On 02/05/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Absolutely. I think we've all worked on at least one such article; purely off the top of my head I can remember [[Guillermo Hernández-Cartaya]]. I wanted to use the DOJ's biographical information to put his death sometime in the '90s, but that didn't seem kosher at the time.
For historical figures, we usually don't see a problem with "1765 - c.1830" and a note in the body of the text explaining that whilst it isn't known when they died, X source notes them as still living in this year but they were dead before Y source was published in that year.
(Yeah, original research, novel synthesis, I know. Sort of maybe; the example I recall is an elderly officer who I concluded died before 1820 because otherwise he'd have been in a comprehensive biographical work published that year. Is it inference to take "I have listed every living..." to conclude that someone listed is no longer living? But I digress)
Somehow it seems a little more dubious to do this for someone who may or may not be dead. I think we need to weigh the conflicting issues of "does it matter?" vs. "how stupid are we going to look if they write and complain?"
As for someone arguing that "we think they're dead therefore BLP rules don't apply", hit them with a damn big stick, that's just being silly.