An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their life. That is what biography means. The story of a life. Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to jail. She is notable, and also she went to jail. Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we should present their biography. If we wanted to only present, in a person's article, what they are notable for, then we shouldn't have an article on the person at all, but rather on the incident, mentioning the person with that incident-article.
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 3:09:56 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, dgoodmanny@gmail.com writes:
An article about a person should primarily be about what the person is notable for.
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Couldn't disagree more. Articles about people are intended to give the information that readers want. What they want ito know is what is important about them. What is important about them is what they are notable for. The personal life is not the important part. The professional (artistic, political ,scientific, business,...) life is the important part.
Please excuse my putting it almost all in words of one syllable, but it's that basic.
For an example, look at Shakespeare: the textual part of the article is 2/3 about the works, 1/3 about the biography. Same ratio for the lede paragraphs. About the same ratio for the illustrations. About the same ratio for the bibliography.
And this is for a literary author, the sort of personal where the facts of the personal biography are generally thought especially relevant to the work. And not any literary author, but one whose disputed personal life has been of particular public interest for centuries. It will be even higher for most other personal subjects.
Just for fun, I checked Bob Dylan, an article where the personal and professional material is presented together, and it seems to be about he same ratio. For Einstein, it's about 50-:50--I think because the work needs to be discussed more technically, so it's mostly in separate articles.
We write about what's notable. The personal life of a person is only notable in relation to his accomplishments--if it were not for the person's accomplishments, we wouldn't care about the life & we wouldn't have an article i the first place. According to your principal , we'd have the fullest articles for he people about whose personal lives more was known, not the one's with the most accomplishments.
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:53 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their life. That is what biography means. The story of a life. Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to jail. She is notable, and also she went to jail. Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we should present their biography. If we wanted to only present, in a person's article, what they are notable for, then we shouldn't have an article on the person at all, but rather on the incident, mentioning the person with that incident-article.
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 3:09:56 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, dgoodmanny@gmail.com writes:
An article about a person should primarily be about what the person is notable for.
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On Feb 22, 2009, at 7:53 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to jail. She is notable, and also she went to jail.
I can agree with this: some facts about a person become notable simply because the person is notable. As David Goodman mentioned, Einstein's children are notable simply because they are Einstein's.
An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their life. That is what biography means. The story of a life. Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we should present their biography.
Here's an opposing idea: A full-blown biography of a person, such as a book, should indeed tell a vast number of details, in order to present a full picture of the subject's life. But a biographical article in an encyclopedia does not aim at giving such a full picture. It's much shorter than and doesn't try to go as far as a full-blown biography.
Also, telling the story of a life in rich detail requires a kind of literary finesse that we can't likely achieve on a large-scale wiki. A serious, rich biography requires the personal touch of an author to, among other things, select thousands of extremely fine-grained facts and weave them into a textured narrative. No other biographer would do it the same way. Stylistic choices blur with content. That's not compatible with a large number of authors, and it's especially incompatible with the way coarse guidelines enable authors to resolve editing disputes.
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
I'm very surprised to read this. It seems to me that every fact reported on Wikipedia must meet an encyclopedic standard for notability--a standard much higher than, say, the standard for a newspaper article or a book about that topic or even a chapter about that topic. Exactly where that line is cannot be defined precisely and must be continually negotiated, but in order to have a sense of common purpose, we need to understand that the "encyclopedic bar" for notability is much higher than those other bars.
I'd like to hear some other folks' opinions about this. I had taken what I just said as "goes without saying" among Wikipedians for a long time. WP:NNC?
Ben
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
It is correct that you need different terminology: notability relates to topics. There is a separate notion of salience, for facts. Articles should consist of salient facts on a notable topic.
Charles
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
It is correct that you need different terminology: notability relates to topics. There is a separate notion of salience, for facts. Articles should consist of salient facts on a notable topic.
WP:SALIENCY? :-)
Carcharoth
On 2/23/09, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
It is correct that you need different terminology: notability relates to topics. There is a separate notion of salience, for facts. Articles should consist of salient facts on a notable topic.
WP:SALIENCY? :-)
Dunno about a policy but an essay on that subject might not go amiss. For an example of saliency failure you could look at an article I briefly intervened on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natascha_Engel The subject is a low-profile backbench British MP. Check the family life section: do we really need to know the names and dates of birth of her children? And what of the career details of her husband, who is not notable in his own right? On the other hand, details of campaigns she worked on before being elected are highly salient to political views, and it's her political career that makes her notable.
