Angus McLellan wrote:
If you write about some dead C19th official, you'll likely be using a book as a source for the article so verifiability is no problem, you'll be unlikely to run into blp as everyone concerned is dead, you probably won't manage to add too much original research unless you try really hard, you're unlikely to have an axe to grind, which only really leaves not to worry about. As for nobody objecting, they might if the subject is a baronet, or if the book you used wasn't in English, or worse yet not in the Latin alphabet, and there are no ghits.
Write about some rapper you're a fan of, or a TV programme you watch, and there's likely no book, you may or may not be neutral, like as not we'll get novel - and probably wrong, unless you're a real-life expert
- conclusions drawn from listening and/or watching, living people are
in there, and the chances are good that some sort of stuff which wikipedia is not gets involved.
I've actually written both (though I wasn't a fan of the rapper), and both were about equally well-referenced and notable, and only the rapper was deleted. For the 19th-century government officials, often my sources are a New York Times from their archive of 1800s news articles; for the contemporary pop culture, often the sources are... a more recent New York Times article. But it turns out there are no implacable foes of minor government officials, so I've never run into objectors there. I suspect this has something to do with a highculture/lowculture distinction that endures on Wikipedia even if it's been mostly discarded by academics who write on culture.
-Mark