The result was keep. JForget 22:53, 3 August 2009 (UTC) reply
Contested PROD. My argument here is similar to the one I made for Frederick L. Frazier a year and a half ago. While I respect the fact that being the world's oldest man is now a very notable position that attracts more than sufficient coverage to pass WP:N, this was not the case in the 1970s. A Google search as well as a Google news archive search does not reveal any substantial coverage of or information on the subject of the article except for the news article cited by this article and a plethora of sites/lists that discuss his ranking amongst in history among the world's oldest people - aside from that one article, however, I have not seen evidence of any non-trivial coverage. Thus it has little potential for expansion and contains no information aside from what is present in the various supercentenarian lists. My basic problem with this article is that there is little, if any, information out there that could be added to this article aside from what is already present on these lists. For those worried that the Google test is not sufficient, I performed searches at both the University of Texas Libraries Catalog (which covers several voluminous libraries) and jstor.org (which covers journal articles back to the 1800s) with no results; while I realize that these searches might not be entirely appropriate or relevant to the individual at hand, it does eliminate the idea that he is an individual of significant academic interest. I acknowledge that it might be more appropriate to merege/redirect him to List of British supercentenarians or something like that, but an attempted merge/redirect in the past was rejected. I would still support either of those ideas, however, if that were to be the consensus.
Simply put: this individual lacks multiple, non-trivial references in reliable publications to establish notability; his status as world's oldest man at one point does not confer automatic notability nor do 1000 mirrors of his ranking amongst the world's oldest people Cheers, CP 00:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC) reply
Comment Well, here'sa 1964 article on him in the Tucson Daily Citizen, and here's a 2008 mention in the Yorkshire Evening Post, which indicates more coverage there in 1974, and there is the Times obit in the article. John Z ( talk) 02:52, 28 July 2009 (UTC) reply
Another untenable suggestion is the one that someone who was historically the world's oldest man is somehow less notable than the world's oldest man now. If something was ever notable, then it's notable forever. Wikipedia contains, and should contain, material on all sorts of subjects of purely historical interest.
Finally, the idea that the article is not sourceable and/or not expandable doesn't survive scrutiny either. The records from Butterfield's lifetime will be on paper rather than online, but that doesn't mean they do not exist; there will be parish records, birth/death/marriage certificates, obituaries and so forth.— S Marshall Talk/ Cont 14:25, 28 July 2009 (UTC) reply
When it comes to cases like Frederick Frazier, with no content other than the statistics, I can understand merging into the national lists. But here we have a little more to go on than just a name and age. Ryoung122 03:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC) reply