You are describing original research. Putting together information you have gathered from various sources and creating a sort of biography. But it is a pseudobiography, without substantial reference to the person described, except as they have received incidental media coverage. A golem you yourself have breathed life into.
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: MacGyverMagic/Mgm [mailto:macgyvermagic@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, April 9, 2007 05:48 AM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Opt Out for Not So Notable Biographies
A newspaper article usually goes into detail about a specific event. Biographies discusses a person's entire life. If you require someone to already have a published biography, it looks like you want to delete articles which can be written based on multiple newspaper sources rather than one biography. (Either that or we have some semantic issues again). Thing is, Wikipedia is often the only place that bothers to put all the biographical info about someone in one place. Just because no one collected the info before doesn't make them any less notable. The info is there. We need to judge notability one what someone did. If someone wrote about them, it provides the sources. But the way that was done has no bearing on their notability.
Mgm
On 4/9/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/8/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
From: Thomas Dalton [mailto:thomas.dalton@gmail.com] Define "Not so notable". If you can do that well, then this idea might have merit, but currently it is far too vague and will just result in arguments over notability, rather than over content.
Not so notable is the rough dividing line between public figures and
those who are not. George W. Bush is a public figure as as most of those who regularly appear in the media. Those whose doings are not ordinarily covered by the media are not public figures, although something interesting may have happened to them and there has been spot coverage.
One way to determine notability sufficient to justify a Wikipedia biography is whether that person has already had a biography published by a reliable third-party source, either in a form of a newspaper article or a book. If we were to adopt a "no first biography" criterion, it would ensure not only that our subjects are truly notable, but would also help to ensure accuracy, because we'd have a published biography to base the Wikipedia article on.
Sarah
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