User:John J. Bulten/BDP

Current text of WP:BDP

Deceased

This policy does not apply to edits about the dead. But material about dead people may have implications for their living relatives and friends, particularly in the case of recent deaths, so anything questionable should be removed promptly. Any individual born less than 115 years ago is covered by this policy unless a reliable source has confirmed the individual's death. People over 115 years old are presumed dead unless listed at oldest people.

Draft proposal for insertion at BLP talk

New BDP fix

I propose a removal of arbitariness from the insufficiently discussed age cutoff, and a consideration of neutral treatment of longevity claimants, as follows.

In March 2009 I noticed a statement resembling "As of 2009, any person born before 1887 who is not known to have died should not be considered a living person" (cf. Jeanne Calment), along with other text and a link to oldest human (14 February 2009 version). In June 2010 this regularly morphing age-122 or -123 cutoff was changed to age-115 (discussions 1, 2). I have been awhile mentally incubating a fix for the policy presumptiveness and am now ready to make a considered proposal. The flaws with the current policy are:

• "115" is a wholly arbitrary cutoff, proposed offhand in discussion 2 by the eminent Will Beback, who committed the minor indiscretion of seeing a "natural" cutoff in statistics because one is looking for it. Rather, in a statistical continuum (where the documentarily-verified population is a vanishing fraction of the total population), no cutoff is more inherently notable than any other (not even a 3-std-dev cutoff), and we should instead turn to what reliable sources say about it with their own valid rationales. (122/123 is no better for identical reasons.)
• Extant policy presumes that a person is alive if under 115 and dead if over 115, while scientists actually affirm no human-longevity cutoff exists, and over 15 known and many unknown people do live over 115. Such presumptions are an avoidable form of unverifiable OR.
• Extant policy continues to link to the article "oldest people" as authoritative (Guinness-style-verified lists of top-10 or -1 oldest all-time in varying categories), a very poor article for a policy link. There is first the natural problem that the correct link for BLP should be list of living supercentenarians (Guinness-style-verified living people over age 110). Next we note both articles are part of a WP:WALLEDGARDEN (identified with more consensus than in the past at WP:FTN#Longevity-cruft), maintained by numerous editors often from the WP:WOP workgroup. The salient failing of these articles is lack of agreement on objective standards for inclusion (some intra-workgroup subjective standards exist): if BDP makes such a poor article a policy standard for determining which persons born 115 years ago are notable enough as such to be considered still alive, and which are nonnotable enough (for old age) to be considered dead, it is an improper reliance on a nonpolicy, nonstabilized article for farming out this determination.
• When editors insert details about a new person notable for old age, they cannot follow the letter of the policy, because they are dealing with immediately current news stories that state the person is living and over 115, even though the claim does not appear in the longevity articles. The policy would nominally require them to consider them dead.
• The two articles also contain only Guinness-style-verified cases rather than unverified-claimant cases, which are far commoner, thus permitting unintentional bias. If an editor comes to WP:BLP dealing with a dated article about an old person, they would be directed to one article not knowing of the bias against Wikipedia's other articles that may contain data on the unverified claim, not listed in the two verified articles.
• And, to switch gears: when the case (rather than the person) is very old, like Amelia Earhart or Ambrose Bierce, the statement about confirmed death will need adjustment to deal with the case of reliable secondary sources that speculate about the unknown death of the individual. Bierce's article says he died after 1913; but there is no verifiable source whatsoever that says this is certain, a remediable V failure. The general inference "X is dead" drawn from age-data observations either is OR, or appears in reliable sources with appropriate qualifications describing and attributing who states how certain it is.

Accordingly, I propose that persons born before a cutoff point be generally treated as neither known living or known dead, to account for both supercentenarians and lapsed historical figures. More specifically:

• Consider the appropriate cutoff point. It is a general but inconstant consensus at WP that longevity notability begins at age 110, for which my friend A. Ross Eckler, Jr., long ago coined the word "supercentenarianism". A supercentenarian (verified or claimed) reported by a reliable source generally has been considered to have line-item notability for inclusion in a table (though not article notability). Thus I propose that, because reliable sources currently use this cutoff widely, and not any other with any consistency, BDP apply to persons born exactly or more than 110 years before the current date.
• Consider the universe of cases: people born on or before the cutoff date (110 years ago) but without proof of death. This superset divides naturally into those notable for longevity and those notable for other reasons. "People notable only for longevity" should equal "all claimed supercentenarians". "People notable only for something else" should equal historical (limbo) cases where there is no update of the person either dying or reaching 110. (A very small third set is the overlap set, "people notable for both", like vaccinist Leila Denmark.)
• Historical cases, like Earhart and Bierce, should not be stated by WP as being either living or dead; they certainly should not be stated as dead or alive dependent on birthdate, due to V, NOR, and the consideration of BLP that a disappeared person still has odds of showing up at age 110 (as well as at any other attested age, like alchemist Fridericus Gualdus). (Reliable sources about death speculations or declarations are welcome, but do not confirm death.)
• Longevity cases should also not be stated by WP as being either living or dead, for different reasons:
  • Many of the less notable of these lapse into a continuum of limbo, without updates or death reports for years prior to the present date, with some claims last updated in the 19th century; these are similar to the historical cases.
  • Without setting an arbitrary cutoff of when limbo begins, the most recent cases are typically reverified by later news reports confirming a person is still alive, until the person's death is reported separately. Each news report only verifies the person was alive as of the news date, and a person verified alive today is not verified as alive tomorrow. Since the risk of death within one year asymptotically approaches about 40% in extreme old age (link above), it is not reasonable to presume a person in a reliable source last year is either alive or dead this year without reverification.
  • Guinness, the primary sourcebook, routinely lists living supercentenarians with the tag fl., indicating exactly this, the last known update date; Guinness does not credit their ages further by adding any of the days between the update date and the actual Guinness publication date.
  • While it can be held that the most famous supercentenarians should receive the consideration extended to all under 110 (the presumption of remaining alive), it is still a presumption, and there is no objective way to separate out the "most famous", especially considering that the larger group of unverifieds routinely exceeds the age claims of the smaller group of verifieds and the unverifieds are at greater risk of lapsing into limbo.
• It could also be argued that the small set of overlap cases is certainly notable enough to anticipate that a death report will work itself into WP on a timely basis, but this presumption is also unnecessary, and the cases too few to carve out a complicated exception for them.
• Though BLP concerns do apply between persons claiming to be very, very old and debunkers claiming those people are much younger, and these do rise to the level of accusations of lying, BLP protections should be considered as a continuum, progressively less applicable as the last update recedes into the past, rather than be considered as an on-off situation for persons born 110 years ago. This continuum is in line with other deliberately ambiguous policies like WP:GNG, in which leeway is given the community to make individual judgments in "borderline" cases.

