Talk:Friday the 13th

Edit request on 14 September 2013

Friday is also the day when Jesus Christ was crucified, according to the Gospels,[citation needed] making it through folklore and adding to its unpopularity. [citation needed] should be replaced with this: and Chapter 13 in the Gospel of John is where the last supper is written in scripture as the event at which Jesus predicts Judas' betrayal, Autisticrev (talk) 04:42, 14 September 2013 (UTC)Jonathan D. ParksAutisticrev (talk) 04:42, 14 September 2013 (UTC) Autisticrev (talk) 04:42, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Not done: You need to find a reliable source which makes the connection between the last supper and Friday the 13th. Celestra (talk) 17:05, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Notable people born on Friday 13th

I have removed this section from the main page, because although four of these seven have WP pages which give their birth dates, I can't figure out who the other three people are. I have however wikified the list, so here it is for posterity.

Person	Date of Birth
Christopher Plummer	13 December 1929
Max Weinberg	13 April 1951
Anna Pope	13 August 19??
Sholto Rock	13 July 2007
Doc Rivers	13 October 1961
William Pitman	13 June 19??
Nate Silver	13 January 1978

Nick Levine (talk) 10:41, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I strongly agree Nick, having had a a quick scan through other date pages I estimate that there are at least 200 people who could be included in the list. What is the point! The whole concept of Friday 13th requires little more space than Rabbit rabbit rabbit or Spilling salt. This article has attracted an accretion of almost irrelevant nonsense and stuff based on false logic. The more flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the shores of the article the more important it seems. Richard Avery (talk) 12:27, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

And now we have another list, this time of people who died on Fri.13. It seems to be a very short list! So I guess not many "well known" people have died on F13. So not such an unlucky day. I will remove this pointless table shortly unless anyone can make a reasoned and convincing case to keep it. Richard Avery (talk) 12:51, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

My back-of-envelope calculation is that any random birthday, or any date, really, has about a 0.005 (i.e. $\textstyle {\frac {1}{2}}$%) chance of falling on a Friday the 13th. While that number looks small at first glance, a quick gander at Category:Living people tells us that Wikipedia currently has 650,127 BLP articles; so a list of those born on Friday the 13th would be more than 3000 names long. (Nitpick; sure, maybe we don't have birth dates for, say, half those people, so, okay, maybe only 1500 names long. But counterbalancing that, the 650,127 figure counts only living people. There are probably at least as many notable dead people as living people, so it's probably a wash.)

The list is presumably comparably long in determining those who died on a Friday the 13th.

Obviously adding two lists of 3000 names each here is not an improvement to the article. If someone really thinks that indicating whether someone was born (or died) on a Friday the 13th is really worthwhile, look into creating a category, i.e. category:People born on a Friday the Thirteenth and/or category:People who died on a Friday the Thirteenth, and tag the articles where you think that's worthwhile. But please, let's not clutter this article. TJRC (talk) 23:15, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Well said. At the same time and for the same general reason there should be a list of "People Who Died Within 3 months of Walking under a Ladder" or "People who Died after their Path was Crossed by a Black Cat". What is the point? Richard Avery (talk) 13:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Uh-oh, now you've done it. See Black cat (superstition)#Notable deaths. TJRC (talk) 18:30, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

It's only borrowed, Some time, some day ;-)) Richard Avery (talk) 22:16, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Notable people who died on Friday the 13th

For substantially the same reasons as set out in #Notable people born on Friday 13th, above, I'm cutting the section "Notable people who died on Friday the 13th". As noted above, any given death has a 0.005% chance of occurring on Friday the 13th, and given the massive number of biographical articles of dead people on Wikipedia, you'd have a list potentially thousands of names long. TJRC (talk) 21:55, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Auto-archiving?

52 (53, now) subjects on this page, going back 7 years. The page was last culled, manually, in 2007. Any objection to me turning on auto-archiving? TJRC (talk) 22:05, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

No objections in over a week, so I'm turning on archiving. TJRC (talk) 20:53, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Contradiction!

In the history section, the following two sentences appear:

• "According to folklorists, there is no written evidence for a "Friday the 13th" superstition before the 19th century."
• "Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales, and many other professions have regarded Friday as an unlucky day to undertake journeys or begin new projects."

These appear to be contradictions to me.

~QuasiAbstract {talk/contrib} 13:25, 11 June 2014 (UTC)