On 4/8/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 4/8/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Not so notable is the rough dividing line between public figures and those who are not. George W. Bush is a public figure as as most of those who regularly appear in the media. Those whose doings are not ordinarily covered by the media are not public figures, although something interesting may have happened to them and there has been spot coverage.
This is all very vague ("the media") and would IMHO lead to a loss of useful biographies of scientists, authors, inventors, and other individuals who are not celebrities, but whose work is continuous and relevant.
I think if one wants to institute such a policy, a good test would be whether the person's notability is the result of a _continuing_ record of activities (which are verifiable), rather than a singular event.
Incidentally, a person like Daniel Brandt (who has been covered throughout the years for his activism) meets that criterion, whereas someone like Brian Peppers (who is notable only because of an Internet phenomenon) does not.
We do not lose much if we give up articles about the occasional media sensation and Internet meme. We do lose an awful lot if we allow everyone who is not a media figure to delete themselves.
How much do we really lose, though? We have, at the moment, upward of 150,000 biographies of living individuals; as a class, they substantially outnumber any other area of Wikipedia. Now, how many of those are going to be (a) of borderline notability and (b) insistent on having their article removed? A thousand? Ten thousand? We could delete articles by the hundreds without making a substantial dent in our overall coverage.
Sure, we won't have as many biographies of obscure bloggers and whatnot; but is the benefit of not having to deal with legal threats, the harassment of editors, the scathing stories in the New York Times, and whatever else the subjects can throw at us not worth this? Do we really need those articles *that* badly?
Kirill