Talk:List of youngest state leaders since 1900

Would it be possible to expand this list beyond leaders who assumed office at age 30 or less? It seems that the list is prima facie incomplete when the world’s current youngest democratically elected leader is not on the list. Perhaps a cut off of 35 would be more appropriate, as even a 35 year old democratically elected head of state is quite rare.

Why 1900?

This list arbitrarily excludes any state leaders who ascended to power before 1900. Since Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, what's the justification for this arbitrary cross categorization? Why not include leaders from before 1900? Pburka (talk) 00:28, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I removed an entry today because it was from before 1900, but I still haven't seen an answer to this question. Why the arbitrary 1900 cut off? Pburka (talk) 17:05, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

@Pburka: Probably because it was so common for monarchs to ascend to the throne very young, even as infants. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:21, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

@Pburka: I think it's because the difficulty of categorising monarch & non-monarch leaders. If you don't differentiate between monarch & non-monarch leaders, then monarchs will dominate the list. But if you make separate list for monarchs & non-monarchs, you will run into the problem of how to differentiate between the two as there were a lot of ambiguities & grey lines between the two prior to modern age. For example, many positions were historically non-hereditary before they became hereditary, so how to decide the cut off date of the change of the nature for that particular position?

Another reason I think is because nation-state is a relatively modern invention. In the past there were a lot of ambiguities about whether an entity is independent or part of a larger entity. So how to decide whether the particular leader was really a leader of an independent state? As Westphalian model of statehood only gaining worldwide acceptance relatively recently, 1900 is a suitable cut-off date. 115.134.136.71 (talk) 11:04, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

This sounds arbitrary and indiscriminate. Are there reliable sources which make this distinction, or are we engaged in the creation of original content here? Pburka (talk) 18:50, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Vandalism

Several monarchs have been put into the list but were not added into the monarch list.

Puyi and Zog both were kings. 2A01:E34:EC12:36C0:551E:E888:63FC:D34E (talk) 19:50, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Citations for birth year

I think tagging the whole article as unreferenced isn't warranted. If there is a specific person on the list whose birth year or reign date is disputed, you can tag that individual. Arbeiten8 (talk) 12:31, 16 September 2024 (UTC)