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Deaths of non-Western people
I have been informally monitoring the recent deaths section of "In the news" since I saw Paul Daniels listed there. It surprised me that he was included, as I presume his fame was limited outside of the UK (perhaps I'm wrong about this), and I've been playing closer attention to the names that appear since then. It strikes me that the vast majority of the people listed are Western (or at least lived in the West, as in the case of Zaha Hadid). Is this an area of Wikipedia where we could try to take steps to counter systemic bias? I'd be interested to hear other editors' thoughts on whether non-Western figures don't get included because they're less likely to be nominated than Westerners, or because English-language news of their deaths is rare and hence we don't tend to find out about them so quickly (or whether there are other explanations). Cordless Larry (talk) 12:25, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- Anecdotally I would say you have hit the nails on the head, i.e. it's due to a lack of nominations, due to a lack of "in the news" coverage in the English language, due to general malaise and systemic bias. The Rambling Man (talk) 12:30, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- I'd tend to agree, it's primarily the lack of reporting in the English speaking media and the subsequent lack of knowledge in English speaking users of this Wikipedia. Not at all sure 'bias' comes into it. Paste Let’s have a chat. 12:34, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- I would argue that this is a result not of ITN itself but just the general systematic bias that en.wiki has to non-English-speaking places and people that we have all policies in place to counter (eg we don't require English sources, etc.) but simply a lack of volunteers that want to work in these areas. As long as at ITN we do not discriminate on nominations simply because they are from the non-Western world, we are otherwise showing the result of the overall systematic bias that WP has. --MASEM (t) 14:02, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- Everything said above is true, but there's also the fact that "notability" and "systematic bias" have a complicated relationship. A part of what helps decide whether something shows up on ITN is whether we think ITN readers will, in general, care about something. That's not necessarily a bias to overcome; it's similar to the systematic bias against non-famous people in the English-speaking world. So it's a balancing act that we need to keep in mind. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:24, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- However, I would argue that I have not seen a case where an RD of a non-Western people was rejected on the grounds because "they aren't important in the Western world" (though I have seen this as a ill-advised reason to oppose which is generally rejected by the admin processing the nom) There are importance issues but this usually has been the case of, say, a second-tier government position, etc, that we'd equally apply to Western RD candidates. It is the lack of those nominations or the quality of those RD articles that's the reason for the lack of non-Western RDs, not because ITN has a bias against those that are nominated. --MASEM (t) 14:41, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
- There are two, unrelated questions here. Question 1 is "Do deaths of Western people get reported more often on the main page" the answer is "Yes". Question 2 is "What should we do about it?" If the answer to that question is not "improve Wikipedia articles about non-Western subjects so Wikipedia as a whole becomes better", then you're doing Wikipedia wrong. --Jayron32 15:07, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for everyone's thoughts on this. The comments largely confirmed my perceptions about the reasons non-Western deaths are rarely included, although I hadn't previously fully appreciated how much a role the quality of an article plays in its selection for inclusion in this section. This obviously complicates things, because it's not just a case of finding out that non-Western people have died and then nominating them for inclusion - we need a decent article about them to already exist (or we need to write one quickly). Cordless Larry (talk) 10:32, 7 April 2016 (UTC)
- I see that Malick Sidibé is currently on the front page. That's good to see (well, not good that he's died, but you know what I mean). Thanks for nominating him, The Rambling Man. Cordless Larry (talk) 16:18, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Proposal to simplify ITN/DC
All this strife about "notability". The DC were originally written to stop ITN from being an obituary. It happened anyway, so RD was created.
If the deceased person passed WP:AFD then for RD let "notability" be satisfied. Get more quality content up, regardless of the subject. If there are so many quality articles about RD people (unlikely) then we can revisit.
If a death is so newsworthy that it gets daily coverage from death to funeral (Thatcher, Mandela, Michael Jackson) then give them a blurb. And let the mistakes of the past just be in the past.
My two cents anyway.
