Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of last descendants of notable individuals

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. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 15:53, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

List of last descendants of notable individuals (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Seems to me this is not encyclopedic and not about anything notable. An excessively broad (to the point of being universal) and pretty random "list" (it's also not really a WP list). - Special-T (talk) 15:08, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete seeing as anyone can qualify for this list as people who still have living descendants are included, I see no reason to have this page. It's interesting TRIVIA, but that's largely all it is. TartarTorte 15:18, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete I'm a descendent of Adam and Noah. "Here's a list of every person on the planet" -- way too broad.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:32, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 16:06, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete We have close to 2 million biographies on people in Wikipedia, and any of those people are thus notable. This list has a true potential to rise to insanely large proportions, and many of the descendants will not be by any stretch of the imagination notable.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:50, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong evidence suggests that our current number of articles is only a sub-set of those people who meet Wikipedia notability guidelines, so that number does not actually show a limit to how big this list could grow.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:52, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. In addition to being incredibly broad (especially if collateral descent is included, because everyone has collateral heirs of some degree), the topic of this list is not notable per WP:NLIST. The first few sources are general information about concepts and the rest are about the ancestry of specific individuals; none of them are about listing multiple "last descendants". --RL0919 (talk) 17:40, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete This list is clearly way to broad. Outside of that though, being a descendant of a notable person isn't a notable characteristic on it's own anyway. I'm a descendent of a few notable people who have articles on here myself. In no way does that mean I deserve to be on this list though. I guess it might work as something like List notable descendants of notable individuals so it's confined to just people who have articles, but even then there would probably be zero way to maintain the list and it would be questionably useful. There's zero way it would be manageable or useful in it's current form if kept either though. Realistically, how many people care that Mozart and his son are included in a list together or are specifically looking for them to be on a list together? Please don't start List of sons of notable individuals. On second thought, List of sons of notable pianists might be interesting..... Adamant1 (talk) 19:10, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Undecided, possibly rename List of descendants of historical figures per WP:NLIST. There are lists out there: Mental Floss: "What the Descendants of 8 Controversial Historical Figures Are Doing Today"; MSN: "The living descendants of historical figures"; Business Insider: "What the living descendants of notorious dictators are doing today"; Smithsonian Magazine: "Historians Identify 14 Living Relatives of Leonardo da Vinci". Clarityfiend (talk) 02:32, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  That isn't a rename, it's a completely different topic. The sources you list are about living descendants. The article in question is about last descendants, who are mostly (almost definitionally) dead. --RL0919 (talk) 09:05, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Because 'notability isn't inherited', and because 'not having descendants' isn't notable (or inherited, obviously...). As for a List of descendants of historical figures, that would be a thoroughly ridiculous list. By the time you'd added all the descendants of Charlemagne, of Genghis Khan and of Muhammad, you'd probably have included half the population of the world. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Even if we limited the list to notable living people who have known ancestors further part than grandparents who were notable, this is going to be a lot of people. Especially since our base set of notable living people is currently at 1.028 million. That is assuming that Wikipedia has articles currently on everyone who meets our notability criteria, which it clearly does not. Even if we were willing to create such a huge list, I highly doubt we would find any sources elsewhere that had treated these people as a whole as a group, and I highly doubt we could actually support the arbitrariness of supporting the inclusion/exclusion in the list of based on excluding notable people in the last 2 generations. Any other limiting grouping, such as say living people with notable ancestors born before 1900/before 1800/died before 1900/whatever else you can think of would be arbitrary. Maintenance of such a list also sounds like a nightmare. At least with this list as it is presented (although not quite as it functions), everyone on the list needs to be dead, and once a person is the last descendant and dies there is very little chance that this will change. I say little chance, because some males have children born after they die, even a few US presidents were born after their father's died, so just because someone dies with no children does not always mean that they have no descendants.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:54, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as per all of the above. —AFreshStart (talk) 16:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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.