User:Pilaz/Don't use obituaries to determine notability

Obituaries are poor indicators of notability. In most cases, obituaries should not be used to determine whether the subject of an article meets the notability requirements of Wikipedia, and in particular of the general notability guideline (GNG). This is due to the fact that obituaries are oftentimes written by the families of the deceased individual and published in otherwise respectable sources for a fee, and are therefore close to being self-published sources; that they often do not have a clear editorial policy, unlike the rest of the publication of which they are part; and that they tend to include even unnotable individuals. All of this leads to a yet to be estimated number of obits of ordinary people being published every year, many of which do not have a credible claim to notability. This phenomenon has been widely covered in reliable sources, interviews with obituary writers, and academic research.

The case against obituaries

Wikipedia is not a memorial

Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements.

Survey of available obituaries

Likely reliable

Likely reliable obituaries

Source	Unpaid? (Independent?)	Obit editor/editing policy? (Reliable?)	Count towards GNG?	Rationale	Ref.
The New York Times	Yes	Yes	Yes	The unpaid NYT obituaries are few (~ 3 per day), written by NYT staff, and reviewed by an editor.
BBC	Yes	Yes	Yes	The unpaid BBC obituaries are written by BBC staff, and reviewed by an editor.

Likely unreliable

Likely unreliable obituaries

Source	Unpaid? (Independent?)	Obit editor/editing policy? (Reliable?)	Count towards GNG?	Rationale	Ref.
Legacy and legacy-affiliated for-pay obituaries and death notices	No	No	No	Legacy obits and death notices are usually written by the families of the deceased, and sent from Legacy to the partner newspaper chosen by the family for a fee. Sometimes, families can bypass Legacy and go directly to their chosen publication, who will publish it in their (paid) obits section, but will still make it available on the Legacy database. Sometimes, funeral homes will act as intermediaries between Legacy and the family. No fact-checking is made, and no editorial policy exists.

Commented bibliography

Press

• William McDonald, "From the Death Desk: Why Most Obituaries Are Still of White Men". 8 March 2018. The New York Times. – "Some 155,000 people die between each day’s print version of The New York Times and the next — enough to fill Yankee Stadium three times over. On average, we publish obituaries on about three of them." McDonald adds that obituaries overrepresent white, male individuals because places of power are predominantly occupied by them.
• Oscar Schwartz."'A deluge of death': how reading obituaries can humanise a crisis". 2 May 2020. The Guardian. – Interestingly reveals that an obit writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote 2,000 obituaries between 1996 and 2009, including for the very notable "church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science", "the girl who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral", and "the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years".

Academia

• Julian Hamann, "“Let us salute one of our kind.” How academic obituaries consecrate research biographies", Poetics, Volume 56, 2016, Pages 1-14, ISSN 0304-422X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2016.02.005. – even obituaries for deceased academics have deficiencies, as said obits evoke "naturally talented, highly devoted academic subjects with coherent research profiles", and omit "both biographical hurdles and the decedent’s gender and class".

Blogs

• Steve Buttry, "Nearly everyone gets an obituary; if not, journalists can and should still verify deaths", The Buttry Diary (blog), January 18, 2013 – a blog post by a former Director of Student Media at Louisiana State University's school of Mass Communication, that explores the lack of basic factchecking (date of birth, full name) by journalists in other databases. Notable quote: "If Legacy's claim of covering 75 percent of all deaths [in the United States] is true, I think it’s likely that the number of deaths reported in newspapers is at least 90 percent and probably more than 95 percent."

Documentaries

• Obit – a 2016 documentary about the New York Times obituary section writers and their daily work.