Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of living former members of the United States Cabinet


 * 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. Seddon talk 20:48, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

List of living former members of the United States Cabinet

 * – ( View AfD View log )

This is even more WP:INDISCRIMINATE and trivial than the other similar lists under discussion. There's no question that this fails LISTN, and, besides the tables, the rest of the article is pure and unambiguous WP:OR, with statements as fancy as "the earliest last surviving cabinet member" being clearly original deduction which might be true or even obvious but are certainly non-encyclopedic; and there's not a single source used to support anything but some details in the tables, thus also failing WP:V RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:08, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 17:37, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 17:38, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 17:38, 31 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete. Wikipedia is not an almanac nor a collection of trivia. pburka (talk) 17:55, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep Per WP:5, Wikipedia has many features of almanancs and the like. And the content in question is not trivial. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:30, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an almanac. And the content, truly, is trivial: "There are x former living cabinet members from president y" is nothing but unadorned statistics and original deduction. And there really is no coverage of "former members of the United States Cabinet" as a group. At best the news might cover the current ones as a group, or those of a specific president might be covered as a group not of "former members" but of "Cabinet of president x" (for ex. Cabinet of Donald Trump; Cabinet of Barack Obama; also evidenced by the categorisation scheme, i.e. Category:Members of the Cabinet of the United States by presidential administration). This is redundant to those articles, and provides no encyclopedic information whatsoever, being just basically a database based upon the arbitrary criterion of who's alive amongst those. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 18:42, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * To me, the distinguishing feature between an almanac and an encyclopedia is permanence. If the contents of a list must be constantly changed over time (i.e. items must be removed to maintain correctness), then it becomes a directory more suitable for an almanac rather than an encyclopedic record of accumulated knowledge. This is closely related to WP:NOTTEMPORARY. pburka (talk) 19:05, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Many of our articles require updating as the facts change. For example, I just updated an article to reflect the fact that the subject had died.  And all our articles about countries, governments and politicians require regular update to reflect changes in office-holders, elections and so forth.  So the reason for deletion is not valid.  My !vote stands. Andrew🐉(talk) 19:10, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Adding someone's death to an article is part of the accumulation of knowledge, but we don't delete the person's page when they die! In 80-years' time, if Wikipedia and this list still exist, every single entry in the list will have been replaced. That's not accumulated knowledge: it's a directory or rolodex. Lists of former office holders are encyclopedic; lists of former office holders who intersect with some ephemeral secondary criteria (living, vacationing, imprisoned, etc.) are not. pburka (talk) 19:22, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * This page has existed since 2008 and still seems to get prompt and thorough updates. Wikipedia has supplanted traditional encyclopedias because it is dynamic not static.  Per policy WP:NOTPAPER, this is not a bug, it's a feature.  My !vote stands. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:45, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh. WP:ITSOLD, but this time not even about the article subject (that is no defense even if the subject itself is over a millenium old), but about the Wikipedia page itself... Wikipedia is dynamic, but that doesn't mean we list every statistic or statistical grouping that could conceivably be updated about something. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 11:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete I fully agree with nom. Edge3 (talk) 15:32, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete for the same reasons as Articles for deletion/List of living former United Kingdom MPs. Unwieldy list that requires constant maintenance to add and remove members. Ajf773 (talk) 00:05, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete The intersection of "has held public office X" and "is still alive" is to my eye self-evidently a WP:Non-encyclopedic cross-categorization, and as such WP:DELREASON (Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia) applies. Of all possible parameters to list this group of people by, being alive is certainly one of them – but so is being born on a Wednesday. TompaDompa (talk) 00:24, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 01:25, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep As someone who created the second list for the article, I recognize that the article lacks verified information and that the article is, in fact, quite disjointed because of my edits, and if it appeases people who want to remove this article, I am therefore willing to separate the two halves of the article into two separate articles. Other than that, I see the article as rather a "lack of references" problem that can be fixed by adding verified references to the existing information. As for those who still want to remove the article despite of that, I think that there is very interesting information in the article and that to remove it will prove a great disservice to those seeking that information, as that is why I created the second list in the first place, as well as the existence of other "compiling information with references" lists on Wikipedia such as "List of last survivors of historical events", as well as the numerous (Births/Deaths) "x" year articles that attest to that. It's all information that people seek but no one has written anything about that for some reason, and considering Wikipedia's wide influence over the internet, I think it should be taken advantage of. Yourlocallordandsavior (talk) 02:00, 5 September 2021 (UTC)


 * 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.