Well, there are articles that can be expanded beyond the basic stuff
found in places like Who's Who. An example is the article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Mestel
But as soon as anyone become newsworthy, you get newspaper sources
jostling for room with all the other sources. Personally, I'd ban all
newspaper sources in BLPs.
Another BLP I tried was here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_W._Moore
Admittedly, one of the sources there is a book review (less than
ideal, and now a dead link, unsurprisingly).
I was going to include the Basil John Mason article as another one
where I tidied it up or one where an article can be written using
reliable non-newspaper sources, but if you go and look at the article,
you will notice a slight problem with using this one as an example...
(I left the sources on the talk page and left the job half-done).
But those are all examples of building biographies piecemeal. But
hopefully those were done in a responsible manner. I won't say
newspaper sources were avoided, but merely that newpapers didn't cover
these people.
Carcharoth
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Scott MacDonald
<doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Good grief, Carcharoth, there it is!!!!! Brilliant!
I've been stumbling about for years looking for a way to differentiate
between legitimate encyclopaedic biography, which Wikipedia should do, and
the problematic, armature-journalistic, selectively biased, originally
researched, WP:NOTNEWS skirting, stuff that causes all the problems. If we
could just agree on that definition you've given all would be well.
No chance of that happening, unfortunately.
Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Carcharoth
Sent: 28 March 2011 17:29
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] iCorrect
I've argued before that the minimum standard
for any biographical
article should be a published biography of some sort, that at minimum
includes birth year (or some details on why the birth year is not
known). These can range from self-published on an official website, to
short bios in conference proceedings, to an actual published
book-length biography. What shouldn't be done is piecing together bits
from newspaper articles and primary sources - that is what official
and unofficial biographers do, and we shouldn't be doing it in their
stead.
Carcharoth
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