User:Edwardx/sandbox5

Net worth - presentation in infoboxes

There have been two recent(ish) village pump discussions of issues around net worth, When is it appropriate to include net worth in a BLP in April 2016, and Net Worth in January 2015.

My concerns are about how we should choose to present net worth in infoboxes for people (primarily BLPs) for whom it is uncontroversially appropriate to have such information in infoboxes, namely billionaire businesspeople and their heirs.

If we look at the infoboxes of the world's three richest people, Bill Gates (#1 on Forbes 2017 list, #339 on Topviews for June 2017), Warren Buffett (#1 on Forbes, #505 on Topviews), Jeff Bezos (#3 on Forbes, #293 on Topviews), we see that in their infoboxes, for "net worth" we use "US$89 billion (June 2017)", and by way of a reference, a link to their Forbes bio, which only shows their "real time net worth", Bill Gates (except for Buffett, which is uncited). In each case the date given is June, May and June, 2017).

Forbes is the dominant source for such data, although Bloomberg and country-specific sources such as the Sunday Times Rich List (STRL, for UK-based people), are sometimes used. The problem essentially arises from how readers and editors choose to access the Forbes data.

Forbes produces an annual list each March, and if you click through to someone's Forbes bio from there, you get two (usually) different net worth figures, "real time net worth" and "2017 billionaires net worth" (although for reasons I cannot fathom the annual list figure is "as of 22 June 2017", rather than March when the list came out). However, if you were to access a Forbes bio via a search engine, Forbes would deliver essentially the same page, but without the "2017 billionaires net worth" figure.

For some months, I have been trying to remove and from infobox net worth figures (I know they look pretty), leaving the edit summary, "Using {{increase}} or {{decrease}} is meaningless and possibly misleading, without any sense of timescale. We use it for for companies because they have regular reporting periods."

Other users have been trying to come up with alternative approaches that might allow for the valid use of and in the infobox. For example Dietrich Mateschitz, but this leads to infobox clutter, imparting little of value to the reader, and with a more recent net worth figure in the lead, it seems like overkill. Roman Abramovich tries to use the Forbes annual net worth figure, adding an STRL one for good measure, but there is no cited basis for using ({{unchanged}}). Indeed the further net worth commentary in the lead suggests that would be more appropriate. And what about Elizabeth Holmes Elizabeth Holmes' Forbes bio, whose net worth was overnight slashed from 4.5 billion to Zero. Surely that merited not waiting until the annual update?

It is hard work and unnecessary to police editors to only use the annual figure. Much better to have "US$88.8 billion (July 2017)" in the infobox, describe them as a "billionaire businessman" in the lead, and if any editor wants to, add a "Net worth" section documenting the ups and downs, citing each annual list.