Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/COVID-19 pandemic death rates by country

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 keep. Sandstein 06:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

COVID-19 pandemic death rates by country[edit]

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This article was created a few days ago without any discussion that I am aware of, and it is essentially a fork of information already present on the many COVID-19 deaths pages that already exist. The deaths section of COVID-19 pandemic now has hatnotes for four pages (COVID-19 pandemic deaths, Mortality due to COVID-19, COVID-19 pandemic death rates by country, and List of deaths due to COVID-19), three of which are grouped in the {{Main page}} hatnote and none of which are all that easily distinguishable by their title alone. There's also country-specific death information at COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory. Put together, this is going to overwhelm any reader seeking clear information and fracture the work of editors trying to maintain pages in this area. I politely raised these issues at the talk page and received a somewhat hostile reply from the page's creator that makes it pretty clear they are not interested in integrating the page into the larger network of COVID-19 pages, so I think it needs to go. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:21, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:21, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Look at the page views banner at the top here: Talk:COVID-19 pandemic death rates by country. This page is already very popular in only a few days. It's obviously filling a need not provided by the other articles. Specifically, the number of deaths per population by country. The title of the article is very specific. Spin-off articles like this are common concerning COVID-19. Due to the extreme length of the main articles. See the many COVID-19 articles linked in the navbox: {{2019-nCoV}}. I only see one other source for this info in one place, Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita, and it died long ago. It is not in any articles since it is no longer updated. Probably because it looks like a nightmare to maintain. Updates on the article I created only take a few minutes. See how here: User:Timeshifter/Sandbox107. And we are not supposed to link to templates as separate articles. The info in that template needs to be in a separate article with normal size text in a table that expands to its full length without scrolling. I have done a lot of editing on Help:Table and Help:Sorting. So I know what people want. --Timeshifter (talk) 22:03, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita is in COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory, although it was commented out recently because of some issues with Wikidata, where it automatically draws its data from (once Wikidata gets their act together and the table is restored, it'll require no maintenance at all). But AfD is not the place to debate the best method of updating tables, and as I mentioned to you at the talk page, I think your approach has promise and could potentially be implemented more widely. The question here is whether we need yet another new article for this, and I think we pretty clearly don't. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:18, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You write: "another new article for this". As far as I can tell right now there is no other article, nor subsection of an article, that has an up-to-date complete country list for the number of deaths per 100,000 population by country. Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita hasn't been edited since June 17, 2020. --Timeshifter (talk) 23:15, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 04:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep or merge to another article where the table can be kept up to date and useful. I think at least during the pandemic that is going to be easiest to insure in a stand alone article. I think it would help if we could find reliable sources that discuss the differences from country to country in determining which deaths to count. We now know people died of this disease or at least with this disease before it was widely being diagnosed (some evidence suggests outside China deaths in 2019), there are in many cases complex multiple factors contributing to deaths, and so we would benefit from discussions of how the availability of testing, willingness to mass test and various determinations of cause of death may effect the overall death rate that is reported for different countries.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:19, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
KEEP The news media does cover this regularly. The news in any nation mention their updated death numbers. Dream Focus 14:32, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
KEEP A significant statistic being reported more frequently. It is not well presented on any other page and probably cannot be. Perhaps the list can also be expanded to explain any difference in reporting methods and anomalies in the data. Even my friend JPL voted keep and I think this is only the second time I have seen that word associated to his name. Congratulations, KEEP up the good work. Trackinfo (talk) 02:24, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject COVID-19. Reason: Relevant WikiProject. Sdkb (talk) 21:55, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment There's no question that the content is valuable. The proposer is questioning where the content is presented and if it needs its own page. In general, agree that the number of breakout topics relating to COVID-19 data is getting confusing. Hopefully, we can find some consensus on the best approach to organize this content based on WP:PGL ...!votes aren't summed. Presenting the data in a scrollbox within COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory seems reasonable though there may be usability concerns. In my mind, the ideal would be to merge this calculation into the Template:COVID-19 pandemic data table. WP:OTHERSTUFF and WP:POPULARPAGE are not the strongest arguments. - Wikmoz (talk) 05:23, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory is part of these 2 massive categories:

Category:COVID-19 pandemic by country

Category:COVID-19 pandemic by continent

The regional and country info in COVID-19 pandemic should be moved to the articles in those categories. In order to shorten the length of COVID-19 pandemic.

This list article should remain separate because as with most country lists people want to go to one place to quickly get important specific stats without it being buried in other material they are not interested in.

