice for Native Americans and highlighted the high number of missing Indigenous persons. The vigil featured speeches from affected families, including those of Allan Olvera, and traditional dances, with the Capitol illuminated in red to signify the cause.

[3]https://nativenewsonline.net/health/in-california-s-capital-hundreds-gather-to-raise-awareness-of-missing-and-murdered-relatives Clnorc (talk) 20:03, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

pls review Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources "As a general rule, do not copy text from other sources. Doing so usually constitutes both a copyright violation and plagiarism ."

"Spamming" hotlines

If it is a guideline that we cannot post nonprofit hotlines (also includes website and org links by the way), then what is this page doing supporting a website for a senator as a link, since that is backhandedly supporting a political candidate instead of nonprofit resources that may provide benefit for readers and no one is really financially or politically benefitting from? Just curious about the logic. KnowTheManyHistories (talk) 02:26, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Advocacy ....WP:LINKSTOAVOID Moxy🍁 07:07, 5 August 2024 (UTC)