Talk:Oldest people/Archive 10

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Um, can anyone verify Mary Elizabeth Sheridan?

She's listed on IMDb and recently had her 121st birthday but she's nowhere to be seen on this wikipedia page. Can anyone do some research or verification? Link [1] —Preceding unsigned comment added by DJ critikaL (talk • contribs) 13:52, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Before any such process is started, you should first confirm this person is actually still alive. I strongly doubt that, but in the case she is, it would of course be worth trying to validate her. However, if the birthdate is correct in IMDB, she had her 111th birthday, not 121st.(Yubiquitoyama (talk) 14:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC))

Oldest people in the world graph

I see that Jughead has added a pretty nifty graph which represents all known oldest people at a given time from 1830 to the present date. But I can see a few problems right off the top - for one, the chart should start from 1955 which is really where the record starts in any substantive manner, as that is when the record started to be kept and subsequently amended back to. While we may be able to compile a list of oldest people going back into the 19th century, besides the fact that patchy birth records make such a compilation somewhat meaningless, any compilation beyond what already exists on this page would be original research.

Secondly, it is hard to really understand what the graph represents, with a lot of tiny dots. Close clusters of dots really represent the fact that record-holders held the title briefly, a low cluster means someone held the record for a long time. Which was only really true after 1955. The chart implies that Betsy Baker who is represented by the dot circa 1955 held the record for a whopping 25 years, which is obviously not so. And thirdly, the current record-holder just turned 115, yet is shown as being 116.

My suggestion would be to keep the vertical axis as is, but to create a bar graph for individual years of BIRTH starting with the first record-holder Betsy Baker's birth year, 1842, draw a bar for the maximum age attained for any person born in that year and do the same for each year up to 1892, the most recent birth year for which no people are proven still alive. And this would not be original research, as there is a page with this list: [2]. There is someone for each year save 1845 there. Canada Jack (talk) 20:42, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Hello. Thanks for pointing out those mistakes, Jack. I'll try to improve the graph soon. Fell free to offer any more suggestions. Jughead.z(1) (talk) 02:28, 16 May 2008 (UTC)