wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
That is why we really have to allow the community to decide what *it* finds interesting, important, salient and not try to impose too much from the top down. The community should be creating from the bottom-up and our "rules" should merely reflect what the community is doing in this type of case.
If many members of the community want to know the names of Brad Pitt's children, then we should allow that, if they can be sourced. Names do not invade privacy when they have already been widely disseminated. I can find the information in about two seconds. Reflection of what is reality is not an "invasion" of privacy.
Now, as our policy already states, if the only way to find a piece of information is with a primary source, and if the door to that information has not been already opened by a mention of some sort in a secondary source, than we should not include it either. However many sources mention that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have children, and so we should as well. Some sources mention their names as well, and so we should as well.
What is true is that reasonable people can disagree, in the abstract, on where "salience" begins or ends. I think it tends to be clearer in front of a concrete case, at least if the article is properly organised into sections. The point I was making is that our biographies amount to about 1% of the content of a book biography.
I don't think we get far with the general case by taking Brangelina as an example: it is an obvious "outlier" for BLP discussions.
Charles