David Gerard wrote:
2009/2/24 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>rg>:
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.
This seems to really be an issue specific to biographies of living or
recently deceased people, for a variety of reasons. For non-recent
people, say someone who died in the 19th century or earlier, just about
everything that you can find in reliable sources is relevant. Certainly
book-length biographies consider anything they can find relevant: the
goal of a biography, properly speaking, is to try to give as full as
possible an illustration of all facets of a person's life, figure out
how they intertwined, etc. So something like a messy divorce would
certainly be interesting in trying to determine why the career path and
thought of a famous philosopher, physicist, politician, or mathematician
took the path it did. It might turn out not to have had a big impact,
but a biographer would at least mention it. Even somewhat shorter
biographies consider this information relevant: if we recently
discovered some personal drama in the life of a 14th-century archbishop,
encyclopedia entries would be duly updated to mention it.
I'd submit that in the cases where some of this information is
considered *not* relevant, it's because we actually don't want a proper
biography of the person at all. Either they aren't all that interesting,
or the interestingness doesn't outweigh the privacy concerns. Instead,
what we really want is something akin to an entry in a subject-specific
biographical dictionary, like the Biographical Dictionary of North
American Classicists (to pick one at random I've been consulting
lately). Sources like that don't purport to be full biographies of their
subjects, but instead to more narrowly describe their academic careers,
perhaps with brief mentions of very notable things outside those
academic careers. Less a biography of [[Personname]], and more an
article on [[Personname's academic career]]. In extreme cases we do
actually do this renaming, e.g. people known for one event are usually
rolled into an article on the event. I suppose it'd be impractical to
actually change the titles in the rest, but I think it's worth
considering that these articles are still something different than real
biographies.
-Mark