[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Opt Out for Not So Notable Biographies

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 4/8/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Not so notable is the rough dividing line between public figures and those who are not. George W. Bush is a public figure as as most of those who regularly appear in the media. Those whose doings are not ordinarily covered by the media are not public figures, although something interesting may have happened to them and there has been spot coverage.
>
> In your own words, that's a "rough" definition. We need a precise and
> objective one, otherwise this proposal will just result in more
> arguments.

Well, what we're really trying to define here isn't "not so notable"
per se, but rather "sufficiently notable that we'd rather go down
fighting than delete the article if the subject insists on it".  It's
trivial to come up with a precise definition if we're willing to
ignore some of the more borderline cases.  We could, for example, say
that anyone that's the subject of a substantial published biography
(e.g. people with books or large articles about *them*, rather than
people that appear incidentally in reporting on other topics) are so
notable that we'll fight for our ability to have biographies of them.

Kirill