The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
Firstly, I apologise for renominating this so quickly after a "Keep" decision. While I acknowledge it is somewhat irregular, I believe that events subsequent to the previous closure justify getting the community to take a second look at this one. I have proposed this course of action on the article talk page and after ten days there were no objections. There have been two deletions of very similar articles as "Delete" in the past few days:
Both of these articles had the same sort of problem that this one does; namely that
WP:LISTN requires that "a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources". There are no sources that discuss long-lived Governors (as distinct from long-serving or aged Governors like
Strom Thurmond), and this list seems to have been compiled mainly as an exercise in
original research.
Delete. I can source the
first and
second longest-lived governors, but beyond that, I don't think reliable sources really care. It's easy enough to source individual birth and death dates, but to say that we should sort these people in descending order in a list would require coverage of the topic itself. I don't really see that. If someone can point out of news story about the top ten longest-lived governors, I would consider that a good start on evidence of notability.
NinjaRobotPirate (
talk)
13:07, 27 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Keep - As I stated on the previous AfDs, this is not the strongest of list topics for cross categorizing, but not enough for deleting. Every entry can be referenced to a bio page and the ages are compiled from such. OR doesn't apply to this list in my opinion. While there might not be other known lists out there that mirror this one to back it up, there is clearly defined criteria for inclusion with no ambiguity. It's a list of people that are obviously notable and factoring in longevity which is at least arguably notable as well. I see no strongly compelling reason to delete this.
RoadView (
talk)
13:59, 27 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete. I continue to believe that this is not an encyclopedic topic. There's no evidence that the longevity of governors is a notable topic (per reliable sources), and the rankings can only be verified by exhaustively examining biographies of every historical governor, which is essentially original research. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.
Pburka (
talk)
15:44, 27 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete This is an indiscriminate collection of information. No reliable and independent sources have been presented which have seen fit to discuss how long governors live, or who are the 100 longest living. A bit of
WP:SYNTH and not at all a suitable topic for a list.
Edison (
talk)
19:40, 27 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete As I noted before, this isn't so much a list of the oldest governor but a list of the oldest people who happened to have been a US state governor. It has no relationship to their length of term of anything else. First, it is OR and
WP:SYNTH because no one has a source that says that Rosellini is the longest living US governor; while it can be considered
basic math but stating that he's number one (even if the facts for his birth and death dates and for everyone else can be sourced) is still merging a bunch of other material together to make a claim that no reliable secondary source ever states explicitly. To me, this is just a minute subset of a potential list of the oldest people who were US politicians from which we can further separate or expand forever but it's still ultimately not a discriminate list. It's basically trivia with things like
Charles Poletti who served as Governor of New York for 29 days in December 1942 is the seventh oldest person ever who was a United State Governor. --
Ricky81682 (
talk)
20:08, 27 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete. This is not a list of the oldest people to serve as governors; it's a list of the people who served as governors at perfectly normal and reasonable and unremarkable ages earlier in their lifetime, and then merely happened to also go on to achieve some arbitrary marker of life longevity years after their terms as governors had ended. That's
WP:TRIVIA, not an actual notable thing. Plus if you have to compile the list by personally going through all the state governors to figure out what age they lived to be, because other sources haven't already ranked them on that basis for you, then it's
original research.
Bearcat (
talk)
21:29, 28 January 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete. basically as Bearcat explains it, though I don't think comparing the lifespan of different people is OR. One of the reasons it isn't ORE is because it's utterly trivial. We could just as reasonably have a list of the ones who died at the earliest ages, or died outside their home states, or any other trivia of the sort. I consider the previous keep an anomaly by our current standards DGG (
talk )
07:09, 3 February 2016 (UTC)reply
Keep -- I do not think this is mere indiscriminate information. However, it will need regular maintenance. I suspect this will be facilitated by separating the living from the dead in separate sections. The number of days of life a living governor has attained will change every day. Is that being automatically updated? If not, the living governors list should merely list their dates of birth. They can then be slotted into the other list on death. Whether people like
Charles Poletti, who held office very briefly should appear is a matter for Americans to decide; not me. I have no issue over sources, as all have a bio-article with a date. It may be useful to have a date stamp in the text, so that we can know how obsolete the listing of living governors has become. The present cut off seems to be age 91. We might allow expansion down to 90. I do not regard limiting the list to 100 with an addendum to be useful.
Peterkingiron (
talk)
12:18, 3 February 2016 (UTC)~reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.