Talk:List of United States senators from Nebraska

Superlatives section

@Surtsicna and Emk9: you both need to quit edit warring and seek a consensus or risk being reported to administrators. Furthermore, I’d recommend you request a comment from users in the political genre for advice and consensus for all articles with this trivia. Thank you, Corky 08:23, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't think reverting a single edit made to multiple articles is an edit war. Either way, I find having a list of living former offices holders to be useful to these articles, for tracking purposes and for historical context. And there has been discussion on the inclusion of this over the years, with the first example I can find being the deletion discussion for the article of all living former senators at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of living former United States senators. Multiple people supported deleting that article because the other 50 state articles had that information already. I remember at least one other discussion on the inclusion of these lists, I think in an American Politics wikiproject page but can't find it at this moment. Emk9 (talk) 08:47, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Don't most of the arguments in favor of deleting the article apply to the sections as well? Namely WP:NOTSTATS, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, non-encyclopedic cross-categorization, etc. If anything of the sort should be included, it is the dates of birth and, if applicable, death of all the listed officials, not an inexplicable segregation of the living and the one most recently deceased. It just reeks of trivia, much like Mr Phineas Hitchcock being the third youngest US senator from Nebraska. Surtsicna (talk) 09:37, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

I'm don't have any opinion about the oldest/youngest/shortest/longest section, though I do think that much of that could be sourced since newspaper articles often mention that type of information in regards to people in office. Looking at WP:NOTSTATS/WP:INDISCRIMINATE, it says that "Statistics that lack context or explanation can reduce readability and may be confusing; accordingly, statistics should be placed in tables to enhance readability." These are in a table and I don't think living/not living lacks context. As for the deletion discussion, since the first 2 comments mention the existence of the information elsewhere and then nobody else mentioned it in their comments about the article or edited the 50 state articles, which would make me think they agree that it should stay there. For non-encyclopedic cross-categorization the example for people given is "people from ethnic / cultural / religious group X employed by organization Y" which seems like a much narrower category than if they are alive or not. Considering nearly every article on people has their dates of birth and death (if applicable) in the first sentence, I would think that this information is relevant. Emk9 (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

The WP:INDISCRIMINATE policy says that, "to provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources". We cannot hope to ever have context with an explanation referenced to an independent source about Phineas Hitchcock being the third youngest US senator from Nebraska. That is what makes it "unexplained statistics" (point 3 of WP:INDISCRIMINATE). The vital dates should be given for all officeholders or none; singling out the living just to point out that they are living is an inexplicable, arbitrary choice. One might wonder why we do not single out the women, or the unmarried, or the non-white. Surtsicna (talk) 11:57, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I have opened an RfC here. Surtsicna (talk) 19:54, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

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