Wikipedia:Obituaries as sources
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Obituaries published by high-quality reliable sources are often treated as valuable sources for articles on deceased individuals, since they provide a broad overview of the subject's life. The term "obituary" is sometimes applied to paid death notices, as well as news obituaries.
A person who has a news obituary (and not a paid death notice) in a national quality[1] newspaper, such as The New York Times or The Times, is usually notable.
An individual obituary should be evaluated for bias in the same way as any other historical source, using the methods normally used by professional historians to evaluate historical sources for bias. Janice Hume, the author of a study of 8,000 American obituaries published between 1818 and 1930, claimed in a subsequent article that obituaries often did not include negative information about the deceased.[2]
William MacDonald, the obituaries editor of The New York Times, said that the obituaries in that newspaper are not intended to eulogize the deceased person.[3] Nigel Farndale, the obituaries editor of The Times, said that he aims for obituaries that are "balanced accounts" and "deadpan in style", and which do not read like a hagiography.[4]
Likewise, due to this tendency towards eulogy, obituaries may emphasize aspects of a subject's life that are not particularly significant otherwise, such as philanthropy or charitable donations.
While eulogies are written to summarize the subject's entire life, they are also, ultimately, only a snapshot of how people felt about them at a particular moment in time; in that respect relying too heavily on a eulogy for a recently-deceased individual may lean towards WP:RECENTISM in that it over-emphasizes the feelings and focus evoked by their death. When covering the reaction to their death is the intent, an obituary is generally a WP:PRIMARY source.
An obituary written shortly after a person's death will not include the findings of any subsequent research by historians and biographers (if there is any) and may in that respect be out of date.
Where obituaries emphasise something that is not emphasised in other coverage (such as other biographies) of the deceased, you might need to consider whether it would be due weight for a Wikipedia biography to emphasise that. Where other coverage of the deceased emphasises something that is not emphasised in obituaries, you might need to consider whether it would be due weight for a Wikipedia biography to emphasise that. For example, a news article about a particular incident in someone's life is not a biography, and might not reflect what is due weight for a biography. Similarly, a hundred obituaries might carry more weight than a single news article about a particular incident (WP:PROPORTION).
Paid obituaries, or those that are published by private individuals, are self-published sources that are wholly or primarily about a third party (the deceased) and which may be partly about other third parties as well. They should never be used as third-party sources about living people. (WP:BLP applies, in some cases, to the recently deceased.)
References[edit]
- ^ These were traditionally broadsheets
- ^ Hume, Janice. "Write ill of the dead? Obits rarely cross that taboo as they look for the positive in people's lives". The Conversation. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
- ^ "How The Times decides who gets an obituary". The New York Times. 15 August 2022.
- ^ He also said "obituaries are supposed to be life–affirming, not gloomy": Writing obituaries can be strangely life-affirming. The Spectator. 9 May 2020.