But you're not disagreeing with anything I said.
The amount of balance in an article between "accomplishments" (that is, what
makes the person notable) and "biography" (that is, the story of their life)
is handled by UNDUE. It doesn't really have anything to do with notability.
And it doesn't enforce, nor preclude, including whatever biographic details
the editors think is warranted.
If someone was a great lawyer, involved a number of famous cases, and their
article is half discussing their descent from the King of Portugal or
something, that is undue. It's also OR unless it is well-sourced, and even so those
sources might be unreliable ones.
A person's biography becomes important because they are, not the other way
round. Once the person has become important, that is when people want to read
their biography. Pick any biography in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and they
include mundane details that could apply to thousands of non-notable people
(born in London, married at an early age, slain in battle, blah blah) and yet
they include them. Those details are each not notable. It is because they
happened to a *person* who is notable, that is what makes those mundane
details encyclopedic.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 5:31:15 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com writes:
Couldn't disagree more. Articles about people are intended to give the
information that readers want. What they want ito know is what is
important about them. What is important about them is what they are
notable for. The personal life is not the important part. The
professional (artistic, political ,scientific, business,...) life is
the important part.
Please excuse my putting it almost all in words of one syllable, but
it's that basic.
For an example, look at Shakespeare: the textual part of the article
is 2/3 about the works, 1/3 about the biography. Same ratio for the
lede paragraphs. About the same ratio for the illustrations. About the
same ratio for the bibliography.
And this is for a literary author, the sort of personal where the
facts of the personal biography are generally thought especially
relevant to the work. And not any literary author, but one whose
disputed personal life has been of particular public interest for
centuries. It will be even higher for most other personal subjects.
Just for fun, I checked Bob Dylan, an article where the personal and
professional material is presented together, and it seems to be about
he same ratio. For Einstein, it's about 50-:50--I think because the
work needs to be discussed more technically, so it's mostly in
separate articles.
We write about what's notable. The personal life of a person is only
notable in relation to his accomplishments--if it were not for the
person's accomplishments, we wouldn't care about the life & we
wouldn't have an article i the first place. According to your
principal , we'd have the fullest articles for he people about whose
personal lives more was known, not the one's with the most
accomplishments.
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:53 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should
be about their life.
That is what biography means. The story of a life.
Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to
jail.
She is notable, and also she went to jail.
Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we
should present their biography.
If we wanted to only present, in a person's article, what they are notable
for, then we shouldn't have an article on the person at all, but rather on
the
incident, mentioning the person with that
incident-article.
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article.
It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 3:09:56 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com writes:
An article about a person should primarily be about what the person is
notable for.
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