US coins depicting people still alive at the time

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1926 Sesquicentennial half dollar

 

I love this reference!

 

Elvis died in 1977 (allegedly). There are no US coins depicting him, but some foreign coins do. One from Sao Tome & Principe, of all places, and I think a few others. There are a lot of "post-mint alterations" where people put stickers of Elvis on quarters and half dollars.

There are indeed some coins depicting Sasquatch/Bigfoot; seen one from Niue and some Canadian maple leaves with a Sasquatch privy mark. There's also quite a few privately minted silver rounds depicting him. He's a popular subject apparently.

 

Oh indeed lol. It says a lot about Wikipedia editors how difficult it was to convince them of the pretty obvious fact that:
1. People modeling as abstract figures or other people shouldn't count, and
2. Even if they did count, the model for Sacajawea still wouldn't be the first woman on a US coin while still alive. Eunice Shriver beat her by 5 years, and many depictions of a female figure as Liberty were almost certainly based on models that were still alive at the time, if models were counted. (If models were not counted, Sacajawea's model would be disqualified anyway.)

(Side note: it's not entirely known when Sacajawea died: for a long time it was believed to be in 1882, which would make her 94 at the time, and that's what her monument claims, but there's a lot of doubt whether or not the woman buried there is actually Sacajawea. Other sources claim she died in 1812, which would make her 24 at the time; most historians accept this date as that death was at least actually witnessed by some people. At any rate she definitely wasn't still alive in 2000, when she would have been 212! I mentioned earlier that we don't even truly know what she looked like, as no portraits are known to exist that have been verified to be made of her by an artist that actually saw her during her lifetime. Any portraits of her are at best a pretty good guess at what she plausibly could have looked like.)

The funny thing is that assertion was contradicted by Wikipedia's own articles, but when I pointed that out they told me Wikipedia wasn't a reliable source. I pointed out that kind of reasoning was precisely why it wasn't regarded as a relaible source lol. And that well, Red Book, and the coins themselves, constituted sources that proved the assertion was inaccurate. Eventually that claim was removed by someone else entirely (also removed from the article on the woman that modeled for Sacajawea).

I like the idea of Wikipedia, and if anything it's as reliable or better than a lot of other printed encyclopedias, where if an error is made it would take a year to correct it. But despite their efforts bias of the editors creeps in, especially on controversial subjects, or subjects where a limited amount of sources exist on it. Still, it's a pretty decent compilation of general knowledge, and it's pretty accurate on most non-controversial subjects. But it feels a lot more difficult than it should be to correct information that is blatantly and provably wrong if an editor is convinced they're right about something. I kept trying to correct the Sacajawea dollar article on that assertion and almost got banned, being accused of vandalism of all things for trying to correct a statement that was self-evidently wrong. Many times I wondered whether it was worth fighting for lol but it just bugged me enough I didn't want to let it go. I don't have the kind of time or patience needed to be a Wikipedia editor I guess lol.

 

I think that's a characteristic of editors, not specifically Wikipedia...?