Good luck! --166.137.97.109 (talk) 22:16, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
- Support as nominator --166.137.97.109 (talk) 22:16, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
- Comment. I'm not really clear on how this proposal is different from anything that we do already, or even what problem this is attempting to address. The whole point of discussing the nomination is to come to a consensus about notability. 331dot (talk) 22:28, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
- Reply Sorry I wasn't clear. I'm saying throw out the "notability requirement". Just get rid of it, and strike the wording from WP:ITN/DC. WP already has WP:NOTABILITY requirements, let them be good enough. The goal is to get more quality content on the main page and eliminate discussion about "notability". The quality check would still stand, so at worst it would be no different, and at best there would be more articles going to the main page and fewer rules to deal with. --166.137.97.109 (talk) 22:56, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
- The drama vs. obit ticker argument. While I'd like to see less bickering over whether a nom gets posted or not, opening the floodgates doesn't seem to be the solution. "Significance" (/notability/importance/etc.) is there to limit the number of nominations passing through here, be it blurb/ongoing/RD. If not, this is just a version of ITN/R where instead we'd be posting articles listed in Deaths in 2016 daily. Is that a good thing? Perhaps. When we say ITN suffers from systemic bias, this would be a good way to increase the exposure of quality articles that wouldn't normally be considered. Though the inevitable fallout when an obscure nom pushes a popular entertainer off the template may need to be addressed.
- Numbers-wise, take for example a slow day (10 April): 5 deaths - 2 red links, 2 stubs and one decent article (which was incidentally posted). 1 in 5 - that's great. But what about a bad day (3 April): 29 deaths - 2 red links, 15 stubs, 8 needing citations and 4 decentish articles (2 posted). That's roughly 30 potential noms. Even if you were to discount on average half as redlink/stubs and another quarter that won't be improved, do we want a turnover of 5-6 deaths hitting the main page on the same day? Those are two extremes but, given that we recently expanded RD because of unfortunate outliers recently, methinks there'll be more deaths eligible than not under this proposal. Fuebaey (talk) 00:10, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- How many articles linked in Deaths in 2016 have the quality to be main page ready? Let's do a quick count. Be back in a few minutes. --Jayron32 19:43, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
-
- Just checked April 13: of the 7 present, 4 were stubs or marginally above stubs, and the other three had short biographies, likely not extensive enough for a quality article on the main page. The best of them is probably Mariano Mores, and it would need significant expansion of the biography and much referencing work to clean it up. Let's try April 12th. Hold on a sec. --Jayron32 19:47, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- April 12 analysis: 12 articles. Seven were stubs or near stubs. Of the remaining five, four have major referencing issues or serious orange-level tags to make them ineligible. Only one Balls Mahoney is main-page quality. On to April 11th. --Jayron32 19:50, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- April 11 analysis: 13 deaths noted, but 4 redlinks (so obviously can't be posted to main page). OF the remaining 9, 7 were stubs, while the other two have referencing issues (one has an orange level "additional citations needed" tag, and the other needs one.) On to April 10. --Jayron32 19:53, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- April 10 analysis: 7 deaths, 3 redlinks, 3 stubs, and one quality article (which was actually posted): Howard Marks. --Jayron32 19:54, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- April 9: 9 deaths, 5 stubs, of the remaining four, one has an orange level tag. One has some likely neutrality/BLP issues that isn't tagged, but probably should be, and the other two comprehensive enough but needs some referencing work, Tony Conrad and Will Smith (defensive end) aren't main page ready, but could probably be worked up to it. --Jayron32 20:02, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- April 8: 16 deaths, 6 red links, two redirects, 6 stubs or near stubs, and of the remaining two, one has some serious imbalance/WP:UNDUE issues that would need a LOT of work to fix. The other, which at first glance looks OK, Edward J. Steimel, I would have tagged for some neutrality/BLP type issues for balance, even though it is long enough and fully references, so probably not main page ready either. --Jayron32 20:02, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
