[WikiEN-l] Looking up death dates in government death records: original research?

[Charlotte Webb]

On 4/30/07,  Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) Finding that she died in 1992 involved discovering a 'Nadia M.
> Osipovich' of the correct approximate age died in Oregon in 1992.
> Oregon is the recorded state of residence of this person in the 1940s.

It's probably the same person and she's probably dead. This list exists, in
part, to prevent identity fraud (impersonating a dead person).

> Is it enough to simply match name, approximate age, and state of
> residence in death records to prove someone is dead for BLP concerns?

For this person, probably. In general, no. There are probably thousands of
dead Matthew Browns buried in your area.

But unless there is some unwritten corollary to BLP that says editors can
"write whatever [they] want about dead people", content standards will not
be dropping two octaves when a person dies (or when Wikipedia wakes up and
realizes a person was actually dead before the article started).

For wiki-census purposes, we do have a [[Category:Possibly living people]]
too.

Just source everything you write, especially if you believe in
reincarnation.

Charlotte
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