On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that BLPs are useful to people.
For low-level BLPs, a large proportion of the views may be Wikipedia editors.
As long as there are sufficient reliable sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the General Notability Guideline says.
But what if that is all the reliable sources there are? And there are no more and no more likely to be forthcoming? We are effectively bequeathing to future generations a large number of stubby articles that may never have any more sources written about them. Would you like the job of (in 50 years time) sorting through these articles and deciding which ones to try and ascertain year of death, and which ones to expand from obituaries (if any exist), and which ones to delete because they turned out to have sunk back into obscurity and only dedicated research in primary documents (mostly not allowed under WP:OR) will be of any use?
I do think we have a problem with writing about things too soon, but it isn't so extreme that we should wait until people are retired or dead to write about them.
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It's not just writing about things too soon, but poor choices of what to write on. There needs to be some judgement that goes something like this: (1) The longest biographical coverage of the subject in sources is of such-and-such a length. (2) Our article should not attempt to go beyond that length until the next level of biographical coverage is written. (3) If the subject has dropped out of the public eye and that next level of biographical coverage is unlikely to be reached, then delete.
If you don't follow something like those guidelines, you get people pulling together different sources to create the next level of biographical coverage, and being the first to do so. Wikipedia shouldn't be in the business of attempting to write biographies of a new type (aggregating existing sources) where nothing similar has been done before.
Carcharoth