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- In summation, over the last 5 days, assuming no significant additional work were done on the articles in the Deaths in 2016 list, the RD list would have had one additional posting based solely on quality, if we did not have ANY notability requirements over WP:N, which is the minimum needed for an article in the first place. Since there are only currently 2 on the list, such an addition would not have pushed off any current candidates. I'd hardly call that "opening the floodgates". --Jayron32 20:05, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- Support To quote the OP: "WP already has WP:NOTABILITY requirements, let them be good enough. The goal is to get more quality content on the main page and eliminate discussion about "notability"." I could not have said it better myself. --Jayron32 12:04, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- Support I'm good with this too. It might encourage people to actually improve articles rather than just drive-by ITN or make their edits purely in the Wikipedia namespace, god knows we have far too many of those "helpful" folk. Only problem I see, based on the analysis performed by Jayron, is that we may have five to ten RD nominations per day to deal with, which may somewhat flood ITNC. Ideas on how that's best handled? The Rambling Man (talk) 20:24, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well, someone still has to a) notice and b) care enough to nominate them. That's still our gatekeeper. I'm not sure how this proposal changes that. --Jayron32 20:25, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well, it's pretty obvious. Right now, most people wouldn't nominate old footballers who won nothing (60 or so, per month, I'd be happy to nom them all) or local politicians or actors from Filipino television shows, but this proposal would suggest that they would all be considered equally, article quality being the only hurdle (but god knows we have a serious lack of editors who understand that...) hence we'd be flooded with nominations. Perhaps not immediately, but certainly in time. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:45, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- TRM is right, there is some risk of a flood. Maybe that's OK? Does it really matter if the footballer was only up for a day? I know it'd be frustrating after putting in a lot of work to see it bumped in 18 hours, but I think for that to happen it would take consecutive days of floods. Probably the clutter in ITN/C is a bigger issue. --166.177.187.122 (talk) 00:59, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- 1) How many of those old footballers have articles whose quality we'd be proud to show off on the main page? 2) I'm not sure why I numbered that question, because I don't think we need a second question. --Jayron32 01:06, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- Whether or not the articles are in a suitable condition is not relevant to the point I'm making. If we encourage the concept that the existence of an article passes the notability bar, then there's nothing stopping every single article being nominated, and why not? If they then get more exposure, more improvements will occur. The obvious conclusion being that we will have a serious flood of nominations at ITN, possibly a dozen per day if Deaths in March 2016 is anything to go by. The other corollary is that if, indeed, some of this many nominations per day are brought up to snuff, the throughput at the RD part of ITN will be substantial with so few names being allowed concurrently, listings will be changing there possibly many times per day. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:04, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- Holy crap! Dozens of articles being improved to with high-quality well written text, and scrupulous high-quality referencing! Goodness, we don't want ANY of that around Wikipedia. We must stop this scourge! --Jayron32 10:32, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- You missed the point again. I didn't say it was a bad thing, I just asked how it would be managed. And whether it would serve the RD ticker well to be turned over many times a day. But I sense you're now deliberately talking past me, so I'll give up trying. The Rambling Man (talk) 10:41, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- My point is that we shouldn't be inventing problems out of whole cloth, and then using those imagined problems as a reason to oppose an otherwise good idea. Instead, lets first see if there is a problem, and then deal with it. Let's actually, you know, enact the idea, and then when it generates a flood of high quality articles for us to assess, we'll see if the current structure for doing so needs tweaking. But to anticipate the flood of high quality articles, and then use that as a reason to oppose the good idea, seems unwise. --Jayron32 12:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- And my point is, who's opposing this? Just wind it in a little bit and try to be constructive. The Rambling Man (talk) 12:10, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- My point is that we shouldn't be inventing problems out of whole cloth, and then using those imagined problems as a reason to oppose an otherwise good idea. Instead, lets first see if there is a problem, and then deal with it. Let's actually, you know, enact the idea, and then when it generates a flood of high quality articles for us to assess, we'll see if the current structure for doing so needs tweaking. But to anticipate the flood of high quality articles, and then use that as a reason to oppose the good idea, seems unwise. --Jayron32 12:05, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- You missed the point again. I didn't say it was a bad thing, I just asked how it would be managed. And whether it would serve the RD ticker well to be turned over many times a day. But I sense you're now deliberately talking past me, so I'll give up trying. The Rambling Man (talk) 10:41, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- Holy crap! Dozens of articles being improved to with high-quality well written text, and scrupulous high-quality referencing! Goodness, we don't want ANY of that around Wikipedia. We must stop this scourge! --Jayron32 10:32, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- Whether or not the articles are in a suitable condition is not relevant to the point I'm making. If we encourage the concept that the existence of an article passes the notability bar, then there's nothing stopping every single article being nominated, and why not? If they then get more exposure, more improvements will occur. The obvious conclusion being that we will have a serious flood of nominations at ITN, possibly a dozen per day if Deaths in March 2016 is anything to go by. The other corollary is that if, indeed, some of this many nominations per day are brought up to snuff, the throughput at the RD part of ITN will be substantial with so few names being allowed concurrently, listings will be changing there possibly many times per day. