The result was no consensus. There are far too many issues here to be decided in the AFD format and timeframe. I understand that no decision has been reached in literally years of discussion, but except in rare cases, lack of consensus is not a reason to delete. Mr.Z-man 07:06, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Currently the page list of massacres is protected due to protracted edit wars. There have been meaningful discussions about how the introduction to the page could be altered so that only entries supported by reliable third party sources were used. But the problem is that the word massacre has no agreed definition that can be attached to a category of offences and it is used in a by third party sources in an arbitrary way. One incident may be described as a massacre in a third party source, while another very similar incident is not.
A requested move to "List of mass killings" failed less than a month ago because, AFAICT, the list would be very large and most thought it even more of a vague title and open to more WP:POV interpretations than the current name. This is also considered to be a problem with all the other names to date that have been suggested.
There are some sections of the article that can be salvaged and placed into new articles which are not contentious, two such articles already exist List of school-related attacks and Going postal, and the two sub-lists from this article that could be salvaged are "massacres during labour conflicts", and "Criminal and non-political massacres". Much of the rest of the article are either covered in other articles eg "State-sponsored genocides" are covered much better in the Genocide article, or are just an arbitrary collection of events which editors with various POVs have added to the article. For example the air forces of the belligerents in World War II launched scores and scores of strategic and tactical bomber raids every week of the war many of which which killed scores of people, yet the list of raids classified as massacres runs to four with no reason given as to why those four are selected as the only four raids that were massacres.
This leads to one final point. The list is as it is currently structured is far from complete, for example if all aerial bombardments from all wars that result deaths are included then it will many times larger and it is already has an edit size of 196K . Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:19, 8 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]