Talk:Real world deaths

question

What is the criteria for being 'major' (and thus emboldening the name)? Obviously playing a doctor or companion counts, but where is the line past that? Sheridan ☎ 10:57, May 7, 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. Though it's taken a few years to see this comment, that's a valid, and essentially unanswerable, concern. Truth is, the issue is even bigger than "Which names get emboldened?" It's, "Which names get on the list?" Either you list them all -- which is a technically challenging task -- or you don't make the attempt. The list was heavily biased towards television, which goes against one of the wiki's basic precepts. It simply wasn't -- and couldn't be -- media-neutral.

After all, how much do we really know about the deaths of comics inkers, short story writers, lighting technicians, production secretaries, audio engineers, stunt performers, print editors, or any one of hundreds of jobs done in service to the DWU? And how much are we going to know about these sorts of workers in the future?

Probably not very much. And even if we, through some miracle, able to get this level of detail, the list would be so very long that it would start to exhibit loading issues, particularly on phones. And, of course, it would be so long that it would be of increasingly little use: who'd want to scroll through it all?

But even if all that weren't true, the even broader problem with this article is that it was inadequately referenced. Only one entry had a specific reference, and that was to the Doctor Who Guide. Meanwhile, the lead paragraph stated that a principle source was IMDb. Both of these reference works are disallowed under T:RW SRC.

Consequently, the article had to go.

This also applies to its sister article, real world birthdays, where the problems of completely listing people are even greater, as there've been more births than deaths at this point in the history of DWU productions. Also, that article had problems surviving because of the implication of this forum thread.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:37: Sun 07 Aug 2016

Is there some way we could resolve these issues and not lose the information? This change makes the wiki a generally less-informative and less-useful place, and it feels like it's being done for the sake of conforming to the bureaucratic rules. The rules should support the usefulness of the wiki, not compromise it. Gwythinn ☎ 03:51, August 9, 2016 (UTC)

I used to frequently update the Real World birthdays and death pages and it's a bit of a pity that they're gone after all these years (even if the latter is a bit morbid). Any chance they could come back? Axonite

The pages for individual years still list people's birth and death dates so it's not like the information is gone entirely. MystExplorer ☎ 18:48, August 9, 2016 (UTC)

It's unfair to characterise the deletion as "being done for the sake of conforming to the bureaucratic rules". There are genuine technical concerns with having such pages on this wiki, due to the age of the franchise. These pages go on forever. And such very long pages can cost a lot if you're downloading them to your phone on a crappy, data-limited plan. If all you're trying to figure out is who's born today, it makes much more sense to go to 9 August (people) than to scan through a massive list. Imagine you wanted to see who was born on Christmas! You're gonna be scrolling a long time, as opposed to just going to 25 December (people).

That's a big reason we added Category:Days of birth and death. We've been planning to delete these two pages since we switched over to a more daily approach back in 2013.

Also the fact that this page explicitly said it was relying on IMDb was a clear problem. IMDb is often, yanno, wrong. It's not "bureaucratic" to follow the clearly applicable rule. It's reasonable. It's taking a stand for the accuracy of information. Surely that's the principal mission of an encyclopaedia.

I have no illusions about the fact that even the daily approach contains information from these now-deleted pages. Ideally, we're going to have to reference-check every person on every day. And when we can't find confirmation of the reference, we have an obligation to delete that person as having an unconfirmable birth and/or death. In some cases, it may mean we remove then from a specific day page, and put them on a year page, if we can confirm that.

But whatever the case, we've been trying to improve the accuracy of our birth/death information on this wiki since the last decade. This latest deletion is simply the next step in that evolution.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:30: Wed 10 Aug 2016