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.
Delete - Statistically almost everyone has a 1/365 chance of dying on their birthday. May not seem high, but when you intersect that with the sheer number of articles that the project does or can have on various dead people the list coulde potentially be very large. And still be very trivial. - TexasAndroid16:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep - let me explain. It does have some notability in my opinion, however it would need an extensive rewrite, and if the page is available in four other langauges (Korean, Bahasa, Portuguese & Swedish), could it be satisfactory enough to meet their standards? Rudget Contributions17:21, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. It's not 1/365.25 chance of dying on your birthday, it's a 1/365.25 chance of dying on a particular day. That day has a 1/365.25 chance of being your birthday. So, really, the chance of dying on your birthday is 0.0000749%, or 1 in about 133,400. Much rarer, but it's still an indiscriminate list, which is a no-no. Delete per nom. ZZClaims~ Evidence18:11, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not great at statistics, so I cannot debunk Ultraexactzz systematically, but I'm pretty sure he is wrong. Once you fix the birthdate, at birth, you only have one random value in play, the death date, which should have a 1/365 chance of ending up on *any* *specific* day, including the birthday. (And let's leave leap days out of an already messy discussion. :)) - TexasAndroid18:33, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A little more. Let's examine the same problem in a world with only two days in a year, to simplify things. If my birthday is on day 1, then I can either die on day 1, or day 2. In either case, I have a 1/2 chance of dying on my birthday. If we take a random person on this weird world, then there are only four cases for b-day/D-day combinations: 1:1, 1:2, 2:1, or 2:2. But again, even though we do not know what the B-day is of this random person, there is still a 1/2 chance of both days being the same. 2 hits out of 4 possibilities, for 1/2. This expands out. For a random person in a world of a 3-day year, the pairs are 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 2:1, 2:2, 2:3, 3:1, 3:2, and 3:3. Again, 3 hits out of 9 possibilities, for a 1/3 chance of the two being the same. And it corresponds directly up to the 365 day real world. 133,400 possibilities, 365 of those are hits, so for a random person, they have 365/133,400 or 1/365 chance of the two being the same. - TexasAndroid18:48, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
My Math = the fail. With a fixed birthdate, which everyone has, you're right, it's only one in 365.25 (averaging for leap year). So much for me being clever. ^_^ ZZClaims~ Evidence19:49, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Delete — statistics aside, why is this a notable, or important means of classifying people? It seems trivial to me. --Haemo20:37, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - For the statistics buffs above, I submit to you the fact that the odds of dying while in a streetcar are almost 1 in 4 million, much rarer than dying on one's birthday. If this article is here because it's rare to die on one's birthday, then I say that we must write List of people who died while riding in a streetcar. (Seriously, though, the article has got to go, as Wikipedia articles are not supposed to be collections of loosely-associated items.) --Hnsampat23:23, 7 November 2007 (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.