Talk:List of prime ministers of the United Kingdom by age

'Oldest living prime ministers of the United Kingdom' section confusing

This section is unclear and confusing to the casual reader or student. I initially thought it was complete vandalism. For example Margaret Thatcher was not prime minister from 2005-2013, that was 1979-1990 when she was aged 54-65; Further, the text implies that Edward Heath became prime minister on the death of James Callaghan. On a third reading I think I understand what it's attempting to present, nonetheless it's unclear, any student could easily be misled by it. The section needs at the very least an explanatory line of text, with the table column headers being perhaps the major cause of confusion here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edrandall (talk • contribs) 06:43, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Copyright problem

List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom by age looks like a copy of this site http://www.cyclopaedia.nl/wiki/List_of_United_States_Vice-Presidents_by_Longevity. CSBot was reporting at 16:27, 30 July 2015 (UTC)- well today. Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

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• This part is: Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing - A BIT TOO CLOSE STILL :--"The first figure is the number of days between date of birth and date of death, allowing for leap days; in parentheses the same period given in years and days, with the years being the number of whole years the Vice President lived, and the days being the remaining number of days after his last birthday. Where the vice president in question is still living, the longevity is calculated up to April 18, 2014." -->

Check Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing Hafspajen (talk) 22:36, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

The above is mistaken, the link given is a mirror of a different Wikipedia article and only the text outlining the methodology of the calculations is copied. This text is pretty generic and it would be very hard to figure out where it originally came from (it's used on a large number of similar articles in addition to the one on vice-presidents). I think we can leave this. Hut 8.5 17:10, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Errors in table

There appears to be an error in the entries for Robert Walpole and the Earl of Wilmington in the table - when you try to sort by (e.g.) date of birth or age at appointment, these two lines do not sort properly and always come last. I'm afraid that my understanding of the template is insufficient to work out what the problem is and correct it.155.136.80.161 (talk) 12:27, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 12 December 2017

Can I Edit the longevity of the British Prime Ministers LAbs (talk) 09:51, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. Gulumeemee (talk) 10:23, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 September 2021

Please remove the link to Living prime ministers of the United Kingdom, as that page has been deleted. 2601:241:300:B610:51E:B39E:D560:D07 (talk) 22:19, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

 Done — IVORK _Talk 22:37, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

As of date

The first section of this list uses a template to claim that the list of living prime ministers is up to date as of whenever the reader loaded the page. This is clearly unknowable. If there's to be a date, it should reflect the last time someone verified and updated the list. That section is also completely unsourced. Technically, our claim that John Major is alive on 22 October 2021 is only supported by the absence of evidence to the contrary, which certainly doesn't satisfy our WP:V policy. (A quick Google News search didn't turn up evidence one way or the other.) If this section is to remain, we must at least be honest regarding the "as of" date and stop autogenerating it. pburka (talk) 22:02, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Agree, having an automatically updating date is effectivly like us saying "currently" (I would argue it is worse than us saying "currently") which should be avoided per WP:DATED. SSSB (talk) 09:54, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I've restored the fixed as-of date. pburka (talk) 19:35, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

An IP editor has updated this to November. We really ought to have a source to support this. Are there any sources we can point to, even primary sources, to support the claim that Major, Brown, Blair, May, Johnson, and Cameron are all alive today? Did they appear together at COP26, perhaps? Or is this original research? pburka (talk) 21:58, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I assume it was changed through original research (in the absence of news that they'd died - I daresay you could get away with justifing the inclusion of this OR by claiming WP:COMMONSENSE and WP:IAR) This page list all the UK Prime Ministers - and clicking on the biographies will tell you which are still alive. SSSB (talk) 08:53, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree it's original research, and, worse, it's about living people. We need positive evidence of life (rather than absence of evidence of death) to satisfy WP:V. Note that the link you provided doesn't say that Theresa May is currently alive: it simply doesn't list a death date. The government's approach of implying liveness by omitting death dates is, I think, more defensible than our positive assertion without supporting documentation. For example, here's evidence that Theresa May was alive as of 8 October 2021: Former Prime Minister, Theresa May, opens new Citizens Advice service in Berkshire. There are only a handful of living PMs, so it shouldn't be a great burden for editors to find references like this for each of them and update the as-of date to reflect the oldest one. pburka (talk) 16:35, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and added sources demonstrating that they were all active last month. There's no need to WP:IAR when we can abide by WP:V with a little bit of effort. pburka (talk) 20:56, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Table is excessively wide

[1]

This is absurd. Why must the table be made wider for some screens, solely because of an unsubstantiated claim that my browser has a problem. I have two browsers that display it the same way (Chrome and Edge), and the fact that I didn't insert most of the line breaks shows that others have the same concern. What's more, if your browser automatically breaks a long line, you don't lose by having it manually broken, but if it doesn't, you get a messed-up display. 122.150.71.249 (talk) 21:19, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

I suspect that the table was made "wider" by the presence of {{nowrap}}s which I didn't remove fully. Check again, if it's still a problem we can re-isert whilst we find out what the problem is. Because, without the presence of WP:LINEBREAKs and {{nowrap}}s your browser should line wrap the same on Wikipedia as it does on any other page, and now that I've removed the nowraps, the table should render narrower than ever. There's also a problem that the table will have a minimum width, each column can't be narrower than the longest word. This means that the table will never fit on a screen below a certain size. If (following my removal of nowraps) this is still an issue for you, we really need a screenshot to move forward. I checked all my browsers (including Chrome and Edge on default settings) and I don't see a problem, so the only conclusion is your browser is the problem, or we misunderstand each other.

"the fact that I didn't insert most of the line breaks shows that others have the same concern." - no, it doesn't. The line breaks were positioned in a "name, line break, title" format (e.g. "Spencer Compton, line break, 1st Earl of Wilmington"), with the names and titles {{nowrap}}ed. Now that Ive removed the nowraps, as well as the line breaks the table should render narrower than when we started this process. SSSB (talk) 22:14, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Can the table be sorted to meet its own expectations?

This table's initial sort is by date of first appointment, which can be confusing to anyone who navigates to this page without studying it carefully (at first glance, was Robert Walpole youngest or oldest?). I see from Help:Sorting that the procedure is to write the wikitext in the preferred initial order. That seems do-able, although a lot of labor or some careful programming. Isn't there any other way, such as, just spitballing, an onLoad event that pseudo-clicks the Age arrows? David Brooks (talk) 21:14, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Should be a split in the blue bar for Harold Wilsonnnnnnnnn — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.162.240.244 (talk) 13:51, 11 July 2023 (UTC)