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Talk:List of deaths due to COVID-19

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 1IfYouSaySo (talk | contribs) at 14:09, 29 August 2021. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

In the news Article milestones
DateProcessResult
March 28, 2020Articles for deletionKept
March 30, 2020Articles for deletionSpeedily kept
November 28, 2020Articles for deletionKept
In the news A news item involving this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "In the news" column on March 29, 2020.

Merger proposal

I propose merging List of COVID-19 deaths in South Africa into List of deaths due to COVID-19. To my knowledge, no other nation has a similar article, and the content is entirely duplicative. AllegedlyHuman (talk) 19:40, 19 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose This page is too large as it is. The merge would increase the page size to almost 500K bytes. Blubabluba9990 (talk) (contribs) 17:53, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Due to this page's scope, the content should be here already. There are 69 deaths in South Africa currently recorded here. AllegedlyHuman (talk) 22:57, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I find the List of COVID-19 deaths in South Africa article more usable. It is not possible to sort the large list by date and country, for example, to find a lists of deaths in a country by order. This is due to the large list not having a consistent country column. It has a place of death column, with values like "South Africa", "South Africa (Cape Town)", which prevents proper sorting. The country article also provides an easy link to follow from the country pandemic page (I don't think it is possible to link to a pre-sorted version of the table, and it would probably involve lots of scrolling as well). The former could at least be solved by restructuring the data on the large page. Greenman (talk) 09:58, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Given that it would make no difference here, this is essentially just a delete discussion for List of COVID-19 deaths in South Africa. I am rather surprised to hear that SA is the only country to have a list of notable persons' covid deaths. I should have thought that there would be plenty of interest in such articles for many countries, and that that would be a very appropriate content fork. Kevin McE (talk) 17:50, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Someone got bold and decided to do something about the unsuccessful split discussions. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 18:12, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, I think it would allow us to split the article into deaths per country. So I think it should stay the way it is and we can split the article by continent or by individual countries. Blubabluba9990 (talk) (contribs) 00:16, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support we should have one list. Splitting by country ignores the fact that people sometimes die in countries where they are only incidentally. If the list has become just plain too long, we should consider deleting it on the grounds this is not a defining enough thing to list.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:15, 2 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It would be very irresponsible to do that without first establishing a consensus for a split, which has been sought but not found consensus a number of times. Kevin McE (talk) 15:32, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We wouldn't have to, but anyone could. Is that a bad thing? Kevin McE (talk) 17:26, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support it makes sense for the list of notable death due to covid 19 to all be in one article so why is south africa's list of notable covid 19 deaths any different and why does it get it own article? Either merge the two articles or give each country's list of notable deaths due to covid 19 the same treatment as the list of notable deaths due to covid 19 in south africa is getting. Thecornerwiki (talk) 07:55, 8 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If this page is voted to stay up, it should follow this format for easier accessibility.

Year/Country/Name/Date

The current set up isn't appropriate. 2dmaxo (talk) 00:46, 21 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Year should be separate articles if it's like that since it would not make sense for year column and date column to have other columns in between, especially given that the pandemic could last a few years. Johnny Au (talk/contributions) 01:02, 22 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

how many of these notable people had wiki articles made after their death?

from what i can tell, more than half of the people on this list weren't notable until they were reported as a covid death. and some were not even reported as covid deaths. this list is obviously very contrived and corrupted and the fact that my mentioning this was previously deleted only helps confirm that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mbsyl (talk • contribs)

Notability is a feature of the topics, not of fact of the existence of an article. There are millions of notable topics that we don't yet have articles about. – Uanfala (talk) 15:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You may be surprised by the number of notable people that only get an article shortly after their death, whatever the cause. It's a natural consequence of the death of notable people usually resulting in a burst of media coverage, and therefore attention on Wikipedia. Greenman (talk) 12:20, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

References?

This article originally contained references for each list entry. This was a good thing (given the guidelines at WP:LISTVERIFY). However, at one point in November last year, the page exceeded the template size limit, which meant that some of the content couldn't be displayed any more. Because most of that was coming from the references, it was decided (see archives) to remove them. This solved the problem and allowed the list to continue to be fully displayed even now, when it's more than double the number of entries.

