Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people who never married


 * 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. WP:SNOW. postdlf (talk) 16:05, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

List of people who never married

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This list will be infinite, and has similar problem to List of childless people. An IP address, likely belonging to the article creator objected to my PROD tag and hence I am opening an AfD discussion. Cahk (talk) 23:10, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
 * The editor seems to be making an effort to reduce the scope of the list so that it will be maintainable. See lead section and talk page.--172.56.33.203 (talk) 23:56, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. North America1000 02:04, 9 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete. Way too broad a criterion, especially with the percentage rising (see Time article "Why 25% of Millennials Will Never Get Married", or The Japan Times article "Nearly 40% of single Japanese not interested in romance: survey"). Clarityfiend (talk) 08:18, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * It would be easy to just cut the list off at some date of birth if it becomes unmaintainable several decades from now. Maybe we could wait and see if that really happens. Notable heterosexual people tend to be people of talent and ambition and such people tend to get married. Maybe the Millennials that those predictions are based upon do not fall into that category and thus there will be fewer of them that meet the project's notability criteria at that future time.  Maybe those young Millennials say now that they will not get married but maybe they will later change their minds (e.g. George Clooney or others documented in the External links section of the article) and the predictions will turn out to be wrong. This is the English Wikipedia, not the Japanese Wikipedia. Consider my prediction of the process: most of the people who get on the list will get on it because they died.--208.54.64.203 (talk) 17:20, 9 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete as too broad per WP:SALAT, which explains that "Lists that are too general or too broad in scope have little value". -- Notecardforfree (talk) 18:34, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete To make things worse than people have pointed out above does someone like Eliza R. Snow who never married in a legal sense, but married according to religious rights, and fully proclaimed herself as the wife of Joseph Smith belong here or not? It will also group those like Evan Stephens who had a fiancee die on them, with those who never were even that close to marry. It also will include those who died before the age of 18 when they did not marry. Even the inclusion of those who died before age 30 without having married in many cases involves grouping unlike individuals. Come to think of it another questionable individual is John Gibson (soldier). His marriage to a close reliative of Chief Logan was clearly viewed as such by the Mingo, but does not appear to have existed as a legal marriage in the eyes of the colonial government. In fat, this is a harder to define set of people than those who died childless, although there are many males throughout history who it is disputed if they ever fathered a child or not, so that list had flaws as well.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:16, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment And from the other side we have Molly Brant, a person who had 8 child, but was never technically married to their father, although our article says she was his "consort". In some historical slave societies, at least in the American south, slaves were refused the legal right to marry, but this does not mean that some were not functionally married. Then there are people like Calamity Jane who it is claimed was married to Wild Bill Hickock in a marriage properly witnessed by two ministers, but others dispute the event ever occured. So the inclusion criteria are fuzzy, and it is hard to establish that this is a way to group people, especially when many of the people who end up on the list will do so because they died before the average age of such a thing. Another issue is that we probably should not try and determine the marital status of all BLPs we have, although this might more be evidence that we have created articles on people who are not notable enough to justify having articles on them.John Pack Lambert (talk) 19:25, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - I have read up on WP:SALAT and don't see that this list meets the guideline. The other problem with it, which is even more serious, is that there would be too many items that might be included or not, depending on how "married" is defined. That it's pointless information is perhaps not a very strong objection, because it might be seen as relevant to some people, but the fuzziness of the inclusion criteria can't be ignored. --bonadea contributions talk 20:56, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete undefinable and too broad. Do common-law marriages exclude an entry?-- &#9790;Loriendrew&#9789;  &#9743;(ring-ring)  21:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it could be moved to "List of people who never had a spouce" since that is the word used in the infoboxes. Note that the lead section of the article excludes people younger than the age of marriage. Some of the infooxes mention "pattners". I created and have used the imperfect redirect never married. See also criticism of marriage.--`` — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tyree999 (talk • contribs) 23:12, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * See also List of reasons for never having a spouse.--208.54.32.211 (talk) 02:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete for a number of reasons: topic is far too broad, no indication of why such a list would be encyclopedic material (ie no source that I know of has covered this) and a topic which by its very nature is going to result in a mostly unverifiable article. Heck, I almost closed this Speedy delete under A11, but I felt it might be useful to establish precedent for this type of thing, so that similar articles can be quickly dealt with. Vanamonde (talk) 03:51, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - I cannot think what purpose this page serves. --ChiveFungi (talk) 14:54, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. Nobody needs a list that links Joan of Arc to Harper Lee, or Susan B. Anthony to Al Pacino, solely on the basis of their never having married someone else — and even if we did constrain it to dead people exclusively, it still wouldn't be useful or valuable to try to maintain. It's not a defining characteristic, or a substantive point of commonality between its entries. For example, never having married before his death is not an inherently noteworthy fact about José Fernandez — people are not expected in 2016 to marry so young that being unmarried at age 24 would be unusual at all. Bearcat (talk) 22:10, 11 October 2016 (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.