Category talk:Deceased

I am sad to say that Danielle Dabbs (editor of Triskilion) must be added to the Deceased category. Here's a link to her obituary: https://www.beckchapels.com/memsol.cgi?user_id=1801971 -- I'm not sure how to do it myself, and hesitate to mess things up. Thanks to whoever can do the edits. Carol Pruitt ADDED: Nice job, Mrs. Potato Head -- thanks!

Sorry, but I've come across another trekfan obituary, for Elyse Pines Rosenstein, who passed on suddenly a few weeks ago. Elyse doesn't seem to have a page of her own here, but she's sure mentioned all over the place! Here's the link: http://file770.com/elyse-rosenstein-has-died/ -- and once more, my apologies for not figuring out how to add her to the Deceased page myself. Carol Pruitt

Deaths by Year

"Deaths by Year" isn't replacing "Deceased" as a category, right? It's just an additional category? MPH 17:25, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

For my two cents, I would hope it's just additional. For one thing, there are bound to be people (especially from the pre-internet era) that we know are deceased but don't know exactly when they passed. Also, as the number of entries inexorably increases, it'll become ever more helpful to have an alphabetical list. I do like the idea of a chronological list as well, though. (My apologies for not recalling how to do an inset here.) --Carol Pruitt (talk) 17:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

We have a lot of new [X] by year categories in Category:Chronology that were created in the last year. None of them have replaced the orginal [X] category so I think they are additional categories. I'm not sure how useful they will be, and I'm not very happy that Deaths by Year and Births by Year are being added to fan pages without any discussion. In the past, there has generally been a lot of discussion before adding new categories to fan pages.. --Auntags (talk) 18:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

This is pretty standard practice on wikis with a fair amount of biographical articles. Every bio on Wikipedia has categories for birth year, death year, and nationality. If the exact year of a death isn't known, but can be pinned to a range of years in the same decade (e.g. in certain murder and missing person cases), then it would generally be fine to use a decade-level category instead.

These categories won't be utilized by most casual readers. But they can be very handy to readers who know how to use them. I once suffered an extreme brain-fart that forced me to browse the "W" section of "Category:2011 deaths" on Wikipedia to remember Amy Winehouse. I can see imperfect memory cropping up more often in fannish contexts. Fans typically aren't huge public figures whose passings become widely-reported news. Sometimes the only thing you might remember about a person is what they did and when they passed. There was an artist who posted Snarry art on Elfwood. I remember that I liked her work. I remember she died in a car crash in late 2002. I remember that she was only two or three years older than me. I've spent spent two decades trying to wring out more details. At some point Elfwood banned fanart and this artist's work was lost.

I'm not saying that these categories will inevitably help me. But they have the potential to resolve similar mysteries. Thus they may help fans reconnect with works they love and remember friends and fellow travellers they've lost. Night Rain (talk) 19:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)