What I see useful in Template:COVID-19 pandemic data is the historical record of all the data sources worldwide. I believe that history, and those many references, should be pulled out as a separate article titled something like "History of COVID-19 pandemic data collection worldwide". Much of that history is probably already in the many COVID-19 country articles.

I have created and worked on many tables. Successful, regularly updated country lists come from one source. Not many sources. That is why for this country list I am happy that John Hopkins University is doing that consolidation of data, and not me.

There would be no easy way to merge the data from this article into Template:COVID-19 pandemic data. As I said country lists with many sources are vastly more time-consuming. And they have constant referee problems as to which data to accept. And this table's data has everything the template has except the recovered numbers. Those are bogus numbers anyway since there is a vast pool of people who have already had COVID-19 but were never listed as confirmed cases, and therefore not as recovered cases.

And scrolling country lists are a terrible way to present data.

One easy way to make the template into an historical record would be to delete all the data columns, and just keep the country column and the references column. And expand the length of the template so there is less scrolling, or no scrolling. Eventually remove the table from the template altogether. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:42, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Timeshifter, I'm inclined to agree with you about centralizing sourcing from Johns Hopkins. (The one difference is that I think the data should be automatically imported to and centralized at Wikidata, which is actually designed as a data repository, unlike here. Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita is set up to import it once Wikidata finishes setting that up.) But there has been substantial prior discussion about how to source COVID-19 data, so that's something to be brought up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject COVID-19, since it's not your or my unilateral decision to make. Your table calculates the case fatality rate from the confirmed cases and confirmed deaths and presents each of those, so what you're essentially trying to do here is replicate Template:COVID-19 pandemic data and stick it in a new forked article. Again, we're not objecting to the way you're getting the data, which is not something to discuss at AfD, but rather to the need for a new separate article. With a topic as sprawling as the pandemic, it's essential to eliminate content forks, rather than creating a new version of a thing whenever we're unsatisfied with the current one. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:10, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is no need to use Wikidata as an intermediary in this process of creating a table. Especially if you are using one source for the data. See: User:Timeshifter/Sandbox107. It lists 3 different methods of converting the Johns Hopkins table into table wikitext almost instantly. And as I said, a scrolling template is a terrible way to present a country list. --Timeshifter (talk) 20:26, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's no need to use Wikidata if we're selfish enough to not care about the 85% of the world that doesn't speak English. Otherwise yes, there's a need to centralize there, after which it can be automatically imported here (there's a big difference between your almost automatic and actually automatic). But if you want to argue against Wikidata, fine, go do that at the appropriate forum, WT:19. But it's not relevant to the question at hand here, and as Wikmoz pointed out, a closer acting based on policy is unlikely to give any weight to the main keep rationales presented so far. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 07:01, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sdkb, no one is stopping you, or anybody else, from using other methods, whether using Wikidata or other tools, to create country list tables with the names of the countries in multiple languages. But right now it doesn't exist for country tables with the number of deaths per 100,000 population by country. I can't help because I know little about Wikidata. I know of no Wikipedia policy that says we should delete pages just because someone hopes a better page (or template) will eventually show up. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:01, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It does exist at Template: COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita; the difference between deaths per 100,000 population and deaths per million population is trivial. And the WP:REDUNDANTFORK guideline is the one that says we don't respond to flawed pages by creating new ones, but rather by improving the existing ones. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:55, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sdkb, there is no redundant article, because there is no article using that template. And it has a zillion references. That makes it difficult to embed in articles. And Wikipedia does not want linking happening to templates. So it needs to be in a separate page. I just created that separate page. And it only has one reference for the table. As I said earlier, country lists that use a single source are much easier to maintain, and by fewer people. And they are more likely to stay updated. And I don't see multiple languages for that template. --Timeshifter (talk) 17:33, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep well documented by reliable sources. Valoem ^talk ^contrib 03:43, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The issues raised with this page have absolutely nothing to do with lack of documentation or sourcing. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:30, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Timeshifter and Trackinfo above. // Timothy :: talk 23:35, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep (or merge, if possible): I find the information quite helpful especially when it is required to compare the death rates of different countries and if that can be provided somewhere else then I'd support the merge proposal. But in the absence of such proposal, I wouldn't want such valuable information to go waste.--Deepak G Goswami (talk) 16:00, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep per Timeshifter. It does seem to be sourced information not available currently in other articles which has some practical use, and it does seem there would be practical difficulties in adding it into other pages. It would be useful to know what "nan" means in the table, though. Grutness...wha? 16:17, 28 July 2020 (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.