On 03/06/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Also, I still maintain that we are doing the subject something of a *service* by writing something *neutral* about this.
We are not. We are merely publicising her humiliation further. This is not helping *anyone*, least of all us - no matter how we posture here, we're not doing the right thing by continuing to publish a "neutral" account of how she became a sex object for the trivial amusement of the internet.
I think I want to discuss this a little further - it brings up a very interesting aspect of how we deal with people.
The Washington Post article is well written (with a couple of regrettably silly editorial glitches), tactfully executed, and touches on the interesting issues raised by this little frenzy. It's low-key; it's retroactively toned, presenting the story as the ongoing effects of a momentary burst of online idiocy. It's a human-interest story, and so is written from the victim's perspective, and as such gives her full and fair opportunity to pass comment, which she makes use of. It's a good example of how to write a story on this event - if you're going to suffer national press coverage, this is the least bad kind.
But it is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it remotely an appropriate topic for one. It's a passing news story about a passing Internet fad and its unwanted effects on the life of a *private individual*.
It is appropriate to cover as a human-interest news story. It is not appropriate to transform into a significant event in the historical literature, which is what we are effectively trying to do - it certainly isn't appropriate to do so whilst the proverbial ink is still wet.
If we have this article, we are asserting, like it or not: a) this person is of fundamental importance to human knowledge; b) because she's pretty. If she was famous in her own right, a clear public figure, it would be different, perhaps appropriate to mention it in passing (if done right). But she's not; she's an eighteen-year-old high school athlete who did pretty well, and got in the newspaper for other reasons.
[and let us now begin to generalise...]
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The continuing inclusion/exclusion arguments have gone on for years and will continue to go on, and we keep asserting some fleeting way of defining "notability" - have they done this, scored so highly on that, published X many books or worked for Y organisation or won the Z Award? Taking no sides, it's not unreasonable to say that our average threshold for inclusion is gradually lowering over time with regards to individuals - if not in principle then certainly in practice, as we gradually "fill up" the lower-importance slots. We bicker about the line to draw, but the community is mostly accepting that "notability" is a critical pass-or-fail test involved in the editorial decision of whether or not to include an article.
Which is fair enough. I've written about a few semi-notable figures myself, and been quite pleased with the results. (Oddest hobby Wikipedia has driven me to: researching the lives of mid-ranking naval officers of the French Revolutionary Wars. They had such unusual careers...)
But somewhere along this line, we lost track of the concept of being a "public figure", someone whose life is accepted as being in the public gaze and who no longer has a reasonable expectation of absolute privacy. It's a legal term, but one with a pretty well-generalisable meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure - not the best of articles, but hey.
To be "traditionally encyclopedically notable", someone needed to be a president of somewhere or a major author or a great violinist or a renowned judge - a public figure virtually by definition. Even the intensely private ones of these Great Figures - the JD Salingers or Neil Armstrongs - have an undeniable public existence, it is just one they choose to strongly disassociate their personal life from (with or without success).
Then we came along, and created an encyclopedia with four hundred thousand.biographies - and if we were to "fill out" that, based on the various precedents we've set for what we consider a legitimate article subject, it would probably be an order of magnitude more. It's wonderful we have all these articles, wonderful that we can write encyclopedic material on people you wouldn't expect anyone to care about.
But there's a hidden bug. The threshold we have set ourselves for notability has now come so low, driven by this vast amount of biographical material, that we're on the public-figure divide. We are happily asserting people to be of "encyclopedic notability" who are not, by any reasonable definition, public figures - we never used to have to apply this test before, so we never thought to sit down and make it on a case-by-case basis.
So, this points up two things.
a) Should we start considering whether or not the subject is a public figure in deciding whether or not the article is appropriate? There is, of course, no clear bright line...
b) If not, why not? (Bonus points for giving an ethical argument)
I suspect a *lot* of our current problems with biographies of living people can be partially attributed to this - we're trying to apply a single test, "notability", when we really ought to be applying two. Comments, especially on the general case, appreciated - I think we might be on to something here.