Cause of death categories

Question

The categorization of causes of death seems a bit adhoc. Should there be a high-level category "Cause of Death" with others grouped below it? There's already a category "Accidental Deaths" and a few others like "Deaths from Tuberculosis", which is a subcategory of "Tuberculosis" ... obviously you can suffer a disease without dying from it.

We also have "Gunshot" as a subcategory of "Accidental Deaths" with "Accidental Gun Deaths" as a subcategory. This is pretty silly.

I found somebody who died from a gunshot, recorded as homicide in his death certificate, but there don't seem to be any relevant categories, either for non-accidental gunshot deaths, nor for homicides.

Edit: there's a claim that a top-level category was created, but I can't see it: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/423790/cause-of-death-category

Comments

That post you linked to is from 2017. In 2019 there was overwhelming consensus for the deletion of the cause of death categories - see: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/773341/should-we-delete-category-causes-of-death?show=773341#q773341

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I see, thanks. There was no way to figure this out, by examining the categories, because some of the cause of death categories, typically accidental deaths and diseases, are still around.

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We didn't delete them all, though perhaps we should get to those.

We left diseases, since many of those are genetically inherited and run in families. But I never saw the need for a category like "drownings" or "suicides."

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It's also worthwhile to keep categories for people affected by disease outbreaks -- and diseases such as cholera  that are typically associated with outbreaks. Whether local or global, outbreaks of infectious disease can be important to be aware of when tracing the history of a family.or community.

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Some causes of death — such as self-inflicted in its various forms — may be genealogically important, though, when they relate to a state of mind the tendency toward which can be inherited.   It may not run in a direct line, because of cousins, etc.

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It's strange that there was "overwhelming consensus for deletion of the cause of death categories" and also people arguing to keep many of them on a case-by-case basis. If so many are going to be kept, they may as well be grouped together in a "Causes of Death" category, and a notice could be put there explaining which kinds of deaths are categorized, and which not (assuming anybody can figure it out).

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In Wikidata, there are actually two properties used. "Manner of death" has things like natural causes, homicide, accident, death in battle, etc., while "cause of death" is the reason somebody died without regard to intention, e.g., a gunshot wound could be from homicide, battle, accident, or capital punishment.

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Gary, WikiTree categories are groupings of profiles that share an attribute that makes the grouping relevant (or possibly relevant) to their genealogy.

Categories in Wikitree are not intended to be descriptors of a person. The fact that WikiData uses a particular set of properties as descriptors does not have bearing on whether they are appropriate as WikiTree categories.

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Fair enough, although it may still be considered in category naming/connections, e.g., accidental deaths wouldn't necessarily be a subcategory of causes of death.

Answer 1

Causes of death which are medical in nature such as epidemics and genetic or other diseases go under Health.  Somebody attached the ''Accidental deaths'' category to that parent (Health), which is truly a bit odd.  It's a category that should be parsed down, those that were part of a major disaster like train wreck etc would go under the Disasters categories.  The others, there is no logical reason to group them, accidents happen in all places and times, with no relevance to who the person was.

Murder victims used to be a category under now defunct Black Sheep project, you'll find it under Society > Law > Crime > Murder victims

Comments

Thanks, although the guy I found only had "homicide" in his death certificate, so it doesn't necessarily count as murder. However, it was evidently a non-accidental gun-related death.

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homicide is the judicial term for murder, the two are synonymous.

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My understanding is not, and Wikipedia seems to agree:

Homicides can be divided into many overlapping legal categories, such as murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, assassination, killing in war (either following the laws of war or as a war crime), euthanasia, and capital punishment, depending on the circumstances of the death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide