[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Charles Matthews]

Carcharoth wrote:
> The interesting thing is noting at what point someone reaches some
> critical mass of *real* notability (i.e. not Wikipedia's definition of
> it) and they start to gain widespread recognition from their peers,
> and then start receiving awards and whatnot, and also how competent
> those writing biographies and obituaries are, and whether someone
> makes the cut for being included in Who's Who and things like the
> Dictionary of National Biography, or specialised biographies.
>   
As you say, not our definition, and more like an old-fashioned attempt 
to distill out "distinction" in a field.
> There are many people we have biographies for who will never reach
> that standard, and for which there will not be comprehensive
> biographical material unless some researcher goes and writes a
> biography (which does happen more often than you might think).
>
> It would easily be possible in some cases for Wikipedians to scrape
> together material, but there needs to be some "verdict from history",
> from a reliable authority in the field, for such articles to be
> anything more than biographical newspaper clippings.
>   
The current situation, applying to say businesspeople, is that they may 
well be interviewed but are unlikely to be the subject of serious, 
archival research in "real time" - while they are in business. (Example 
of interest to me - I realised a few days ago I have may have met Sergey 
Brin of Google, when he was six years old, since I certainly met his 
father shortly after he left the USSR. I probably can't know whether the 
rest of the family was around at that date in 1979, until a biographer 
goes over the whole ground.)
> The final verdict on whether an article on someone is sustainable is
> sometimes not clear until several decades after they have died - or
> even longer - there are people publishing biographical material about
> World War I generals today (there were over 1000 of them in the
> British Army alone), but consider someone in 2050 considering who to
> write about from our time - unless material gets deposited in an
> archive and there are enough reasons for someone to study that
> person's life in detail, many of those we have articles on will have
> nothing more written about them. Ever.
>
> Most people get nothing written about them. Some only get a bit
> written about them, and an obituary. Only a very few get their lives
> pored over in great detail with multiple biographies published about
> them. We should draw the line somewhere, and in a way that is easy to
> assess.
>   
Well, your last sentence combined with the first one certainly sums up 
the problem: we operate with WP-notability, not (say) ODNB-distinction, 
and in our tradition notability is supposed, like everything else, to be 
defined in simple abstract terms. No matter how often one points out 
that the notability concept we have is actually broken, and always has 
been, the thing won't lie down and die. Because there is nothing slick 
to replace it with.

And people want slick. The actual editorial process is not slick, and/or 
things go wrong on the site all the time. I don't find it helpful that 
WP:V is used as a sufficient as well as a necessary condition for 
inclusion, given WP:NOT, and I do sometimes wonder if the people I'm 
arguing with have even got that far. WP is supposed not to be an 
indiscriminate collection of information, but the line-drawing involved 
in being discriminating is not easy.

Charles