The living legends, and the chance each has of leaving us in the next twelve months. Age does most of the work; a publicly known illness, sex, field and country move it from there. Living legends are people with a Wikipedia article in 50 or more languages.
Still here, though by the odds they more likely than not would have gone since 1 January 2021. Long may they keep it up.
Your own watch list: up to 10 people, added here or with "Watch" on Still with us. Picks stay in this browser only and nothing is sent anywhere. A pick who passes after you picked them scores 100 minus their twelve-month odds when picked, so long shots count for more.
Each year from 2022 the odds were fitted only on the years before it, then asked about that year. This is how close they came.
What moves the odds
Multipliers on the yearly death rate from the full fit (1.0 = no change).
The years
People, dates, causes and places come from Wikidata; portraits from Wikimedia Commons. Causes are only what has been recorded publicly, and many are blank. Odds are a statistical estimate over many people, never a forecast about any one person.
Why this exists
Every so often a name comes across the news and it lands like losing someone you knew. They sang the songs we grew up on, played the characters we quoted, argued the causes we cared about. This page is a place to remember them together, one face at a time, and to keep count of the legends still with us.
It began with a simple question: if you looked at everyone notable who has died in the last few years, could you see who the years were weighing on most? The answer is mostly age, and sometimes a fight we all watched them have in public. The odds here are kept with that in mind: gently, and never as a prediction about any one person.
No money, no bets
Nothing on this site takes money or pays out. "My picks" is a quiet game that lives only in your own browser. There are no accounts, no ads, no cookies and no tracking.
Candles
You can light one candle for each person remembered here, once, and the count is shared so you can see how many others have stopped to remember them too. No sign-in is needed. To keep each candle meaning one person, your browser keeps a random code; the site stores only a scrambled form of it that cannot be turned back into anything, plus a one-day code for your connection that is thrown away at midnight. Nothing else about you is kept.
Give in their memory
When the cause of a loss is an illness, the tribute panel links to a long-established charity working on it, straight to that charity's own donation page. We chose each one by hand, we take nothing and there are no affiliate links. Every gift goes from you to them. Most are US charities; if you know a good one elsewhere, tell us.
How the odds work
We take everyone with at least 20 Wikipedia pages about them (a rough measure of how widely they are known), follow each of them through every year since 2021, and fit how often people of each age, sex, field and region died, along with any illness they had made public. That gives each living person a chance of leaving us in the next twelve months. Each year the odds are also tested against a year they had not seen; the results are on "How the odds did", including where they miss.
Odds are a group estimate. Many people with long odds live for years, and sudden losses (accidents, overdoses, violence) cannot be seen coming by anything here.
Where it comes from
- People, dates, places and causes: Wikidata, the free knowledge base behind Wikipedia (CC0). Causes appear only when they have been recorded publicly.
- Portraits: Wikimedia Commons. Every photo is freely licensed (public domain or Creative Commons); the photographer and licence are shown under each portrait in its tribute panel. Photos are shown at their source and not altered beyond the black and white on the memorial wall.
- The living roster is found with QLever (University of Freiburg), a fast mirror of Wikidata.
- "Read their story" opens the person's English Wikipedia article.
- "Remembered for": the films and shows they are best known for, and other notable work, as recorded on Wikidata. Each film links to its page on IMDb, and the IMDb button to theirs; nothing is copied from IMDb, and this site is not affiliated with it.
- Type: Cormorant Garamond and Inter, both under the SIL Open Font License.
How often it updates
A small script checks a few times a day whether Wikipedia's list of this month's deaths has changed, and refreshes the month when it has; once a day it re-reads this month and last; once a week it refreshes the living roster. It asks the Wikimedia servers slowly and politely, and stops if they say slow down. New losses usually appear here within a few hours of being recorded on Wikidata.
Corrections and care
If something is wrong, or you are family or a friend and would like a photo or an entry changed or taken down, write to world@ai-ministries.com and it will be handled kindly and quickly. Most details come straight from Wikidata, so fixing it there helps everyone.
We Lost Another One is a non-commercial memorial made by AI Ministries. It is not affiliated with Wikipedia, Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation or any of the people remembered here.