However, one editor has insisted that this list must have references. I don't see how that can – or should – happen. The fundamental policy of verifiability is already met, as each entry is for an existing article, and that article will have a sourced claim that the subject died of Covid. What is being violated here is LISTVERIFY: a guideline-level style preferences for having those sources also present in the list article. Ideally, we should strive to stick to the guidelines, but a defining feature of guidelines (as opposed to policies) is that they allow for common-sense exceptions. This list here is a clear case for such an exception, as following that guideline is not even technically possible. Any thoughts anyone? – Uanfala (talk) 10:35, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone thought of splitting the list...? Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 06:47, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, they have, but no, it's not likely to happen. – Uanfala (talk) 11:11, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Unless a consensus can be reached on how the list should be split, this is going to be a persistent issue. There might be a way to get around it by invoking citation templates, but I'm not sure how much the software can take if that's done for every single one. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 18:22, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The template argument size isn't the only parameter that will exceed the limits if we brought back citations. There's also "Lua time usage", whose limit we will almost certainly go over even if we bypass the templates and invoke the module directly, and the "Post-expand include size" limit, which we'll probably hit if we had any sort of citations with links, even if they're manually formatted one without any templates or modules. – Uanfala (talk) 12:50, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Table

This table would better serve the Wikipedia public by being arranged by names in alphabetical order.

The reason is that none would readily have in mind a date of death for the deceased, but rather, the deceased name in mind.

2dmaxo (talk) 00:43, 21 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The table is sortable, so the public can sort the entries by any column heading just by clicking on it. Also, I doubt readers would come here looking for a specific person to find out whether they died of Covid or when they died: they won't need to come here and search, they'd just go to that person's article, no? – Uanfala (talk) 00:56, 22 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Disproportionate detail for politicians

For most entries on the list, the details of their notability are presented concisely:Writer, footballer, historian, guitarist etc. But for politicians, we have a list and dates of their incumbencies in several roles. Why the discrepancies? Should the politicians be pared back, or are we to encourage proportionate details for other roles? Kevin McE (talk) 08:23, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I agree that this detail is unnecessary. All the more so because these details will typically contain several wikilinks, and wikilinks contribute disproportionately to the ultimate size of the rendered webpage, which is pretty big even without them. – Uanfala (talk) 12:41, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A further consideration is size: this page is among the longest pages on Wikipedia, it's only going to grow and there's not much chance it's going to get split. We're sill some way off from exceeding the size limit, but at 1.3 MB, the page is still pretty big, to the point of being inconveniencing for many readers. Trimming the unusually long descriptions of politicians will help, and so would the removal of links (in descriptions or elsewhere), as these take up quite a bit of space in the html. – Uanfala (talk) 21:48, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I would encourage proportionate details for other roles: writers (what books did they write), NFL footballers (team played for), actor (main films they starred in) - as long as there is a wikipedia article of said film, book etc. I don't think we should remove important information from list regarding politicians at all, no one else has ever recommended that, as putting just "politician" is wrong as there are so many different politicians in the list holding different roles: President, Prime Minister, Minister etc. You can't put politician for both a President of a country and a local Assemblyman as they aren't the same. There's a reason people have put all the political information in over the last nearly 2 years - because it's interesting. So we should leave it and expand others if needs be. 1IfYouSaySo (talk) 13:35, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Adding similar level of detail to the other entries is an option, in principle. But in practice, this will affect the size in a bad way, and it's also easier to change the politicians to match the rest of the list than to change the rest of the list to match the politicians. Maybe the label "politician" is too broad – but there is a similar range of accomplishment for the other occupations and we don't seem to try making those sort of distinctions: a musician may be barely notable, or they may be a Grammy winner and a household name, but we describe both as just "musician". Still, I won't be opposed if added a little detail: if the politician was at some point a president or an MP in a top-level assembly, then that may be mentioned briefly. – Uanfala (talk) 13:46, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think adding more detail would be very good, such as Grammy winner as it's an interesting fact and I imagine readers would like to see it. I know you commented on length of the article and its size but I imagine the average wikipedia reader wouldn't mind since it's sortable and you can find info quite quickly within the article. Overall I think the article should be left as it, especially when it comes to politicians as that is their occupation or job and its why they are notable and it's how it seems to have been for nearly 2 years without complaint. I would definitely support you if you wanted to put (Grammy Award 1968) next to certain musicians, (Gold medallist 2004) next Olympic athletes, (New England Patriots) next to American footballers etc as it gives them the distinctions you mentioned above. 1IfYouSaySo (talk) 14:08, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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