Category talk:Living people

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Category:Living people page.
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Archives: 1, 2

Notice: Please note This is not a typical category! Read the archived discussion and reasons for its existence before complaining about the "point" of having this new, administrative-style category.

	This category is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Category	This article has been rated as Cat-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]

This category was nominated for deletion, renaming, or merging with another category on 2006 January 19. The result of the discussion was keep per edict of Jimbo Wales.

This category was nominated for deletion, renaming, or merging with another category on 2006 January 23. The result of the discussion was no consensus to rename.

This category was nominated for deletion, renaming, or merging with another category on 2007 September 3. The result of the discussion was not to rename to Category:Living persons.

Archives

Archive 1 (This archive is incomplete due to page blanking - see also the archive page history) Archive 2

Contents 1 Year of death missing 2 If there's no news of a person's death 3 Change the rules! 4 Bug in navigation bar 5 Subjective 6 Undead report updated 7 Just plain too long to ever be useful 7.1 Missing entry 8 Number of articles in this category updating 9 Over 10% of all Wikipedia articles are currently in this category 10 Useful tool for working with this category 11 Kelly Salmon and Duncan Duff 12 Is this a meaningful category? 13 Natalee Holloway 14 Lists of people needing categorization by birth or death 15 HIDDENCAT

[edit] Year of death missing

"For those with unknown death dates born after 1882…"

I seriously doubt anyone born in 1882 would be alive now. Should it be moved to maybe 1900 or 1920? —  $PЯINGrαgђ  Always loyal! 21:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

1920 is far too late; plenty of people born then or before are still with us. 1900 at the latest.--Brownlee 13:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

BTW, shouldn't the sentence read: "born before [date]" ? --RCEberwein | Talk 01:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

No. Then the sentence would make even less sense. Heroicraptor 07:07, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone that would be older than Jeanne Calment is likely to be dead (122 years and 164 days, i.e. born before 1883 in 2006).

When adding categories by bot, Category:Living people was only added to those born later than 1920, articles about people born between 1910 and 1920 (but not in one of the death categories) were checked after addition.

Category talk:Possibly living people discusses which articles to move to Category:Year of death missing. -- User:Docu —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Docu (talk • contribs) 13:41, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

Marking this topic resolved, because Category:Living people sets the date criteria, and Category:Possibly living people handles the unknowns these days. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] If there's no news of a person's death

If a person in the living people category dies, but this is not reported in news media, they will remain in this category. Over time, there will be people who become very old for whom there is no recent news about. At what age should we move them to the possibly living people category, do you think?--HisSpaceResearch 14:34, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

This is now covered at Category:Living people in its documentation. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Change the rules!

I strongly suggest whoever decides Wikipedian policy ought to change the rules so that this category can be subcategorised in some circumstances. Wikipedia does not segregate any category into living and dead, but should do so for living supercentenarians as this shows the extremes of age. At present, there is a CFD on this category. Dovea 20:50, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

What is wrong with having living categories that are not sub-categories of this one? A category for living supercentenarians is inherently notable and if they're all also in this category I don't see what the problem is. Timrollpickering 01:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

There is no consensus to date for such subcategorization of this category, and many proposals for it have been rejected. I believe that some such categories exist, but they are not subcategories of this category, which serves a special WP:BLP purpose. Also, such categories, under the general principles established at WP:CFD, should not include only supercentarians who are still living; we do not remove people from categories (Category:People from Barcelona, Category:Scottish pool players, etc., etc., etc., simply because they have died. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bug in navigation bar

Has anybody else noticed the bug in the fairly new two-letter navigation bar? Even if you click on all twenty-six of them starting with one letter, you will not get all the people whose names start with that letter.

In fact, if you do that under the O's, there will be more than six hundred fifty people that are missed.

That's because both the space and the apostrophe (and any numbers and several other characters), plus all of the capital letters from A to Z as well, have Unicode numbers lower than the Unicode number of "a".

