Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of formerly unidentified decedents (2nd nomination)


 * 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.

The result was delete‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. Though there have been no comments since the relisting, I'm seeing a clear consensus here. The only argument to keep provided some sources, but these are convincingly rebutted as referring to subsets of this list, and therefore contributing to notability for the broader topic but not the spinoff list. Vanamonde93 (talk) 21:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

List of formerly unidentified decedents
AfDs for this article:


 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Fork of Unidentified decedent. Only page content, aside from list entries, is copied from Unidentified decedent. Would be better implemented as a category rather than WP:LISTCRUFT. jellyfish &#9993; 18:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists of people and Crime. jellyfish  &#9993; 18:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Also, from previous nominations - it still fails WP:NLIST, per 4meter4's reasoning here. jellyfish &#9993; 18:25, 27 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 21:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Delete per first AFD rationale. Also WP:SALT to prevent recreation. Fails WP:NLIST and WP:NOTDIRECTORY. This list is an original grouping that is never discussed collectively as a list in any sources; compiled through an original synthesis. This is essentially WP:LISTCRUFT. According to NAMUS's own statistics, law enforcement in the United States successfully identified 7,188 unidentified bodies in 2023 alone. That's just one nation. Being a formerly unidentified body is not unusual or encyclopedic.4meter4 (talk) 22:08, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * delete per above. I too can see having a category but as group they have little to do with one another. Mangoe (talk) 23:59, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
 * On further reflection, I think this just needs to go. The majority of these seem to be found murder victims, and after all unless someone is there at the time who survives to tell the tale, the general rule is that it takes time to identify a found body. How much time is enough to justify inclusion? Well, it's pretty arbitrary, so I'd say the membership criterion is vague. Mangoe (talk) 21:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Comment - I think it's also worth looking at Talk:Unidentified decedent, particularly "Why ruin the page?" and "Lists of formerly unidentified decedents". Perhaps some of the more notable cases could be merged into Unidentified decedent, with a note that they were identified in such and such year (ex. Joseph Henry Loveless, Murder of Elizabeth Roberts, or Murder of Joseph Augustus Zarelli). However, most of this could really just be a category. jellyfish &#9993; 01:06, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I strongly oppose any such list at the Unidentified decedents article. The very reasons for deletion are the same reasons why an in-article list are inappropriate. You could try a category but I suspect that too would end up at WP:CFD as a non-encyclopedic cross categorization.4meter4 (talk) 16:32, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Yep, you're right - category deleted at CfD. Jellyfish (mobile) (talk) 18:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Sadustu Tau (talk) 15:35, 28 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Keep. Granted so much news stories of decade-old decedents being identified drowns them out, but I did find three sources that discuss them as a group as WP:NLIST requires in one of its scenarios (or subsets at least: 1 is about unidentified indigenous people being identified with DNA; 2 is about forensic genealogy being used to identify murder victim bodies; and 3 is about unidentified 9/11 victims being identified). Overall, this passes WP:NLIST and is compliant with WP:NOTDIR and WP:NOR.
 * While I can't dispute NAMUS' statement of thousands being identified in the US annually, it doesn't account for how many of them are notable (in fact, there are only 42 American ones on the list, which composes all of history) or even had been unidentified for so long, and if anything, it (and to a lesser extent the vast amount of news sources) possibly makes them a culturally significant phenomenon, so the topic doesn't violate WP:NOTDIR#3. Further, the list entries do not violate WP:SYNTH because each entry only requires one source to confirm that they were once unidentified but are now so. Also, WP:NLIST only discusses being discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources as one of many reasons for counting, with consensus for cross-categorizations likes these being inconclusive, though my previous arguments lean towards keeping.
 * However, considering many of these were notable for being unidentified, we should at the least consider restricting the list to only those with articles and who went unidentified for some time (i.e. five years or a decade), and a merge might be considered given the list is a little bit small, but these are discussions for another time. ミラP@Miraclepine 21:06, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
