Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lucy Hannah

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Wizardman 05:14, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lucy Hannah

Lucy Hannah (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Stub article on a woman claimed to be the fourth-oldest person on record and the oldest African American. However, a google search throws up no sign of substantial coverage in reliable sources, so she fails WP:BIO. The article says that "the case escaped more than local media notice", but no refs are given for any that coverage, so there is no way of assessing how substantial it is. I was going to suggest merger to List of American supercentenarians in case anyone finds more refs, so much the stub appears to original research or speculation that I think deletion would be preferable. She is already listed in List of the oldest people and in U.S. state longevity recordholders. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Keep I don't think there will be any refs. She died in 1993 and had no media coverage, and her case was discovered in 2001. Neal (talk) 20:25, 9 December 2007 (UTC).

• • Reply. Please re-read WP:BIO. I can see no grounds for keeping the article if there was no media coverage of her and hence no refs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:34, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Reply Same here. Neal (talk) 21:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC).
      • Do you mean that you agree there are no grounds for keeping the article? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:22, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
        • I think what I said pretty much matches your 2nd sentence. Neal (talk) 16:38, 10 December 2007 (UTC).
• Delete or Merge No substantial independent, reliable sources to establish meeting WP:N or WP:BIO. Nothing here that couldn't be summarized in the many supercentenarian lists. If, as mentioned above, there cannot be refs, then this individual does not deserve her own article; rather, notes on the lists will suffice. Cheers, CP 20:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Keep or merge --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:42, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Keep Verified as the World's oldest black woman ever. That's notable. 69.14.38.16 (talk) 03:05, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Being "the World's oldest black woman ever" is indeed a fact worthy of recording, but it can be noted in a list article. However, there needs to be more substantive coverage before she passes WP:BIO and merits a standalone article. The article as it stands now is simply a pile of unverified assertions: her dates of birth+death are listed at http://www.grg.org/Adams/I.HTM (warning:huge table, may take your browser a long time to render), but I haven't even found anything on the GRG website to confirm that she was an African American. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Under the column 'R' (for race) B is for black. And then the names are color-coded by gender. So black = Black, blue = White, green = Asian. But since there's no biography on her life, there would be no story about her race. Just in the Guinness data and census checks. Neal (talk) 08:16, 15 December 2007 (UTC).
      • Neal, thanks for the explanation of her, but but but but but ... if, as I thought and you now say "there's no biography on her life", then how can wikipedia have a biographical article on her which is not original research???? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:50, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
        • Simple, someone made it anyways! Neal (talk) 04:03, 16 December 2007 (UTC).
      • BTW, the pedant in me insists that I correct something written above: She was "the World's oldest known verifiable black woman ever". Who's to say that someone living in the Ivory Coast in the 1400s didn't outlive her? Grutness...wha? 00:13, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
• Regretful delete - the claims of this article make the lady super super notable. However, I can find no reliable sources whatsoever; the only sources listed may well have taken their info from Wikipedia. The article has been around long enough [1] that there's the possibility this is a hoax; for this type of case and this type of case especially was WP:RS created. We do not want to be posting unreliable info and possible hoaxes on Wikipedia (especially for something of this magnitude of importance). I would think that for sure, this lady would have some kind of coverage for having been the oldest black person ever, and for being the oldest American at the time, and yet there is none. All but one keep !vote seem to have WP:JUSTAVOTE or WP:ITSNOTABLE issues. The Evil Spartan (talk) 02:52, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

per below, not now. The Evil Spartan (talk) 07:49, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

• Keep -- Not a hoax: I found her record in the Social Security Death Index, substantiating the dates of birth and death. The details of her life could use further referencing, but considering that she died in 1993, the lack of ghits may only be indicative of the fact that most media didn't come on line for another few years. See this search for evidence that younger supercentarians are routinely covered today. Deleting this article could be an inadvertent concession to recentism. -- Shunpiker (talk) 07:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

• Can you give a link to the SNN page (if it exists)? We could add it to the article. The Evil Spartan (talk) 07:49, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

• The Social Security Death Index entry may verify the dates, but as a primary source it cannot establish notability. As to the possibility of references, we can only speculate, but at the moment there is no evidence that any further sources exist. If such sources do become available in the future, then the article can of course be recreated. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:52, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 21:05, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

• Note. This article was closed as "keep", but relisted after I queried the closure. The problems with this article remain the same as when it was nominated: that all the references are entries in in lists, which is fine for including this person in lists on wikipedia, but nowhere near enough for a standalone article per WP:BIO.
  Neal IRC says above that "she died in 1993 and had no media coverage, and her case was discovered in 2001". If there is no media coverage, then the article can never be expanded beyond a stub without original research - see this edit for what it looks like when the articles is stripped of original research and unreferenced commentary about her place in the longevity tables. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:20, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I certify the above. BHG came to me on my talk page, and I revised my decision. Instead of taking it to a DRV, I decided to re-open, considering that an overturn at DRV would partly come to my own view, if that makes any sense. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 23:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Fails WP:N and WP:BIO, due to the lack of substantial coverage in reliable and independent sources. Lists and directory listings are insufficient. The "Gerontology Research Group" is listed as a ref, but I do not see Lucy Hannah in their list of supercentenarians [2]. I also question satisfaction of WP:V since the Social Security Death index reference attribute the info on her birth date to a "family member." Many extremely old people have exaggerated reports of their age, as stated by the US Census Bureau discussion of "false centenarians" [3] and by other authors [4] [5] and I would like to see additional reliable sources who have done investigations to verify the claim. Census record searches often conflate the records of different individuals with the same or similar names. Birth records of Blacks in Alabama in the 1870's were pretty scant. Edison (talk) 05:58, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Considering that Hannah died in 1993, she does not show up in Gerontology Research Group's list of *living* supercentenarians. But the reference is to the site and not to that report. She does show up many other places on the site.