Shouldn't it be fixed so that the single letters are also links? Gene Nygaard 10:14, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Wrong venue; this should be addressed on the talk page of that TOC template. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Subjective

This is totally subjective though. How do you define when a person is "dead"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.96.249.63 (talk • contribs)

When they are no longer alive. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 19:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Reliable sources, as always. If there is serious doubt, that is what Category:Possibly living people is for.

[edit] Undead report updated

Interiot updated the "undead.txt" report on the toolserver. It includes all articles tagged with a birth category but not a death category. As the update of toolserver data from en.wikipedia.org stopped with data from c. 19 January 2007, articles categorized afterwards aren't included.

Some 6000 articles from the list for birth years 1910-2004 have already been added to Category:Living people.

Articles about people with earlier birth years (born 1909 or earlier), Category:Year_of_birth_unknown or Category:Year_of_birth_missing still need a category for the year of death, Category:Living people, Category:Possibly living people, Category:Year of death missing, Category:Disappeared people, etc. -- User:Docu

[edit] Just plain too long to ever be useful

I'd just like to make a point that's probably been made before, but here goes: every single article on Wikipedia is about a living person. Therefore, this category is entirely useless. I challenge you to find one article to prove me wrong.

I agree - I just saw this Category at the bottom of a page - this category is 100% useless to 99.99999% of the people that use the net - a category like "Architects", "Chefs", etc. have some purpose, and I can see the service it provides. I propose a new Category: "Human" -- Themepark

Additionally, I think we should keep in mind that the existence of a category implies that there should be a Wikipedia article about every single entity in that category, as per WP:CATRULE. Consider Category:Footballers, which currently lists everyone alive who has ever played the game. In the case of "living persons", however, I hope we can agree that the over 6 billion of us would single-handedly crash the servers, in addition to being boring to read.— Lenoxus 08:53, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your second point. Only if we have an article about the person (footballer or not). Garion96 (talk) 21:52, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Not true in the slightest — again, see CATRULE. Lenoxus " * " 02:53, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

It was late last night... Garion96 (talk) 05:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Heh, totally understandable -- that's when Mrs. O'Leary's cow is up to her tricks. You have no idea how often I've had the same thing happen (like with m:Friends of gays, had to read it twice). Peace! ;) Lenoxus " * " 16:25, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I quote you in saying "every single article on Wikipedia is about a living person". If you can excuse me using WP:IAR and make a mild personal attack, that's possibly the most outrageously ridculous statement I've ever read on this website.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 20:27, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

This is not a usual category, but is for both and WP:BIO needs; the normal reader/editor categories are Category:1925 births, etc., etc., Category:1998 deaths, etc., etc., and the missing/unknown ones Category:Year of death missing, Category:Disappeared people, and so on. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree, this category is useless. Obveously, I wouldn't say that "every single article on wikipedia is about living people" because not all of them are. But still, the world has a population of... I don't know, maybe 1,000,000,000,0000....etc. So yeah, this category is almost like listing the names of the worlds entire population. This category is useless JimboV1 (talk) 06:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Missing entry

You need to add Martin Walsh to the list, as he is more "famous" than some others on the category page. Please comment back, if you add him to the list. Brylcreem2 17:17, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number of articles in this category updating

From the page: "Organization: This category should not be sub-categorised. Entries are generally sorted by family name. As of 10 February 2007, there are 162,304 articles in this category."

It used to be that the total number of articles would be updated every month; this has not happened for a while. Any reason?--FeanorStar7 00:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

The tally takes more time and there didn't appear to be much demand. Anyways, I updated it and could update it once in a while. 200,000 is close. -- User:Docu

Thanks for answering and updating the info. Appreciated --FeanorStar7 11:02, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Over 10% of all Wikipedia articles are currently in this category

Total: 1,951,742 Living people: 211,156

--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 16:35, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

So? I think the interesting comment is that 10% of wikipedia articles are about living people. --Gmaxwell 16:41, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, but there are over 4 million "living people" in the world. PS how do we know if a wikipedian has died? --[[123Pie|Talk]] 17:36, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Useful tool for working with this category

Give cattersect a shot. For example, living English footballers, non-living English footballers. Unfortunately due to the level of excessive sub-categorization and under-categorization on English Wikipedia it's not possible to simple get a list of all living footballers.

