Daniel Mayer wrote:

Nikola Smolenski wrote:

...

I don't really understand what is the problem with autobiographies and why are they more unverifiable then biographies written by someone else.

Because Wikipedia is not a primary source. Once and /if/ that person is able to get a real publisher to publish their autobiography, then and /only/ then do we use their autobiography as a source.

We need some sort of filter.

That explains why the autobiographies are a problem (if you accept mav's premise that we need a filter), but it doesn't explain why they are more unverifiable.

First of all, sometimes they ''are'' (or might be, I don't have an example) perfectly verifiable. And in that case, then they should pose no problem. And sometimes (non auto-) biographies are equally unverifiable, in which case those biographies are ''also'' a problem. But in general -- and in the examples that have come up here -- we run into something that Fred Bauder just mentioned:

:If there are books published, they are self-published, with no reviews.

An autobiography (or sympathetic biography based on interviews) might well be as POV and unverifiable as a Wikipedia autobiography; but if it's published by a mainstream publishing company, then it should attract reviews that will help verifiability (and along with that, help us make the article more POV). A self-published work -- vanity book, web page, Wikipedia autobiography -- is less likely to attract the attention that will provide such context. Note that the existence of verifiability is the key here; there's nothing wrong with using a self-published book as a source ''if'' there is verifiability despite the odds against it.

Potentially, a Wikipedia autobiography that attracted attention (say, on its talk page) that led to verifiable sources could be acceptable -- and such articles can be salvaged by following up the sources mentioned on the talk page. But one can't ''start'' with a Wikipedia autobiography and just hope that people will place sources in the talk page; we need to have something verifiable to begin with. Thus a Wikipedia autobiography, when there is no other material, is not verifiable.

I'm focussing here on verifiability, but there's more than that to mav's point that Wikipedia is not a primary source. However, an autobiographer can avoid this by publishing a home page on a free web hosting service such as Yahoo! Geocities (or whatever the cool kids use these days); then Wikipedia's mercilessly edited article could use that homepage only as a source (and an external link). But if that homepage is the only biographical material on the person, then we ''still'' run into the problem of verifiability.

-- Toby