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:04, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well, it's pretty obvious. Right now, most people wouldn't nominate old footballers who won nothing (60 or so, per month, I'd be happy to nom them all) or local politicians or actors from Filipino television shows, but this proposal would suggest that they would all be considered equally, article quality being the only hurdle (but god knows we have a serious lack of editors who understand that...) hence we'd be flooded with nominations. Perhaps not immediately, but certainly in time. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:45, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well, someone still has to a) notice and b) care enough to nominate them. That's still our gatekeeper. I'm not sure how this proposal changes that. --Jayron32 20:25, 13 April 2016 (UTC)
I apologize; glossed over the 'DC' part. 331dot (talk) 09:57, 14 April 2016 (UTC) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
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Is two supports a consensus? Thanks for the feedback, this one looks like it's toast. --166.177.185.61 (talk) 17:21, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I don't think two is consensus, but I still think this has legs. Worth keeping it going for a bit, perhaps encouraging regular editors like 331dot, Masem, WaltCip, Mjroots, Thryduulf, Muboshgu, Zanhe, Mamyles, BabbaQ, Nergaal, Stephen, David Levy, Smurrayinchester, Fuebaey etc to comment. The Rambling Man (talk) 17:30, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- The idea here is to post everybody who dies who has an article of decent quality? That'd open this up to a lot of postings. See Deaths in 2016; some days have upwards of 15 entries. Not all have postable articles, but I can imagine the churn. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:40, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose. Keeping in mind that importance is one factor, quality is another, and for that reason, just saying anyone that show's notable is going to be a headache for finding the quality needed on the front page. When we review by importance, that should hopefully lend itself to an availability of sources that can improve the article for front page posting; a notable but "non-important" person is not going to have that same type of sourcing capability and will lead into problems. --MASEM (t) 17:46, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- A bizarre position to adopt. Assessing quality is easy, and that's what admins do. Assessing notability is much more complex and contrived. If an RD is up to scratch on quality, it gets posted. That's really simple and there's no problem with any "headaches" or "availability of sources" or "sourcing capability". All this proposal is saying is that "if the article is quality enough, it gets posted". That by its nature includes good sourcing. What's the problem with that? The Rambling Man (talk) 20:40, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Support - The general idea is good. If a person that has an article (i.e a Wikinotable person) dies, then I see no good reason that they shouldn't be posted at RD, subject to the usual rules. That means no stubs get posted, no articles with serious issues get posted (except in very exceptional circumstances). It may be worth creating a separate discussion page for RD nominations to keep ITN/C clear of clutter. Call it WP:RD/C if you like. Also, it may be worth listing more RDs at a time, say ten or a dozen. As it's only names we are linking, doing so won't stretch the page by more than a few lines. Mjroots (talk) 18:03, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose of the 5M articles on wikipedia I say maybe around 50k are BLP. Assuming that half of them die in the next 50 years, that means 2 BLP become RD every single day. Even if 1 in 2 us good enough quality, I still think 1 RD per day is too much. Nergaal (talk) 18:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I think you're a factor of 10 off - {{BLP}} is transcripted over 750,000 times...making your argument even stronger.--MASEM (t) 20:12, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Just a quick question, why is two high quality and updated articles per day at RD "too much"? DYK gets through 16 mediocre articles per day. Complaining about a high throughput of quality of quality articles seems bizarre. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:37, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- We actually probably review (not necessarily post) an average of 1-2 RDs a day presently, though this is only a wild gut feeling guess; we probably could easily handle 3-4 assuming only 50% are accepted for quality and/or importance for posting. However, a big difference on DYK vs ITN is that DYK only takes effectively two people to promote after the nomination (the hook reviewer and an admin check), while ITN requires a larger consensus. We'd have to adjust how we handle RDs if we really want to push them out at the same rate as DYK, bringing it down to a similar two-man check for inclusion. --MASEM (t) 22:03, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- No, I think creating a problem (i.e. too many nominations to review) is a nonsense starting point. It's a good thing to have nominations, and certainly a great thing if people realise that items will be posted as long as they are up to scratch. The only reason we "review" an average of 1-2 is because that's how many are nominated. It's easy to review such things, we could easily handle a significant increase. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:39, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
