Talk:List of people from Anchorage

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sectioning and inclusion crieria

Now that this exists it is probably worth discussing a few things:

  • Should we divide the list into sections by occupation/reason for notability?
  • What, exactly, makes someone "from" Anchorage? Born there, lived there a few years, etc?

There's probably more but these are the two most pressing issues in my mind. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:58, 24 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think we may have a unique situation here. I've started going through the list entry-by-entry and what I am finding is that there a lot of people that were born in Anchorage, and that is basically their only connection. I suspect this is bloating the list with people who had a parent in the military or in the employ of an oil company and they "did their tour" in Alaska and then went home. We need to discuss if we want to keep these entries. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:48, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I was checking to see if Ted Nugent made the cut. He has a place in Eagle River, which is technically part of Anchorage, but it's just one of his many hunting houses and not a primary residence either. (I met him once when he gave a seminar at the Archery Shop.) The problem was I couldn't sift through all of that to see if he was even on the list. I think we should try to organize it better, even if it is just alphabetical order.
In my opinion, "born in" and "from" are two different things. For example, my mom was born in Montana, but moved here with her family when she was only three, oh ... shortly before WWII. She used to tell me stories about the air-raid sirens going off and having to hide in the basement with all the lights off. Now, she would get very upset if someone called her a Montanan. She was too young to remember the place, and she considers herself an Alaskan through and through. This is the only home she ever knew.
In a similar way, my good friend in high-school was born in Kenya and raised in Egypt, before his parents moved back to Alaska during his teens. Even though he's white, he considers himself an African American who is a native of Kenya but from Egypt (he's a citizen of all three countries). Technically, I guess, you could say that my mom is a native Montanan, because she was born there, just as I am a native Alaskan because I was born here (not to be confused with an Alaska Native), but where a person is "from" (as in "came from", as opposed to where they live currently) is where they grew up and developed into who they are, in my opinion. Zaereth (talk) 01:25, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking about it further, perhaps the first thing we should do is section it into different definitions of the word "from". We could divide it up by "born in", "came from", "passed through", and "lives currently". At that point it would be easier to decide if any of those sections merits inclusion, deletion, or perhaps a list-article of its own under a more-specific title. I think it would be a good place to start, before we start dividing by things like occupation. Zaereth (talk) 02:10, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]