On Feb 23, 2009, at 9:10 AM, Sam Blacketer wrote:
On 2/23/09, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
WP:SALIENCY? :-)
Dunno about a policy but an essay on that subject might not go amiss.
I'm feeling pretty hot about salience at the moment. I'll take a crack at a short essay tonight, incorporating what people have posted here.
Ben
I'm feeling pretty hot about salience at the moment. I'll take a crack at a short essay tonight, incorporating what people have posted here.
Couldn't wait. List of topics is now here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz/Salience
Thanks, Charles, for suggesting the word "salience". :)
Ben
2009/2/23 Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org:
I'm feeling pretty hot about salience at the moment. I'll take a crack at a short essay tonight, incorporating what people have posted here.
Couldn't wait. List of topics is now here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz/Salience Thanks, Charles, for suggesting the word "salience". :)
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.)
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/2/23 Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org:
I'm feeling pretty hot about salience at the moment. I'll take a crack at a short essay tonight, incorporating what people have posted here.
Couldn't wait. List of topics is now here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz/Salience Thanks, Charles, for suggesting the word "salience". :)
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.)
There was also something, once upon a time, at [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] - I was rather proud of "Wikipedia is not paper, and nor is it a Christmas newsletter". Stuff that resembles "vanity" may do so because it lacks salience. If it looks like newslettercruft it probably should go.
Charles
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.
-Mark
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.
- d.
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
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.
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
Delirium wrote:
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.
OTOH - biographies have been subject to a kind of mission creep. A biography of Beethoven used to be 200 pages where you'd learn something of his life and character. Then it was 300. Biographies are now commonly 600 pages. And _serious_ biographies are huge: often now they are even trilogies. I bought one of Melville that is around 2000 pages. Michael Holroyd started to shorten his own long biographies.
To get back to the point: an article on Wikipedia is no substitute for a book-length treatment, if the latter and its detail is what you want. Defining it as "the WP biography of X should tell you whether or not you need to consult a full biography" says it better. I wish I knew the technique for filleting a biography to write the article (I don't write that way, but by building up a piece from various scraps and fragments); there is a big pile of biographies to the right of my desk and I'd be delighted to get rid of any from which the "salient" facts have been extracted already. The fact that I tend to use the biography of X to find verifiable facts about Y who crossed paths with X at some point tells its own story, I feel. I actually like the idea that Wikipedia articles printing to a few pages can give the essentials of a book. I'm not anti-academic - far from it - but there is a point in being anti-magpie.
Charles
-----Original Message----- From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 2:23 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] "A short article is not a stub."
Delirium wrote:
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.
OTOH - biographies have been subject to a kind of mission creep. A biography of Beethoven used to be 200 pages where you'd learn something of his life and character. Then it was 300. Biographies are now commonly 600 pages. And _serious_ biographies are huge: often now they are even trilogies. I bought one of Melville that is around 2000 pages. Michael Holroyd started to shorten his own long biographies.
To get back to the point: an article on Wikipedia is no substitute for a book-length treatment, if the latter and its detail is what you want. Defining it as "the WP biography of X should tell you whether or not you need to consult a full biography" says it better. I wish I knew the technique for filleting a biography to write the article (I don't write that way, but by building up a piece from various scraps and fragments); there is a big pile of biographies to the right of my desk and I'd be delighted to get rid of any from which the "salient" facts have been extracted already. The fact that I tend to use the biography of X to find verifiable facts about Y who crossed paths with X at some point tells its own story, I feel. I actually like the idea that Wikipedia articles printing to a few pages can give the essentials of a book. I'm not anti-academic - far from it - but there is a point in being anti-magpie.
Charles>>
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.
If a marginally notable physicist had a messy divorce only covered in a small local newspaper and only tangentially mentioning "and their two children", and the only way to find more details on those children is by examining birth certificates, court papers or school records, then we should not be mentioning those details. However, if those same sources gush about how one daughter is a "famous art historian working for the KGB" then they themselves are opening the door to dig out the information. If they want to be private, they need to stay private and not display their peacock in public.
Will Johnson
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