On 29/09/06, Matt R <matt_crypto(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
* If a biography subject is genuinely notable, then
whether or not he wants an
article on himself or not to exist is irrelevant. We would try and communicate
that fact tactfully, of course.
Done that. "I'm afraid an MBE probably means you're at least
marginally notable. It's a pretty important and public form of
recognition."
* There's lots of disagreement on Wikipedia about
what is notable.
* Wikipedia is inconsistent.
* Making it consistent would mean arbitrary decisions that in practice
upset people a lot. (e.g. arbitrary or culturally-biased notability
cutoffs.)
* Wikipedia tolerates things it does not condone (same reason) as long
as they aren't too awful right now.
(Yeah, I'm
observant...) My personal definition would exclude a fair bit of current
Wikipedia content (so I'm a theoretical deletionist), but I'm happy to live
with it (and hence am a de facto inclusionist) because:
1) It does me no harm. I don't have to read articles that I think are
non-notable.
2) It does other people no harm. That is, few other people want to read them
either, and for the few who do, there's little real-world harm that comes from
blantant falsehoods about (say) minor Pokémon characters.
Yeah. That we have a Britannica volume of Pokemon isn't painfully in
the reader's face.
However, in the case of living person bios,
"2" may not hold. Malicious persons
can write all kinds of false and libellous things that will quite possibly go
completely unnoticed until they've been widely mirrored across the Web.
Hence the new nutshell for WP:BIO. (Which I wrote *preens* Any other
bad nutshells in need of clarity?)
- d.