I disagree. Our obligation should be to report what is reported. Not to obscure merely for the sake of some rather ill-defined notion of "privacy" or some such thing.
Do you think we should not report the names of the children of Edward III who died as infants? I think it's interesting to see what he and his wife named each of his children. In addition, if a biography subject had no children, one child, or 12 children, is very important to presenting a full picture of the person.
Children have a great impact on parents. If our sources discuss the children, then we should as well. If they don't, then we shouldn't either.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 1:23:12 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com writes:
Why do you say that? In most cases we should not mention children by name.
**************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntu...)
On Feb 22, 2009, at 7:50 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
I disagree. Our obligation should be to report what is reported. Not to obscure merely for the sake of some rather ill-defined notion of "privacy" or some such thing.
Do you think we should not report the names of the children of Edward III who died as infants? I think it's interesting to see what he and his wife named each of his children. In addition, if a biography subject had no children, one child, or 12 children, is very important to presenting a full picture of the person.
Children have a great impact on parents. If our sources discuss the children, then we should as well. If they don't, then we shouldn't either.
This worries me. As Charles Matthews said, it would terrible to make a rigid, general rule about this, but most mentions of subjects' children strike me as unnotable. That is, they clutter the bandwidth. Sources tell much, much more than is suitable for an encyclopedia. We are summarizing the highlights, not attempting to report every fact.
Ben
2009/2/23 WJhonson@aol.com:
I disagree. Our obligation should be to report what is reported. Not to obscure merely for the sake of some rather ill-defined notion of "privacy" or some such thing.
I rather thought it was some notion of "editorial common sense", but I understand this seems to be unfashionable in some circles these days.
(Why are we having this discussion for the thousandth time, anyway? It's not desperately germane to the issue of how to define stubs...)
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org wrote:
On Feb 22, 2009, at 7:50 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
I disagree. Our obligation should be to report what is reported. Not to obscure merely for the sake of some rather ill-defined notion of "privacy" or some such thing.
Do you think we should not report the names of the children of Edward III who died as infants? I think it's interesting to see what he and his wife named each of his children. In addition, if a biography subject had no children, one child, or 12 children, is very important to presenting a full picture of the person.
Children have a great impact on parents. If our sources discuss the children, then we should as well. If they don't, then we shouldn't either.
This worries me. As Charles Matthews said, it would terrible to make a rigid, general rule about this, but most mentions of subjects' children strike me as unnotable. That is, they clutter the bandwidth. Sources tell much, much more than is suitable for an encyclopedia. We are summarizing the highlights, not attempting to report every fact.
For contemporary and living people, I agree. Family details can be irrelevant and intrusive (though in some articles it sounds like the family details have been added by the subject of the article, or copied from some official website).
Historical stuff is less certain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England#Children
The strange thing is, we have an *article* on the 4-month-old, but not the 2-year old:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stuart,_Duke_of_Kintyre
The template at the bottom of that article seems overkill.
Carcharoth