Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of the longest-lived United States Governors (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. Per the overwhelming policy-backed consensus for deletion here, and per the consensus found by two separate administrators on Articles for deletion/List of the oldest United States Senators and Articles for deletion/List of the 100 oldest members of the United States House of Representatives, the list's subject is found to not meet the requirements of WP:LISTN, WP:SYNTH, nor WP:OR... and is therefore unsuitable for inclusion on this encyclopedia. &mdash; Coffee //  have a cup  //  beans  // 18:15, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

List of the longest-lived United States Governors
AfDs for this article: 
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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:


 * Articles for deletion/List of the 100 oldest members of the United States House of Representatives
 * Articles for deletion/List of the oldest United States Senators

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.

I will after nominating this ping all editors who participated in the previous AFD, as well as in the two similar recent discussions. Lankiveil (speak to me) 11:46, 27 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Notifying .  If I have missed anyone, please do notify them of this discussion.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 11:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)


 * 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)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. North America1000 13:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. North America1000 13:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. North America1000 13:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. North America1000 13:53, 27 January 2016 (UTC)


 * 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)
 * Keep - How many times are you going to nominate this? Czolgolz (talk) 14:02, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * Comment: I don't think I was directly involved with the last AfD --allthefoxes (Talk) 17:28, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Reply, I invited everyone who participated at that and the two other similar AfDs, in your case this one. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about that in my initial statement.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 02:50, 30 January 2016 (UTC).
 * Delete: Seems to be a bit of WP:SYNTH, and some amount of WP:OR..not to mention WP:LISTN --allthefoxes (Talk) 17:28, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * Delete appears to be original research and is just stats Seasider91 (talk) 19:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as OR and a topic not discussed in RS. Only way to build this ranked list is to exhaustively search all the potential candidates. How long someone lives after they hold office is trivia.  Why not Longest lived every profession  Legacypac (talk) 20:04, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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)
 * Delete as per User:Bearcat and User:Ricky81682.E.M.Gregory (talk) 14:51, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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)~
 * ~Thanks for your comments. Just to clarify, living to 90, 92 or even 100 is not particularly notable, nursing homes are filled with such people. No one is questioning that names and dates can be sourced, the question is can the topic be sourced, and the answer is no RS discuss the topic of somewhat long lived people who happened to be state governors at some point. Legacypac (talk) 12:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom., Ricky81682, Bearcat, and others. Fails WP:LISTN.--Rollins83 (talk) 18:28, 3 February 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.