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)