Category talk:Murderers from the United States

Assassins, Mass murderers, Serial killers categories

User:Blackcat has merged Category:Assassins from the United States, Category:Mass murderers from the United States, and Category:Serial killers from the United States into Category:Murderers from the United States, and then speedied 2 of them, so that there is no talk page available for people who are watching those categories. There appears to be no discussion about this, and deleting the categories spontaneously leaves no talk pages for people watching those subcategories, and it is much harder to split back out than it is to merge. I'm considering re-creating the categories. Should these 3 subcategories be merged up? --Closeapple (talk) 20:05, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Is there a reason to create "Assassins" whereas there is a main cat "Murderers"? What does make a "murderer" a "mass murderer" (exact threshold, please). What problem is an "assassin" category supposed to fix? -- SERGIO ^{(aka the Blackcat)} 08:56, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
PS That apart, the said categories were inconsistent with the tree.

en:Category:Assassinations/en:Category:Assassins, en:Category:Mass murder/en:Category:Mass murderers, en:Category:Serial killers all exist on English Wikipedia. I'll try to explain each:

• I think there may be confusion about "assassin" in Romance languages: In English, "assassins" target a victim because the victim is famous or powerful. Very few murders are assassination, and assassinations are well-publicized. (e.g. Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald)
• A mass murderer intends in advance to cause several deaths at once nearby. Some might argue that other crimes that result in several deaths could be "mass murder" also; but acts of illegal/selfish self-defense in the moment don't really count: Robberies and gang fights, in which the participants were only prepared to kill those who resist the crime, are probably not mass murder in the public mind. But there's no doubt that Charles Manson or Dylann Roof or the Columbine High School massacre shooters are mass murderers: Death of more than 2 or 3 people was the goal and the result.
• A "serial killer" commits murder in separate acts as part of a pattern, and again, with death or leaving people for dead as the goal, not merely some other crime.

In the public mind, all three of these types of murderers — assassins, mass murderers, serial killers — are special classes of criminals beyond "mere" murderers. --Closeapple (talk) 17:51, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes I know that also in Italian Gaetano Bresci "asssassinated" King Humbert I because usually a political murder is an "assassination", but we tend to include all in the category "Omicidio" (Homicide). The fact is, Commons is not en.wiki but a multinational project in which English is the lingua franca, thus we have to find a least common denominator in those cases in which there are several terms to indicate basically the same action... -- SERGIO ^{(aka the Blackcat)} 15:22, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

But we don't have to up-merge more-specific English to less-specific English. Someone who is looking for educational material about mass murders or serial killers are not looking for just murderers — murder happens thousands of times every day without being reported outside the local community. There is no combination or intersection of categories on Commons that will allow a user to find these topics, other than the ones actually called "mass murder", "serial killers", etc. --Closeapple (talk) 23:17, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Blackcat's actions were terrible for the project and I have recreated the serial killer category, his actions straight up removed tons of people who are only known for being serial killers from the serial killer tree and I'm amazed it took years for someone to fix this.*Treker (talk) 22:59, 20 July 2020 (UTC)