I think this whole conversation is missing some points.

1. There are people who are out there who are only famous for doing bad things. John Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. Notoriety is no reason for exclusion from an encyclopedia. There may even be only one bad thing that they did: Lee Harvey Oswald and Gavrilo Princip surely deserve article, if only for his single action of killing a president. In both cases, there are fairly comprehensive articles about them, even though nothing else they did was notable. Sure, these are extreme cases, but they still shoot down the argument about deleting articles that contain only negative material.

As for the astronaut, Lisa Nowak, the article about her has existed since 26 July. Even today, the first paragraph makes no mention of jilted lovers or alternative underwear. It talks about her role on a space mission, her expertise in manipulating the shuttle's robotic arm, etc. There is a whole section on her pre-rampage life, including her education, her space mission, etc. She is not in Wikipedia because of her little stunt. That came later.

Having said all this, there is another criteria for inclusion--how much has been written about them. How much are we simply reporting history, rather than being in involved in perpetuating urban folklore (even if it is not an urban myth). How much will their actions be remembered five, twenty, one hundred years down the road, and how much is the reported action indicative of who they are. Alternately, how much are we responsible for them being remembered for something. If it is the latter, then we should be very careful about what we include.

Danny

In a message dated 4/23/2007 5:05:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time, doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com writes:

Jeff was arguing that we can't delete a biography which only contains negative material as "What about the astronaut who went cross country in an alleged

...

attempt to murder her jilted lover? Guess what - her biography's going to be based on that one incident, no matter what the eventual outcome. This isn't a bad thing, either - it's simply reality.

Now, that's a fair point. There may only be one incident that's newsworthy - and there may be no reason to exclude us reporting it.

But biography is by definition a record of someone life, not an incident. If the incident is encyclopedic and verifiable then we should have an article on the incident, and the individuals involved in it, but disallow a biography, since we have inadequate material for such.

If we don't have appropriate information for a biography, we shouldn't have a biography. And if all the information relates to the one incident, we should simply have an article on that.

Further, as has just been pointed out to me:

"The biggest argument in favor of relegating an incident involving a person to a non-bio page, is that a bio page features the name of the person in the title of the article. This causes the bio to rank *much* higher in the search engine rankings when searching for that person's name. By the time all the internal linking to that bio is carried out inside of Wikipedia, you also have the weight of anchor-text content added to its ranking. Presto! Number one in a search for that name."

And that is where the problems begin

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