 * @ None of those sources are specifically about formerly unidentified decedents, or are necessarily reliable. All three are on related but different topics. The third source is targeted solely at 9/11 victims, which is a different much narrower topic. The second source is on forensic genealogy. It is also an opinion piece which means it can't be used as a source on wikipedia because it is unreliable. The first source is about DNA testing in the process of body identification, and while it mentions formerly identified people in passing, it does not address the subject directly and in detail, or discuss formerly unidentified people generally as a group. Additionally, the sources are entirely America-centric and do not look at the broader topic from a global perspective (and this is a global topic). None of them provide a list of formerly unidentified decedents, and none of them talk about formerly unidentified decedents from a big picture long term view. It's all a narrow viewpoint secondary to the main topic of each individual article, none of which primarily focus on formerly unidentified decedents. I'm still not seeing how this passes WP:NLIST and WP:NOTDIRECTORY. How is this not a "repository of loosely associated topics". The only thing unifying these people is that they were at one time an unidentified body; which as statistics have demonstrated, is not unusual. Do they really belong in a list together? Is this even encyclopedic? I also want to point out that we already deleted several lists of this kind because they were rife with WP:Original research with numerous entries added from law enforcement and the NAMUs websites (without any secondary sources) and self published crime enthusiast blogs; many of them with speculations and factual errors. It's been a nightmare cleaning up after the type editing these lists attract.4meter4 (talk) 23:18, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Agreed with the analysis here. Reading over most of the articles in the list, I don't believe being unidentified is necessarily the thing that makes a lot of them notable - most often it's the murder or whatever led to their disappearance. Jellyfish (mobile) (talk) 17:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Granted, they’re on related but technically different subsets, but because of the subject matter, they still generally talked about human remains being formerly unidentified, enough to go beyond trivial coverage, so I feel it still applies in principle; also WP:SIGCOV says Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. Also, not all op-eds are unreliable; WP:NEWSORG provides for rare scenarios for which op-eds are reliable, and the in this case op-ed written by a subject-matter expert, criminologist Nancy La Vigne, so I am inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt relative to a WP:EXPERTSPS. Further, I feel discounting the sourcing as being American-centric might amount to WP:ATA.
 * With regards to NOTDIR, calling it a "repository of loosely associated topics" appears to be a stretch because they are in common an unidentified body, which while technically not uncommon, pales in comparison to, say, 3,279,857 deaths in the United States in 2023 (1 for every 745); hence it should be as encyclopedic as the list already at unidentified decedent. Also, OR/V issues are generally nothing restricting the list to only those with enwiki articles (45 out of thousands, if not millions), thus fulfilling recognized [...] navigation [...] purposes, can't solve. ミラP@Miraclepine 17:13, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
 * That's a complete misread of WP:NLIST. NLIST specifically says we need to restrict lists to those where the targeted topic of the list " grouping or set in general has been discussed". If you can't find sources that talk about the concept of the list directly in a general way, that is exactly the kind of thing that indicates WP:NLIST is not met. Piecemeal, partial, and tangential coverage does not meet the NLIST guideline which requires broad overview sourcing on a given topic. Further, the lack of non-US coverage in the sourcing and in-article content in the text of the sources is very concerning for having a list with a global framework. For a global topic there needs to be sourcing written from a global paradigm; otherwise there will inevitably be an article rife with Systemic bias due to issues of Geographic imbalance. I don't think its possible with the current sourcing to create a global article that isn't inherently a WP:POV/WP:UNDUE violation due to being entirely created from only American-centric sources. But that doesn't matter anyway, because of the lack of direct coverage, which demonstrates a failure of WP:SIGCOV as well as WP:NLIST. 4meter4 (talk) 17:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 20:56, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete. This would work much better as a category, and the current list is too much of a WP:FORK of the main article. If a full list were included, it would go into the thousands. Bearian (talk) 15:40, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
 * @ a full list would probably be in the millions or tens of millions. NAMUS has tracked close to 100,000 identifications of unidentified bodies since it was founded in 2003, and that is just bodies in the United States. If we were to include the entire globe, and go through law enforcement/hospital/government records globally over the last two hundred years the number would be many times that size.4meter4 (talk) 16:53, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Honestly, as far a category would go, I doubt it'd end up being anything more than a collection of redirects. Most of these people are notable solely for their death or murder. I can't link right now, but I did post it above - category was deleted for similar reasoning a few years ago. Jellyfish (mobile) (talk) 19:01, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * 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.