Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Medical definition of death


 * 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. Consensus is to omit this article. There's no consensus about whether a redirect to legal death would be appropriate, but anybody may create (and anybody may then request deletion of) such a redirect.  Sandstein  08:13, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Medical definition of death

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The creation of this article is unfortunately attributed to me, except that I didn't really create it. In 2007 I created a stub for "Legal death" that was then transmorgrified into different subject matter and renamed "Medical definition of death" after the article was correctly identified as a WP:Coatrack in 2014. Legal death now has its own article, so that subject is fine. The remaining Medical definition of death article is at best a content fork that is redundant with other articles already on Wikipedia, such as Legal death, Brain death, Organ transplantation, cryonics and especially the Diagnosis section of the main Death article. If there is any notable non-redundant encylopedic information in the article, it would be better if it was added to the above articles where it would benefit from the monitoring of editors with expertise in those subjects. While sustained poor quality per se is not an argument for deletion on Wikipedia, the lack of development of this article is likely related to the better coverage of the subject matter encompassed by the title elsewhere on Wikipedia. Cryobiologist (talk) 09:07, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Legal death. The article also has long paragraphs without references. OtterAM (talk) 17:54, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
 * That looks like a good solution to me. The lede still defines the article as being about legal death, raising the question of what this article is supposed to be about if not legal death. Cryobiologist (talk) 18:27, 6 May 2016 (UTC)


