Category talk:Deaths by type of illness

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what do the categories of deaths of common illnesses, like Category:Cancer_deaths, Category:Deaths from cardiovascular disease, and stroke add to Wikipedia? Wikipedia is not intended as a medical database. How is it related to a person's notability that a person died of these common illnesses? In nearly all cases it is unrelated and all those persons should be removed from these categories. Andries (talk) 11:47, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Why no cardiac?

Considering the other categories of particular diseases or groups by system, I'm astonished not to find one or more categories relating to cardiac conditions and heart disease. A question arose for the page Richard Pryor, appearing in Category:Deaths from multiple sclerosis, while Richard Pryor#Death cites a forensic pathology report giving the cause as "fatal heart attack ... caused by coronary artery disease." Is there some history of previous Categories deleted? How to proceed with this? -- Deborahjay (talk) 08:00, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Category:Deaths from cardiovascular disease and its subcats were deleted. Jim Michael (talk) 18:35, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

@Jim Michael: Where may I view the discussion of the rationale for its deletion? -- Deborahjay (talk) 15:03, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Click on the red link in my comment above and follow the links to the discussions. Jim Michael (talk) 19:04, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Or, if you prefer, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 December 20#Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:54, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Note that there are three links to related discussions within that discussion. Jim Michael (talk) 20:28, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

According to WP:CAT: The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to all Wikipedia pages in a hierarchy of categories which readers, knowing essential—defining—characteristics of a topic, can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics. I don't really think that the Illness which caused the Death of a person is really a essential—defining—characteristics of a topic --Info-Screen::Talk 08:21, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Comment, I would like to see all categories that define cause of death of notable people maintained on WP. A comment from 2008 user suggested that WP should not be a medical database. Wikipedia is already a medical database. This kind of categorization keyed in to Wikidata will lead to information that may have positive/negative effects on future health issues. As a medical editor, I scour dozens of medical journals for information. One type of reference that is unacceptable is called a case study. And though I read case studies, combining them is considered original research. What I have learned is that many medical discoveries have been made by the creative observations of clinicians who discover a link between the death of one person to others. Where else can this be done? Allowing cause of death categories contributes to the sum of all human knowledge and does not conflict in any way with having categories of cause of death. Illness has a catastrophic effect if it leads to the death of a person! It is an essential defining characteristic of a topic. To keep deleting categories generally harms this encyclopedia. Retain categories, tolerate redundancies and help readers find the information they need.

Best Regards,

  Bfpage  _{let's talk...}  20:59, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

• Comment Called by bot. Looking at the discussion that led to the deletion of the category, there was a consensus to containerize the category - that is, have a series of subcategories describing death caused by some specific variant of cardiovascular disease. The rationale was that cardiovascular disease in general is overly broad. However, I do not see subcategories - do these exist? I'd support reinstating the category: that plenty of people die from this should be an argument for, and not against a category. -Darouet (talk) 01:53, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
• Comment I would support creation of these categories through the standard procedure, which requires evidence that it could be populated. With such a thing as cause of death, most major ones are going to be feasible to populate a category with. Per User:Bfpage, categorization of things such as cause of death is more than helpful for a portion of our userbase, and there is no real reason to not provide something that can be net positive. Wikipedia 'is' becoming a medical database to some extent, and this just supports the use of our encyclopaedia to this purpose. Keira1996 04:12, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
• Comment As Darouet says the result should have been containerize, and yet it was bot deleted. Presumably the subcats were also deleted. This should be fixed. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 09:28, 8 February 2021 (UTC).