- We actually probably review (not necessarily post) an average of 1-2 RDs a day presently, though this is only a wild gut feeling guess; we probably could easily handle 3-4 assuming only 50% are accepted for quality and/or importance for posting. However, a big difference on DYK vs ITN is that DYK only takes effectively two people to promote after the nomination (the hook reviewer and an admin check), while ITN requires a larger consensus. We'd have to adjust how we handle RDs if we really want to push them out at the same rate as DYK, bringing it down to a similar two-man check for inclusion. --MASEM (t) 22:03, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Nolo contendere - We may as well try it, find out what the end result is. If it fails then we can get rid of it. If it's a success then we can keep it.--WaltCip (talk) 19:45, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Nolo as well. I think I'd need to see this in practice to decide if I think it's a good idea, so I have no problem with trying it. I would only suggest that nominations still need to be shown to be in the news. 331dot (talk) 21:28, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
Doris Roberts
Is there any chance of reopening that RD discussion for Doris Roberts? I'm surprised at how easily people dismissed 5 Emmy Awards. If Marcia Wallace could make the cut, I think Roberts merits more consideration.
I saw the Roberts article last night, and it wasn't perfect, but the problems didn't seem that difficult to fix. And at least a few people opposing the article said they'd support pending article improvements. Zagalejo^^^ 02:49, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I don't really see the point,. Besides the nom, there was one support and nine opposes, most of which were not quality based so no matter what is done to article the vast majority is in opposition to its posting. It was a good close. The Rambling Man (talk) 06:25, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I never engaged myself at this page, but it is said that an actor must be "widely regarded as a very important figure in his or her field". The problem is that the field of acting is very big, while the field of a freeride snowboarder (Estelle Balet) or a tropical storm scientist (William M. Gray) is small. Not that they aren't important and shouldn't get at the Main Page, but they are rather unknown to the general public while famous actors like Doris Roberts or Abe Vigoda don't meet the RD criteria - they are supporting actors, but well-known because of their long careers. That Doris Roberts isn't at the Main Page (while an important but unknown freeride snowboarder appears there) surely irritates a lot of readers. In my opinion, it should also be considered how big a field is. --Clibenfoart (talk) 08:16, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- If we define her field more narrowly as "TV actresses", then I'd argue that she was at the top of her field. Honestly, I don't usually care that much about RD, but in light of some of the more obscure names that have been there lately, Roberts seems like a glaring omission. Zagalejo^^^ 13:14, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well not according to a strong consensus at ITNC. The Rambling Man (talk) 13:18, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I feel like we have a tendency to post too many actors, which is probably a bias of our own for better knowing familiar faces from TV and film than people in climate science and other fields. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:30, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Particularly American television actors who, through our systemic bias, are more "popular" and many people erroneously equate "popular" with "notable". The Rambling Man (talk) 20:41, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Well not according to a strong consensus at ITNC. The Rambling Man (talk) 13:18, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- If we define her field more narrowly as "TV actresses", then I'd argue that she was at the top of her field. Honestly, I don't usually care that much about RD, but in light of some of the more obscure names that have been there lately, Roberts seems like a glaring omission. Zagalejo^^^ 13:14, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- I never engaged myself at this page, but it is said that an actor must be "widely regarded as a very important figure in his or her field". The problem is that the field of acting is very big, while the field of a freeride snowboarder (Estelle Balet) or a tropical storm scientist (William M. Gray) is small. Not that they aren't important and shouldn't get at the Main Page, but they are rather unknown to the general public while famous actors like Doris Roberts or Abe Vigoda don't meet the RD criteria - they are supporting actors, but well-known because of their long careers. That Doris Roberts isn't at the Main Page (while an important but unknown freeride snowboarder appears there) surely irritates a lot of readers. In my opinion, it should also be considered how big a field is. --Clibenfoart (talk) 08:16, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
