Delirium wrote:
This seems to really be an issue specific to biographies of living or recently deceased people, for a variety of reasons. For non-recent people, say someone who died in the 19th century or earlier, just about everything that you can find in reliable sources is relevant. Certainly book-length biographies consider anything they can find relevant: the goal of a biography, properly speaking, is to try to give as full as possible an illustration of all facets of a person's life, figure out how they intertwined, etc.
OTOH - biographies have been subject to a kind of mission creep. A biography of Beethoven used to be 200 pages where you'd learn something of his life and character. Then it was 300. Biographies are now commonly 600 pages. And _serious_ biographies are huge: often now they are even trilogies. I bought one of Melville that is around 2000 pages. Michael Holroyd started to shorten his own long biographies.
To get back to the point: an article on Wikipedia is no substitute for a book-length treatment, if the latter and its detail is what you want. Defining it as "the WP biography of X should tell you whether or not you need to consult a full biography" says it better. I wish I knew the technique for filleting a biography to write the article (I don't write that way, but by building up a piece from various scraps and fragments); there is a big pile of biographies to the right of my desk and I'd be delighted to get rid of any from which the "salient" facts have been extracted already. The fact that I tend to use the biography of X to find verifiable facts about Y who crossed paths with X at some point tells its own story, I feel. I actually like the idea that Wikipedia articles printing to a few pages can give the essentials of a book. I'm not anti-academic - far from it - but there is a point in being anti-magpie.
Charles