Therefore, I would change the present text:

Any individual born less than 115 years ago is covered by this policy unless a reliable source has confirmed the individual's death. People over 115 years old are presumed dead unless listed at oldest people.

And replace it with the following text:

Any individual born less than 110 years ago is fully covered by this policy unless a reliable source has confirmed the individual's death. To satisfy verifiability, people born 110 or more years ago and lacking reliable-source death confirmation (i.e., supercentenarians if living) should neither be presented as "alive as of today", example "(1890– )", nor as "dead as of today", example "(1890 – after 1990)", but as a middle category, "alive at last update", example "(1890 – fl. 1990)". The person should be considered as being progressively less covered by this policy as the last update receds further into the past. Language about the person's present status should be avoided (although presently-held verified longevity records may use the present tense).

In addition to the stated problems, this proposal also resolves certain issues in the longevity-related articles, edited by WP:WOP, who have helped contribute to the proposal:

• Many list-based articles combine both dead persons and those living at last update, but sorted by age as if living today; this violates datedness policy, because whenever a living person's age if living today passes a dead one's, the person's line must be re-edited to show a tie with the dead person, and the next day re-edited again to pass the dead person, which has required nearly daily updates to several articles.
• The ordinal numbers in list-based articles have been objected to as OR, but if articles were sorted by last update, they would not only be stable but also rely on objective rankings, not changed until new updates occur.
• The arbitrary determination of when a person reaches "limbo" status, such as in longevity claims, has been employed to separate out claims that would appear "too old" in the editors' eyes if they are still living: in that article there is a table for claims last updated 0-2 years ago, another for those 2-10 years ago, and another for claims last updated over 10 years ago. This is wholly arbitrary and creates undue weight for those closer to being updated exactly 2 or 10 years ago.
• The difficulty of editors speaking about lapsed longevity cases, as well as lapsed historical cases like Earhart, as if death can be confidently assumed at some point or can be assumed to be "not in play" at some other point, would be wholly removed. All language that would originally synthesize a person's living or dead status would be replaced with what reliable sources have suggested about the probability of death, if any have so commented.

Thank you for reading through the issue, and I trust this proposal will meet with wide consensus. JJB 20:49, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Discussion

I'm not particularly involved in editing longevity-related articles, but I agree an arbitrary cutoff date is not the right approach. Having said that, I think we are venturing into the realms of logic-driven absurdity if we allow the encyclopedia to imply that Ambrose Bierce might still be alive at 168 - by the same principles we would have to grant the possibility of Jesus or Hammurabi still walking the earth, since as far as I can see we don't have verified death dates for either.

I think there's a policy somewhere (I couldn't find it just now) which says we don't have to source statements of universally-accepted fact like "the sky is blue" and I suggest the same principle would apply here. The test is: is it conceivable this person is still alive?

Of course, there would be some grey-area cases where editors would argue about whether or not it was conceivable. (For example, since we have a verified 122yo, the possibility of a 124yo clearly isn't ridiculous.) But in the cases of people who are certainly dead by now, yet whose date of death isn't known, it would enable us to reflect reality a little better than the proposal of - as I understand it - not acknowledging that death must have occurred at some point. Barnabypage (talk) 18:53, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

This is handled by the statement, "Reliable sources about death speculations or declarations are welcome, but do not confirm death." It would be inappropriate for WP to say "Bierce died" because we have no reliable source for that claim. But to quote sources that conclude it to some degree, based on the timing or other evidence, would be perfectly appropriate. The lack of the statement "Bierce died" in lieu of third-party attribution of the uncertainty about his death will not lead to the WP:OR implication you derive. We do have "Hammurabi died" attributed to a source and tied to a half-century range (although the uncertainties and nuances are definitely encyclopedic if they are as you state), and there's no shortage of "Jesus died" sources tied to a particular decade. The basic intent, though, is to treat all cases alike without subjectivity or V failure.

The V policy, where I was previously active in discussion, is generally that if "the sky is blue" is challenged (say, due to a particular spectral model), it should be sourced (our current sky lead has 4 sources); the opposite is merely a repeated objection to the policy due to misunderstanding. Further, the question of what is conceivable about old age is not only disputed but also a prime OR target. The proposal completely removes the necessity to define a "grey-area" or a "certainly dead" unless reliable sources make such a judgment, and thus removes this temptation to OR. To use the sky analogy, for any cases where you fear a misinference might be drawn, the simple fix is to cite the reliable sources that say the party is dead, as they will be very easy to find. The supercentenarians are simply the subset that most bring the issue into the proper light. JJB 19:31, 18 November 2010 (UTC)