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	Harry Kendall Thaw was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result December 4, 2012 Good article nominee Not listed

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Comment

Great article! Good work. Harry Thaw sure was a simpleton who made Forrest Gump look like a genius. Was is it ever determined that he was mentally retarded? Wasn't much of a fighter and could be labeled a coward!

Removed comment from main article that Thaw may have been the first to use the word "brainstorm" at his trial in 1909. OED has two earlier cites:

1907 Daily Chron. 13 Feb. 7/5 Ordeals of mind which formed a *brain-storm or mental explosion. 1908 Westm. Gaz. 8 Aug. 4/3 In the closing years of his active life, Ruskin had suffered from recurrent brain-storms. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aldiboronti (talk • contribs) 13:00, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:Horrible Article

The style in which this article is written is truly atrocious. Grammar and tone are god awful. This feels like satire. I plan to make in my special pet project for the weekend.

Article edited

This article needed major attention. I've completed re-writing, adding inline citations for the entire entry, also adding images to enhance text. Very time consuming, but well worth the effort, as I feel that what we now have is comprehensive information on the man and the era. Betempte (talk) 18:04, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Article stated that Thaw's father died in 1893 and left Thaw 3 million dollars. Thaw was born in 1871, so he was 22. Changed the article to reflect that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.182.180.240 (talk) 03:00, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Harry Kendall Thaw/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Wizardman (talk · contribs) 04:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll review this article shortly. Wizardman 04:01, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

In short, the concerns from Talk:Evelyn Nesbit/GA2 are in this article in spades. It's plenty detailed and has mostly good sourcing, though it is thin in a couple spots. The tone of the article, however, is completely unencyclopedic. Here are just a few lines that don't really make an encyclopedia article:

• "His historical legacy rests on one notorious act. In 1906, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Thaw murdered renowned architect" notorious/renowned are not needed.
• "His cautions were generalizations, lacking the sordid specifics that would have alerted Nesbit to Thaw’s all too real, aberrant proclivities. " this sentence sounds nice in a vacuum but doesn't add any substance to the article.
• "due to the intervention of the city's social lion, lauded architect Stanford White, who would not countenance Thaw’s entre into the hallowed halls of masculine supremacy." same as above.

There is so much style in the article that it actually hurts the substance that's present. It would need an outside reader to go through the article tom to bottom to turn this into a GA piece, as is the case with Nesbit as well. As a result, i have to fail this article at GAN despite how long it's waited for a review. Wizardman 04:26, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

• Ten years later the writing remains wretched. EEng 01:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

I just came upon this article at random with no prior knowldge of the subject and also felt frustrated by the tone of the writing. Although you could call it well-sourced, I think in some ways it hurts the article to be based largely on newspaper writing of the day and what seems to me like a rather "pop history" book in Uruburu's American Eve—that combination seems almost guaranteed to yield a needlessly sensational and lurid tone with this kind of subject matter. I think this article would really benefit from some scholarly history sources (I know Uruburu is an English professor but she seems to be writing more for the general public in that book, and in a pretty racy way that I don't think has done this article many favors).

Just glancing at JSTOR it looks like there is some scholarly history on this but it doesn't seem to make much of an appearance here. This article on the literary history of the "sob sisters" idea seems interesting to me, for example, and its topic does appear here briefly, but if the previous editor consulted that article there's no sign. This one from a sociological legal history angle seems like it has intriguing things to say about the tension between the "unwritten law" of 19th-century-style "honor" vs. the era's legal concept of provocation as they featured together in Thaw's trial, but that article also doesn't seem to be in use here. This is just from a brief glance so maybe there's more.

I don't see much scholarly writing on Thaw's life aside from his trial, though, which maybe bodes a bit ill for the rest of the article. Also, all the book-length stuff I've come across, glancing around, appears to be in a rather popcorn-munching novelistic vein not far off from American Eve in tone—seems like people have a hard time taking an extended interest in this subject from any other perspective.

This topic strikes me as kind of depressing and I'm feeling pretty down as-is, so I'm not sure I really want to spent a lot of time with this article, but I might decide to have a go at it anyway. If I don't, and another editor decides to, I encourage widening the source pool with some less "tabloidy" material, which I think will help temper the article's style. 🍉◜◞🄜e𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚊r🅟🜜🥑《 𔑪‎talk〗⇤ 04:08, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Material for a Trivia Section?

I suggest that a trivia section be added, containing statements from the 1924 book Thirty Years Among the Dead, by Carl A. Wickland. (I realise I might be inviting ridicule, but the fact is that there is a source making claims so outlandish as to be worthy of inclusion. It also illustrates Thaw's notoriety, even almost two decades after the murder.)

Wickland used to hold seances with his wife as a medium. He claims that Thaw killed White under the influence of "revengeful spirits", two of whom he had spoken to at said seances. Wickland also writes about talking to the spirits of Stanford White and Thaw's deceased father. The latter said that both the murder and Harry's odd behaviour throughout his life had been caused by spirit possession:

"He is sensitive to spirit influence and has been all his life. I did not understand the cause of Harry's queer actions while I was in the physical, but now, from the spirit side of life, I can see that Harry has been a tool in the hands of selfish, earthbound spirits most of his life."

FWIW, 80.217.127.229 (talk) 09:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

First sequestered jury?

The Lizzie Borden trial had a sequestered jury according to the History Channel. Mike Hayes (talk) 07:42, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Image size

That is awesome that 225px is optimal for your screen, but we now use dynamic sizing so that everyone can choose an image size that is optimal for their own screens in the settings. If you think the default setting should be set at 225 pixels, this is not the place to make that argument by reverting to your favorite setting. You can lobby to change global Misplaced Pages policy at the WP:Village Pump. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 20:19, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Shouldn't you be spending your time fixing your vast number of copyright violations? Or do you prefer to work on writing more articles that you're not allowed to move to articlespace, which will then join the many, many articles that sit in your userspace because you spent your time writing them (and making stupid edits like this) instead of working on your copyright violations? BMK (talk) 20:25, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Attack the editor when the logic behind your reversion rationale fails ... --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 20:36, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Yep, you work with what you've got, and what we've got here is an extremely selfish editor who'd rather dick around making trivial edits, edit-warring, and bothering and incorrectly warning other editors (and who can't count to three either, I guess) rather than do what's right and help fix his vast number of copyright violations. To expect me to treat you as a colleague under those circumstance is asking too much, so this is how you'll be treated instead, like the pest you have become. BMK (talk) 21:20, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

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