On 24 March 2012 11:25, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
*We are currently lousy at judging "ephemeral notability", and issues around it seem to be classic time-sinks. There is a bigger picture here, and digging around in older biographical dictionaries can help to explain what is going on.
This is an excellent point (along with the rest of the posts from Charles and Andreas). I was thinking explicitly of the sense you get of what constitutes a 'proper' biography when reading how it was done in the past (especially the 19th-century Dictionary of National Biography and the 2004 update/expansion/revision of that, the ODNB). If you spend your time reading and looking at numerous biographies across a wide range of subjects (as I do, both on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and as Charles does), then you get a good sense of what sources are used for a genuine biography, and what sources are features of more ephemeral biographies.
Other biographical sources I'm familiar with include the Australian and Canadian dictionaries of national biography, the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society journal, the similar publication in the USA, produced by (I think) the National Academy of Sciences for their members, and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
The point about Wikipedia (for BLPs) being ahead of the proper sources to use is another excellent one. There is a natural progression to biographical sources that (for obvious reasons) parallels the subject's life. People record their own lives at first (diaries, letters, CVs and the like), and then gradually others start to write about that person and you get short descriptions such as author and contributor biographies, and short news items. Then, as someone becomes more prominent, you get more considered material, such as interviews, feature articles, and so on. Very prominent people get official and official biographers that document that person's life (e.g. US Presidents and some other politicians). Towards the end of someone's career, you may get tribute articles and the like. Then, when the person dies, you get obituaries, and then (possibly) entries in the histories relevant to that person. Very prominent people get entire books written about them. Others get less.
If Wikipedia jumps into that natural progression too early, and tries to establish, or maintain, a biography before there are sources to support one, the result can be a mess. Even if done carefully, it can still be a problem. I mentioned the example of Robert E. M. Hedges, who's article I've just been updating. If I hadn't updated that article, it likely would have remained without an update until more material was published. In all four cases I've given as examples of BLPs that I've created or edited extensively, I've felt uncomfortable at times that I was doing what should, properly, be left until the right moment for those people's colleagues and peers to do - write that person's life story (in some ways, the difference between an authorised and unauthorised biography). That is why it is important to have the foundation of a proper biographical source to build on, not go too far, and to be clear that BLPs are always a work in progress, waiting for the definitive accounts to be written by others (and then summarised and incorporated into the Wikipedia article).
There are other examples, but I'll leave those for another time.
Carcharoth
Zee problem with this standard is that it would preclude having an article on the person currently running mali (admittedly the article isn't up to much but I think it could be argued that we should at least try).