Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Quinquagenarian

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was - some kept othres redirected - SimonP 15:22, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

The result was:

1. Quinquagenarian, Sexagenarian, Septuagenarian, Octogenarian, Nonagenarian redirected to Ageing.
2. Centenarian, Supercentenarian kept.

Carnildo 19:15, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Quinquagenarian

Also, Sexagenarian, Septuagenarian, Octogenarian, Nonagenarian, Centenarian and Supercentenarian.

NOT FAIR TO INCLUDE SEVEN DIFFERENT ARTICLES ALL TOGETHER! CERTAINLY THE WORD "CENTENARIAN" MEANS MUCH MORE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THAN QUINQUAGENARIAN.

This is just a case of "WIKTIONARY GONE WILD." Someone just discovered the "fun" of creating dictionary entries and is now on a rampage against the WIKIPEDIA. But let's face the facts: an encyclopaedia tells a whole lot more than a mere dictionary ever will.

While I am not saying this should be deleted I will point out the following problems with this article: It consists of the following: a definition, a calculation which is not year aware and so must be manually edited the first of each year (and is not particularly informative in my opion, but that's just opinion) and a list of people in a certain age range. This list is (1) incomplete and (2) always changing as people age into and out of this range. This would require perpetually manual maintenance. I suggest it be considered if the page, as constructed, is useful or even possible. RJFJR 03:25, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia	Wiktionary	Already in Wiktionary since:
Quadragenarian	-	-
Quinquagenarian	-	-
Sexagenarian	-	-
Septuagenarian	Wiktionary:Septuagenarian	2005-03-04
Octogenarian	Wiktionary:Octogenarian	2005-01-10
Nonagenarian	Wiktionary:Nonagenarian	2005-03-04
Centenarian	Wiktionary:Centenarian	2005-03-04
Supercentenarian	-	-

Keep. First of all, there are people creating these lists, and to them this must mean it is important. To claim that the lists should be deleted because it is "too much work" is an argument that could be made for Wikipedia itself. Second, since few people reach age 110--and even then, the "lists" include only a short, top-ten or something list--this is certainly NOT going to change every day. How many times is the record for "oldest person in England" going to be broken? It was set in 1993, and still stands. Meanwhile, track records fall every week.

I agree that the articles on "quinqagenarian" or whatever aren't very useful, but all you have to do is to trim them and get rid of the "living 50-year-olds" which is a waste of time. But don't throw the granny out with the bathwater. ~~

