Slim Virgin wrote:
There are people for whom there's what Fred called "spot coverage," because they did something interesting, but they're not overall notable.
This is some fallacious concept being cooked up. Either you're notable or not.
Along the lines of "John Smith is a British schoolteacher who came to public attention after being discovered on the floor naked during a geography class, having asked his pupils to draw a map of Europe on his genitals."
Which is notability, whether we like it or not.
I think we could fairly easily come up with a working definition of "notable borderline," where George Bush is at one end of the scale and our geography teacher at the other.
Not at all.
The point is that no news organization or encyclopedia would publish a biography of the geography teacher just because of that one incident.
Well, if a news organization isn't reporting it, we're not including it. That seems to be a valid standard to work with in terms of biographies of living people, even if we go way too far with it already. We're more than your standard encyclopedia, and we cover what's possible to cover. If John Smith is in the news, he's notable and we should consider inclusion.
We're currently asking the question "Why shouldn't Wikipedia publish biographies on everyone for whom reliable sources can be found?" but I think we should turn that on its head and ask "Why *should* we, given that no else does?"
Because we're better than everyone else, and we're better than to cow to the demands of our subjects.
If we were to adopt an opt-out clause for borderline notables, I think it would generate significant goodwill among the public, because this is seen as one of our major problems.
Among who? Our problems deal with reliability, with vandalism, and with trust. "Borderline notability" is hardly on the radar when you consider factual issues, Sinbad/Sieganthaler-style vandalism, and issues like the Essjay incident.
Building an encyclopedia is about building a wealth of knowledge, not creating some goodwill. If we're in the market for goodwill, then start a goodwill project, not an encyclopedia.
-Jeff