There is considerable evidence that many people have come to believe that she was one of the oldest living people. This makes Lucy Hannah notable. With the official social security record attesting to a great lifespan, they have good reason to believe that she lived to a very great age. Wikipedia shouldn't get into the business of trying to decide this question. The reader can make up their own mind based on the available information, which (to my sensibility at least) establishes notability and is adequate for a stub article.

I second BrownHairedGirl's editing down of non-verifiable information in the biography. But I disagree with her insistence that the article be deleted, and I don't think that there is anything wrong with AnonymousDissident's closure of this discussion. BrownHairedGirl makes her arguments thoughtfully and forcefully, but there are ample grounds for other thoughtful people to disagree with her conclusions. -- Shunpiker (talk) 16:23, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

If she is not listed at the Gerontology site (and they have lists of the claimed super-elderly who dies in the past couple of years as well) then it should not be presented as a reference. It gives the false impression, intentionally or not, that it validates her longevity, rather than being about other persons claimed to have lived a long time. The Google search string you cite is also not a "reliable source." Individual reliable and independent sources should be presented. The claim that "lots of people believe she lived a long time" is not what is claimed in the article, which instead asserts that she IN FACT lived to the claimed ripe old age. This is not an article about Bigfoot or some other pop culture urban legend: it is a claimed scientific fact. The Census Bureau and other scholarly studied of claimed super-centenarians note that there was a motivation for people to lie and claim they were older than they were in order to receive better benefits, so Social Security records are not all that convincing, absent other life-long documentation, which some of the claimed super-centenarians actually have. Edison (talk) 21:23, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Clarification: Lucy Hannah is listed a number of places on the Gerontology site. I included the google search URL to show that. She is not, however listed among the living supercentenarians, since she died almost 15 years ago. You wrote "I do not see Lucy Hannah in their list of supercentenarians". I just wanted to point out that you were reading an inapplicable list. The reference should cerntainly indicate one of the relevant pages on GRG's site, rather than just pointing you to the home page. -- Shunpiker (talk) 07:58, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that there is evidence that Lucy Hannah was one of the oldest living people, and I agree that it's right and proper that wikipedia should record the fact that several sources make that claim. However, all that information is already available in List of the oldest people and in U.S. state longevity recordholders, and there is no suggestion that it should be removed from there (I'd oppose it if it was proposed). So the issue for AfD is not whether wikipedia tries to make a decision on the facts, but simply whether there should a standalone article on her.

I think that one of the difficulties here is that term "notability" ends up being used in two rather different ways. WP:N tries to clarify this by distinguishing "notabiity" from "worthiness", but IMO it doesn't really succeed. I suggest that it might be helpful to think of "notability" as used in WP:N and WP:BIO as referring to "suitability for a standalone article". In this case, there is no evidence that properly-sourced text on her could amount to more than the 26-word sentence in my test edit. That brief sentence is simply not an article, it's a verbose way of representing a single line from a list, and it's misleading and unhelpful to readers to create in lists a link to an "article" which conveys nothing more than they will already have learnt in the list.

This isn't just something which I made up, it's an approach which has community consensus as expressed in WP:N and WP:BIO. My concern with the CfD closure was that it did not address the absence of any reason from the "keep" !voters to make this case an exception and set that principle aside. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:26, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Thanks for the additional explanation. I take your point that that the Notability guideline is difficult to interpret. It seems to me that Lucy Hannah "made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in ... her specific field." Because of that, I've been trying to make the case for Notability, rather than pleading for an exception. This case comes down judgment call, and I don't fault anyone for coming to a different conclusion. But I object to the interpretation that the closure was simply a headcount. Valid arguments have been made pro and contra, and it sounds like there may well be more to discuss. -- Shunpiker (talk) 08:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

"Widely recognized"? That's why WP:BIO's reuirement for substantial coverage in reliable sources is so important: there is no evidence that Lucy Hannah was "widely recognised", because we have no evidence that anyone has done enough research on her to be able to write anything more about her than a list entry, or even that the listing has been widely published. She has a brief entry in the Guinness Book of Records, and apart from inclusion in the lists published by GRG, that's it.

So I'm sorry, but the "keep" arguments do not seem to me to be at all valid, or that there is any reason to retain an "article" which says nothing more than its entry in an existing list. The case for retaining this article seems to amount solely to "she is in a notable list", a case which is explicitly rejected by WP:NOTE and WP:BIO. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:06, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

• Very weak keep just due to being a record-breaker - oldest black person ever, and 4th oldest person ever. The claims that she does not meet WP:BIO are worrying, though, as are the lack of independent sources.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 20:03, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep per comments in the prior discussion. Relisting is not an alternative to making a decision. Mandsford (talk) 23:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep as above, sufficiently notable as one of the oldest African Americans. (jarbarf) (talk) 00:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.