Carcharoth wrote:
The interesting thing is noting at what point someone
reaches some
critical mass of *real* notability (i.e. not Wikipedia's definition of
it) and they start to gain widespread recognition from their peers,
and then start receiving awards and whatnot, and also how competent
those writing biographies and obituaries are, and whether someone
makes the cut for being included in Who's Who and things like the
Dictionary of National Biography, or specialised biographies.
As you say, not our definition, and more like an old-fashioned attempt
to distill out "distinction" in a field.
There are many people we have biographies for who will
never reach
that standard, and for which there will not be comprehensive
biographical material unless some researcher goes and writes a
biography (which does happen more often than you might think).
It would easily be possible in some cases for Wikipedians to scrape
together material, but there needs to be some "verdict from history",
from a reliable authority in the field, for such articles to be
anything more than biographical newspaper clippings.
The current situation, applying to say businesspeople, is that they may
well be interviewed but are unlikely to be the subject of serious,
archival research in "real time" - while they are in business. (Example
of interest to me - I realised a few days ago I have may have met Sergey
Brin of Google, when he was six years old, since I certainly met his
father shortly after he left the USSR. I probably can't know whether the
rest of the family was around at that date in 1979, until a biographer
goes over the whole ground.)
The final verdict on whether an article on someone is
sustainable is
sometimes not clear until several decades after they have died - or
even longer - there are people publishing biographical material about
World War I generals today (there were over 1000 of them in the
British Army alone), but consider someone in 2050 considering who to
write about from our time - unless material gets deposited in an
archive and there are enough reasons for someone to study that
person's life in detail, many of those we have articles on will have
nothing more written about them. Ever.
Most people get nothing written about them. Some only get a bit
written about them, and an obituary. Only a very few get their lives
pored over in great detail with multiple biographies published about
them. We should draw the line somewhere, and in a way that is easy to
assess.
Well, your last sentence combined with the first one certainly sums up
the problem: we operate with WP-notability, not (say) ODNB-distinction,
and in our tradition notability is supposed, like everything else, to be
defined in simple abstract terms. No matter how often one points out
that the notability concept we have is actually broken, and always has
been, the thing won't lie down and die. Because there is nothing slick
to replace it with.
And people want slick. The actual editorial process is not slick, and/or
things go wrong on the site all the time. I don't find it helpful that
WP:V is used as a sufficient as well as a necessary condition for
inclusion, given WP:NOT, and I do sometimes wonder if the people I'm
arguing with have even got that far. WP is supposed not to be an
indiscriminate collection of information, but the line-drawing involved
in being discriminating is not easy.
Charles