On 5/24/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
So what you are claiming is that Adolfo Constanzo's poor immigrant family is relevant TO HIS CRIMES? That is nothing short of racism.
No one has, so far, claimed that Harold Shipman's possible Jewish refugee background is in any way relevant to his crimes. Anyone doing so would be rightly called an anti-Semite. What people have claimed is that Harold Shipmans family background is an interesting tidbit of knowledge, which I agree with. What I have showed is that it is not taboo for articles about (non-Jewish) serial killers to include information about their family background.
It seems fairly clear to me that there is some inconsistency applied to issues such as these on Wikipedia. 1) For "bad" people, Jewishness must be proven beyond all doubt, and must not go in the lead. I couldn't actually find any examples of Jewish criminals - there doesn't seem to be a "Category:Jewish criminals" for instance. 2) For "good" people, Jewishness must merely be asserted, and should be applied as a category. Occasionally it goes in the lead ([[John von Neumann]]), other times as "born into a Jewish family" ([[Alan Greenspan]]), other times it's not even mentioned except for the category. There are around 15 "Jewish Xs" categories, some with subcategories like Jewish-American scientists.
I don't want to speculate on why this is the case, and I certainly don't want to imply that it only applies to Judaism. At a quick glance, Christian and Muslim scientist categories exist, but with somewhat poorer organisation (Egyptian scientists is a subcat of Muslim scientists, for example).
However, I do think there is something inherently dodgy about allowing the categorisation of "good" people by religion with no sources, but not "bad" people. If a serial killer's religion is "irrelevant", I don't see why the same should not be said for a nobel prize winning scientist.
Steve