If you scroll down to the bottom you'll see a list of categories frequently found in the results. In order to further refine your results, you can click the plus next to a category mandatory, minus to make it forbidden, or equals to start a new search with just that category. --Gmaxwell 16:48, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kelly Salmon and Duncan Duff

Can you please add Kelly Salmon and Duncan Duff to this list as I can't work out how to. Thanks. Jordan5001 19:21, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

You just needed to edit their page, and add [[Category:Living people]] to the bottom. the wub "?!" 18:53, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is this a meaningful category?

I mean, there are (currently) more than 6 billion people in the world. Even if we count only persons of notability, this is a vast amount of people - and the category is not reliable either, for two reasons. 1) It's easy to forget to remove the category when updating an article on a recently deceased person, and 2) Far from all articles on living people use this category. LarRan 11:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

See the old discussions. This category isn't really for readers but helps editors to monitor these articles for libel, which could present legal problems for Wikipedia. Obviously it's not perfect, but if you see articles where it needs adding/removing then please do so! the wub "?!" 18:59, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with LarRan. This list is inane. Anybody who is of any public interest will have their articles monitored without the aid of this list. 72.147.204.127 19:51, 26 September 2007 (UTC)ah3133

I'm no exclusionist, but this list is a bit much! I've seen lists for just about everything, but a list for living people? I suggest the creation of a whole new WikiBiographies. Honestly. Wikitank 01:08, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't see why the living=yes field in the WPBiography template doesn't suffice for the purpose used as rationale for retaining this piece of semantic noise. We even have the blp=yes field for the WikiProjectBannerShell to make sure the WP:BLP concerns are properly advertised. I personally do not perceive how removing this category would result in a sigificant increase in disregard for BLP concerns. __meco 08:03, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

If the list is for bot/admin purposes, why not make it private or something? It's bizarre to scroll down to the end of a page and see 20 links clogging it up, and one of them being the absolutely inane "living people." Why don't we have categories for "Living People With Hair" "Humans That Are Homo Sapiens" and "Dying People" (wherein we also include everyone). Pages on Wikipedia should be meaningful... this one isn't. Pariah23 (talk) 10:54, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree. There is absolutely no point in adding this category. Specifying the person's date of birth and death in the biography is enough to tell whether they are alive or death. If the dates aren't known then they couldn't be classified anyway. And yes, for that matter we could add endless classifications (people without a classification, for instance). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Josuedavila (talk • contribs) 01:32, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Agree. This is a totally inane category and I don't see how it increases the accuracy of biographical info. If it really does then I suggest some hidden category flag instead. Karpouzi (talk) 11:26, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Natalee Holloway

I have suggested per the category living persons that she be removed from that category since she is listed under the disappeared persons category. There was BLP concerns about monitoring this article that was discussed. I was told to take it up with the "BLP patrolers" who ever they might be. Can this category please be removed. There seems to be plenty of eyes watching this article to help avoid any BLP issues as well as all other policy and guideline disputes. Thank you.--24.250.59.250 (talk) 19:43, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of people needing categorization by birth or death

I've compiled three lists of people needing categorization by birth or death (as of mid-March 2008):

• User:Dsp13/Living people needing categorization by year of birth (containing about 26,000 individuals)
• User:Dsp13/People needing categorization by year of birth (containing about 11,000 individuals)
• User:Dsp13/People needing categorization as living or by year of death (containing about 18,000 individuals)

Any help gratefully received in adding the appropriate categories to these! Dsp13 (talk) 21:05, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] HIDDENCAT

Should this use the hiddencat keyword, as it's mainly an administrative category? Superm401 - Talk 05:25, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so. It's not really an administrative category in the same sense as other hidden categories in that it can't become applicable or need removing as the result of an editorial proces—i.e. it's not to do with the current status of the article. Category:Possibly living people could well need to be hidden though, but I'm not so familiar with its usage. BigBlueFish (talk) 20:18, 29 April 2008 (UTC)