Personally, I think most articles could be improved if the research were done--but it would, as Mangoe says, often be non-trivial research, not the sort that any one of us can do on many articles a day--which is why most people make substantive contributions only to a limited range of subjects. Upon finding an apparently trivial bio on a contemporary subject, it is however almost always possible to do a quick check which would confirm or disprove the validity of many dubious articles. Sometimes in doing this it becomes clear that one can't tell, and then i think it reasonable to nominate for AfD so other people can see it. (It would never be appropriate to nominate for speedy if one were unsure oneself, and there is still no mechanism to ensure that prod's get the attention of the necessary subject groups). I can see the possibility of a more organized check by the people in these groups as a general matter (but the people checking the wide field of biography notability, however well-intentioned, can not possibly be doing it carefully at the speed they are going) DGG
On 6/10/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/10/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/10/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
Since it isn't, it gets put through AfD to force someone to put up a real reason. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, other than people write this kind of article in the first place instead of providing the notability themselves.
If you have been nominating, for deletion, articles which you believe could (or even should) be improved rather than deleted, please cease and desist right now.
Well, as a rule I don't nominate AfDs, though at times I do go through them. But even so, as a rule, I don't believe that articles can be improved unless I know something about the topic which I believe is notable and which the article doesn't include. For bio articles on people in notable positions, it's not up to me to search for some real notability about the person, and it is especially not up to me to dig up some personal detail to pad out such an article.
The thing about most such articles is that they can't be improved. I don't fight it personally, because every attempt I've made to get reasonable notability standards set up has been rebuffed by the combined forces of the "it's useful" crowd and the "you want to delete all my work" crowd. But I see lots of articles, especially bios, which could only really be justified by some considerable research, which might not turn up anything anyway. Someone putting a trivial, notability-less article doesn't obligate anyone else to do the work to prove its notability, and particularly in the case of BLPs I think such articles ought to be speedily deleted.
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