Add what an individual was known for to recent deaths
The recent deaths section is currently not very enlightening - it just consists of names that may be totally unknown to readers. Unless they click, they won't learn who these people are. Plus, we have more space than we used to - the main page is now optimized for widescreen display. Therefore to help readers understand who these people are, I suggest we add a short description (just a word or two) of what made each person famous. So for the template we currently have:
In the news |
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we would instead go for:
In the news |
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What do we think? Smurrayinchester 15:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Not enough people use widescreen monitors with sufficient resolutions for this to take. It might also not be a good look for people of dubious fame. For instance, do we post "Bernie Madoff (fraudster)" or "Bernie Madoff (financier)"?--WaltCip (talk) 16:51, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Agree. Suggestion is valid, but it'll burn a lot of screen real estate. WP needs to seriously improve look and feel but that's outside the scope here. --166.177.185.61 (talk) 17:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
- Part of the role of ITN and RD is to highlight articles for people to read; if someone sees a name on RD, most people (I think) will either 1) know who it is and what they do or 2) not know who it is or what they do, but be curious enough to click to at least glance the lead of the article and find out. That's what we want to happen. I'm not sure how much information we should be giving away on the MP with regards to RD's. 331dot (talk) 22:18, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
-
- But what is there to be interested about when all you can see is the name? Some are interesting (Joseph Medicine Crow got me to click recently) but for the most part, it's just a random selection of names. I don't know how many people were so intrigued by the name "Bill Gray" that they clicked through, for instance. Smurrayinchester 07:52, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose we don't have the real estate (or else why was there so much debate over if we could just about squeeze a fourth name on there?) The Rambling Man (talk) 08:45, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose Per TRM. Insufficient space, and the information is one click away in the first sentence of the article. SpencerT♦C 20:51, 21 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose, the idea is to showcase quality content for recent deaths that are in the news. The point is to click and see a well rounded article on their life and acheivements. Stephen 08:35, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- Oppose Others have said it well 1) Real estate is already at a premium 2) Unlike print sources, blue links exist for people to learn more if they need to. --Jayron32 13:06, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- <possible irrelevancy warning> Regarding your second reason (I agree with both), assuming he had made it through the ITN/C selection, how would Michael Jackson (writer)'s death in 2007 have been posted? Just using his name (with the correct link of course)? ---Sluzzelin talk 13:21, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- Probably just like "Michael Jackson" since the "other" one had died previously. I could argue that if we come to a case where the RD of an important person with the exact same name as another, much more household-name person who is very much still alive, that we might look to find a way to qualify the difference to avoid a front page panic, but I've yet to see that situation come up. --MASEM (t) 14:46, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- It has happened. We can't control when people get confused by similarly named people. This is a problem outside of Wikipedia, and not something we have the capacity to remedy for the world at large. Consider when George Martin died; the world was pissed they wouldn't get their next Song of Ice and Fire installment. Not recognizing that he wasn't George R. R. Martin. This has nothing to do with us, really. --Jayron32 15:53, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- Probably just like "Michael Jackson" since the "other" one had died previously. I could argue that if we come to a case where the RD of an important person with the exact same name as another, much more household-name person who is very much still alive, that we might look to find a way to qualify the difference to avoid a front page panic, but I've yet to see that situation come up. --MASEM (t) 14:46, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- <possible irrelevancy warning> Regarding your second reason (I agree with both), assuming he had made it through the ITN/C selection, how would Michael Jackson (writer)'s death in 2007 have been posted? Just using his name (with the correct link of course)? ---Sluzzelin talk 13:21, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
- Support I agree, it's just a random set of names, especially for readers from outside the English-speaking world (as most RDs are from English-speaking countries). If lack of space is a concern, maybe use smaller font for the description: Lonnie Mack (musician) • Estelle Balet (snowboarder). 117.221.121.14 (talk) 03:42, 23 April 2016 (UTC)