David Gerard wrote:
2009/2/24 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
David Gerard wrote:
There was some coverage of this matter in WP:BLP - that only noteworthy details of a noteworthy person should be included. (The hypothetical example given is the subject having had a messy divorce - for a minorly notable physicist it's probably not relevant, for a politician it may have been a widely reported scandal.)
I this more than by subject area, it varies especially by fame of the person. For famous people, all aspects of their professional and personal lives are interesting to historians, who attempt to construct a full picture of their lives, tease out possible influences and motivations, and so on. You would be hard-pressed to find a book-length biography of a physicist or mathematician that fails to discuss their personal lives, for example. For less-famous people, it's not notable because frankly nobody really cares about them: since nobody is interested in teasing out possible influences and motivations, we don't need to know any of that info.
It has to be applied on a case-by-case basis. e.g. [[Mitchell Baker]]
- her hobby is trapeze. Is this relevant to mention? Well, it may not
be for most people, but quite a few biographical articles on her mention it because it's an interesting thing about her.
Similarly, a biographical article not listing the subject's family would seem odd where that's uncontroversial public information. OTOH, there have been cases like one I dealt with where someone put this apparently uncontroversial info into an article, but it was actually something unsourced the subject worked hard to keep out of the public eye and had to be removed and the revs deleted unless and until a good public source came up.
I very much support the case-by-case principle instead of a hard rule that applies for all cases. That still leaves room for the exception in the example. Family information generally humanizes a subject. What there is in [[Natascha Engel]] seems about right for developing that human perspective. There is no suggestion there of anything that might be problematical in her personal life.
It seems to me that this thread started by being about stubs in general, and drifted into a discussion about BLPs where, understandably, considerably more caution is necessary. The narrow should not become the rule for the wide. If there is a reasonable chance that more can be said about the subject we should not be so hasty to delete the article. The Baby Duke stub, may be a good example of one that exceeds its informational value.
Ec