• Transwiki to Wiktionary, minus the impossibly incomplete unmaintainable list. DaveTheRed 04:05, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Wiktionary. Megan1967 07:22, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Maintenance nightmare. Wiktionary - David Gerard 13:30, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Comment. Is there any reason this article gets put on Vfd but sexagenarian, septuagenarian, etc. do not?? Georgia guy 16:06, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Not really, no.
    • Yes. Wikipedia is inconsistent. Denni☯ 18:47, 2005 Mar 17 (UTC)
• Strong concur with RJFJR, delete the unmaintainable lists and move the short description to wiktionary. Radiant! 08:58, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Supercentenarian, keep Centenarian without the list, Wiktionary the rest. --Carnildo 09:41, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• My votes:
  • Quadragenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus an unadorned dictionary definition (with a note about attestation). Remove the list and Wiktionary.
  • Quinquagenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus an unadorned dictionary definition (with a note about attestation). Remove the list and Wiktionary.
  • Sexagenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus a dictionary definition plus information about retirement. Remove the list, add a {{wiktionary}}, and Keep.
  • Septuagenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus an unadorned dictionary definition, that didn't improve in 15 months whereas Wiktionary managed to come up with a better one in two days. Remove the list and Delete.
  • Octogenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus a dictionary definition, that didn't improve in 13 months whereas Wiktionary managed to come up with a better one in two days, plus information about life expectancy. Remove the list, add a {{wiktionary}}, and Keep.
  • Nonagenarian — A badly maintained and not useful relative-to-present list plus a dictionary definition, that didn't improve in 11 months whereas Wiktionary managed to come up with a better one in one day, plus information about dead presidents (☺) that isn't particularly useful, and already exists amongst all of the other Trivial Pursuit answers at President of the United States in any case. Delete or {{wi}}.
  • Centenarian — A reasonably maintained and presented list, that is not relative to "now", plus a dictionary definition, plus information about longevity and telegrams from heads of state. Add a {{wiktionary}} and Keep.
  • Supercentenarian — A well maintained and presented list, that is not relative to "now", plus a dictionary definition, plus information about extreme age claims. Add a {{wiktionary}} and Keep.
• Note that "Wiktionary" in my votes can be replaced by "Delete" without loss. There is ample evidence here (and elsewhere) that Wiktionary can come up with better dictionary definitions from scratch in a handful of days than collaborative editing at Wikipedia can achieve in months (or even years in some cases). Uncle G 12:35, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
  • I would suggest though that information about retirement, longevity and telegrams from heads of state should be put in articles by those names. Radiant! 13:40, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep centenarian and supercentenarian - good pages with information that does not change very often. No opinion on the others. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:45, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep centenarian and supercentenarian—delete all others. Postdlf 13:44, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Wikipedia is not a general information base. People keep wanting to create "list" articles that don't add basic information to the encyclopedia but simply present the results of a hypothetical query against the information present in other articles, assuming that information was in a form that could be queried. For example, this list is the result of the hypothetical query: Select NAME from BIOGRAPHY_ARTICLE where (NOW - BIRTH_DATE)<60 and (NOW - BIRTH_DATE)>=50. The problem is that there are an infinite number of such queries and the list articles that are created by this approach must be manually maintained -- the software is not actually doing the work. Manual maintenance means inaccuracy, incompleteness, and WORK! Furthermore, in many cases the query implicit in these articles is not even of great interest, such as this case. --BM 17:10, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Eh? Supercentenarian is effectively an article on the oldest person. In what sense is that not encyclopaedic? -- ALoan (Talk)
• Unless and until any of these articles can have more information in them than definitions and lists of people it will be very labour intensive to change (maybe even daily!) delete. --Daniel C. Boyer 21:14, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Re-direct quadragenarian and quinquagenarian to middle age, sexagenarian, septuagenarian, octogenarian, and nonagenarian to old age. Keep centenarian. Georgia guy 22:07, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep cent. and supercent., and delete or redirect the rest. -Sean Curtin 02:54, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep centenarian, supercentenarian, delete or redir the others. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 05:17, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep centenarian and supercentenarian since they are encylopaedic and interesting. Delete the others, I guess, since they change quite often (although, since they are ordered by year, they are not that hard to change: just delete someone from 'septuagenarian' and add them to 'octogenarian' when they turn 80). But delete them if you want. --Ben davison 13:11, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep the Supercentenarian! Keep only the list of those who are already dead. Don't keep the still alive ones -- add them when they die. sherry.

• Keep Supercentenarian, preferably in a version without table-formatting,as I have pleaded on the article's talk page.(Compatible with every browser except mine is not an advance over compatible with every browser;I find editing formatted tables enormously more difficult than plain-text lists).When I started work on that article it was just a redirect to Centenarian,from which it needed to be sorted.I think the oldest living persons belong there (while the National longevity recordholders belong in their separate article),though the list of oldest-livings should be kept fairly short so it doesn't need editing often.Keep the Centenarian article but prune the lists,it is not necessary to have everyone over 100 you have ever heard of,only the most famous centenarians.The rest,might as well delete/redirect,but keep the List of people who are nearly centenarians.--Louis Epstein/le@put.com/12.144.5.2 03:51, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep all. Fix! Remove continually changing info and try some statistics. ie - the world's quinquagenarian population in the 1990s was some percentage.  The Steve  20:44, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete all nn listcruft. ComCat 03:00, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• keep the page--Jonano
  • The above edit was by User:24.122.51.203 --Carnildo 00:50, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Supercentenarian. It's actually a good article, has been around for some time, and has been getting even better and more readable. Jonathunder 02:05, 2005 Mar 23 (UTC)
• Keep Centenarian and Supercentenarian. Delete, redirect or merge with wiktionary the other entries. Oska 02:58, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.