 * strong oppose: The current article clearly discusses the ethics regarding the definition of death.  legal death does not have nearly as much content.  I am no expert on medicine, but my guess is that if you ask a Ph.D. in medicine, a lawyer, a philosopher, a priest and an artist what the definition of "death" is you will get five distinctly different answers.  What's more, it would dependent on what content and culture you asked the question.   What needs to be done instead is to differentiate the two articles not to delete content for no good reason.  --David Tornheim (talk) 00:16, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Concern: Canvassing by the creator of this RfC may be taking place.  See   --David Tornheim (talk) 00:26, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I was following the prompts and instructions that came up when I clicked "Preloaded debate" in the AfD page, the last one of which was to provide courtesy notices to editors of the nominated article if understood correctly. I therefore posted notes on the talk pages of the last two significant contributors to the article to advise them of the nomination. I've been around Wikipedia awhile, but am nevertheless an inexperienced editor. I can't remember the last time I nominated a page for deletion, so if I did something incorrectly please explain so I can do it correctly in the future. Cryobiologist (talk) 05:20, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Your "concern" is misplaced: a deletion nominator is explicitly urged to contact possibly-interested editors and projects that a nomination is in progress - David Gerard (talk) 09:03, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect per nom (or redirect anywhere else, or just WP:TNT), merge any referenced - David Gerard (talk) 09:03, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect as it all suggests it's best connected to that. SwisterTwister   talk  06:01, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep - this is a fairly important article (see the talk page), and better arguments need to be given to delete it without searching online more (WP:BEFORE). Bearian (talk) 20:59, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia already has an article on Clinical death. How is this one different? I would say that disputes about medical definitions should be in the clinical death article. Ceosad (talk) 02:45, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I stand by my !vote. Each of the two articles have different POVs. In this case only, I think we ignore all rules about forking articles and keep both, one of which is medical and one legal. Bearian (talk) 13:02, 12 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Request: Could those editors who don't think this article should be redirected to legal death please explain what they believe this article should be about if not legal death? The article could then be renamed appropriately, or least the lede rewritten to give editors a guide to what the content of the article should be. As it stands now, I don't know what "medical definition of death" means if not legal death. Since the article title has no generally understood meaning apart from legal death, I don't know what content discipline should pertain to this article. Cryobiologist (talk) 01:48, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete, but do not redirect to Legal death. Maybe recreate immediately, but about a whole different subject.
 * About the redirection: simply put, even if legal death is one of the subjects of the current article, it is not a plausible redirect. You have what the law uses as criteria to announce someone dead, and what physicians say defines "death", but those are not the same things even if the definitions coincide (because lawmakers are not complete idiots).
 * The current article is a mix of organ transplantation, brain death, some moral considerations, and some "information-theoretic death" mumbo-jumbo. The first two are already better dealt with at their current articles, I am baffled the last was merged without someone rushing it into AfD as it seems to me to be WP:FRINGE at its best ('nuff said). The "moral and ethical issues" section could be split-merged between organ transplantation, euthanasia, and maybe some religion pages.
 * All in all, the intended subject of the current article is not clear. However, I could very well envision an article dealing with various viewpoints from physicians, biologists etc. about what constitutes "death" titled "medical definition of death". It is not clear to me it would be notable (I kinda think it would be, but I would need to do some source-searching), but at any rate that would keep nothing from the current content. Hence, WP:TNT (delete and recreate is cleaner than blanking the page before starting from scratch). Tigraan Click here to contact me 14:58, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I removed the four paragraphs cited only to two non-peer-reviewed papers - David Gerard (talk) 17:45, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Update: I found what I was looking for since my comment, which is civil death, to which I suggest to redirect as a plausible target if no article is kept in the manner I suggested. Tigraan Click here to contact me 08:34, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Huh, of course, redirecting "medical definition of death" to "civil death" is stupid. I managed to confuse myself. Redirect to Clinical death, that is much better. Tigraan Click here to contact me 16:54, 12 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Redirect - Mlpearc  ( open channel ) 17:47, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom, including the merge of data into the related articles. DeVerm (talk) 22:53, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment about redirect !votes: please write the target of your redirect in your comment. I would assume legal death but there are other plausible options (brain death, etc.). Tigraan Click here to contact me 09:08, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment How can you redirect "medical death" to "legal death" when the two are different in principle? Somebody can be legal death without being medical death. DeVerm (talk) 19:30, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Do you mean this in the sense of a missing person being declared legally dead, or something more subtle and technical? Except for a missing person, I'm not able to think of a situation where a legally dead person would not also be considered medically dead. The reason for this is that medical determinations of death are supposed to follow legal standards. It's true, as acknowledged in the language of the UDDA itself, that there are medical standards that go into determinations of death to comply with legal definitions. Nevertheless, as far as I know, a determination of death in medicine is always a legal determination of death. In other words, any article about determinations of death in medicine would be an article about how people are determined by medicine to be dead under the law. Cryobiologist (talk) 07:20, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * In other examples, there is civil death. Otherwise, do you have a source for "medical determinations of death are supposed to follow legal standards" (in the meaning, I assume, that such medical determinations have legal value)? I mean, of course the legal declaration of death is usually based on a medical declaration, but I could imagine cases where the government's official comes every week and the Sunday is registered as "date of death" (legal) for every person who died during the week, while the local physician does declare people dead to the families after visits. Tigraan Click here to contact me 08:34, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * No, it doesn't work that way. See here for a brief explanation of how people are pronounced dead. You are legally dead when a legally empowered official (typically a licensed physician or sometimes nurse) makes a medical determination of death in accordance with laws for that determination. That time is recorded as the legal time of death. The State won't know about the legal death before the paperwork is filed, but legal death has nevertheless occurred. Legally, marriage works the same way. Cryobiologist (talk) 00:56, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * That is about the United States in the current day and age. The rules are probably similar in other developed countries as well, but I would not expect a high standard in (say) Somalia.
 * Moreover, clinical death is a much more natural redirection than legal death for medical definition of death, don't you think? Tigraan Click here to contact me 10:58, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Legal death also includes people who have been declared dead in absentia. Usually they have been murdered or lost at sea. Various kinds of medieval outlawry (like civil death) might or might not qualify as a legal death too. This is why I think the clinical death is a lot better target for redirecting. Ceosad (talk) 14:10, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately redirecting to clinical death doesn't work because you can be medically dead without being clinically dead (as in brain death), and you can be medically alive while being clinically dead such as during DHCA or more commonly during code blue resuscitation efforts. In medical care settings, clinical death and medical death only overlap when there is a DNR order. It is indeed possible to be legally dead without being declared medically dead. This could happen in abstentia or in underdeveloped countries where a medical official never comes into contact with a body. But the converse, a person being medically dead but not legally dead, doesn't seem to be possible. If there is a jurisdiction where declaration of medical death was not simultaneously a declaration of legal death, that would seem to mean a person could be charged with homicide by asphyxiation for moving a body to the morgue. If legal death was drawn on a Venn diagram, then medical death would be a big circle inside it, an almost encompassing circle in developed countries. That's why redirecting to legal death made sense to me. The problem is that the discussion of medical declaration of death within the legal death article is only a stub when it should be huge, and the medical definition of death article that is the subject of this nomination is horrible. It doesn't even mention the UDDA which is the cornerstone of determining death in the United States. What to do? Do we redirect to the legal death placeholder of the legal death article in anticipation that it will be filled with good information in the future, or leave the pretty bad dedicated article on medical definition of death without redirection in hope that someone in the future will rewrite it? Cryobiologist (talk) 22:47, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * We could do a placeholder disambiguation page that lists these various cases, or we can add a few hatnotes to the relevant articles in addition of the redirect. The hatnotes should be added in any case to be fair, and they would help people find what they want. Ceosad (talk) 23:49, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I expanded the Legal death article section so that there's now a stronger case for redirecting to it until someone rewrites the bad Medical definition of death article. If we don't redirect Medical definition of death, there should at least be a hatnote on it directing readers to the better explanation in the legal death article. Cryobiologist (talk) 07:37, 14 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Rename as Information-theoretic death and delete everything except the relevant section to create a stub, AND/OR Redirect the current title to clinical death. I could see the information-theoretic death as a notable and very important (cryonics related) topic on its own right, but this article is way too weird and suffers in its current shape from insurmountable coatracking issues. The information-theoretic death article might need to be written (and the existing redirect must be eliminated), but this article has almost nothing salvageable due to the overall lack of references as noted above. I strongly oppose redirecting to legal death, as that one is about law. Do you think that the Information-theoretic death deserves its own article? Ceosad (talk) 02:37, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * In fact I do think that Information-theoretic death should have its own article. It actually has had one since 2004, but after some experienced editors recently identified problems with it, it got trimmed, content merged, and redirected into the Medical definition of death article. I'm presently working on a rewrite of Information-theoretic death to address problems that were identified. There's no need to rename this article or create a new article because old Information-theoretic death article still exists as a redirect. Cryobiologist (talk) 07:42, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * "Information-theoretic death" is a cryonics jargon term that is only ever used in cryonics. I don't think there was enough in that article originally to make a substantial article. (The four paragraphs from two non-peer-reviewed Merkle papers that were in this article started there.) But if Cryobiologist can make one that wouldn't do better as a few paragraphs in Cryonics, that would be useful. The present article is still terrible and needs redirect, deletion or WP:TNT, though - David Gerard (talk) 12:49, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, these are good arguments. I did not notice that the redirect page had been an article. I have struck the part about renaming from my !vote. Ceosad (talk) 13:27, 12 May 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.