On 2/23/09, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: 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. -- Sam Blacketer

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

David Gerard wrote: 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

2009/2/24 Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>rg>: 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: 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

-----Original Message----- From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 2:23 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] "A short article is not a stub." Delirium wrote: about Certainly 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