On 4/8/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
Jeff, can you expand on how it would do that? As I see it, it might do the opposite. Biographies of borderline notable people often either languish unattended or are used as a platform by people with an axe to grind.
Well, the first problem is the construct of "borderline notability." There's no such thing. You're either notable or you're not, and our twisted concepts of the idea doesn't help.
There are people for whom there's what Fred called "spot coverage," because they did something interesting, but they're not overall notable. Along the lines of "John Smith is a British schoolteacher who came to public attention after being discovered on the floor naked during a geography class, having asked his pupils to draw a map of Europe on his genitals."
I think we could fairly easily come up with a working definition of "notable borderline," where George Bush is at one end of the scale and our geography teacher at the other.
The point is that no news organization or encyclopedia would publish a biography of the geography teacher just because of that one incident. We're currently asking the question "Why shouldn't Wikipedia publish biographies on everyone for whom reliable sources can be found?" but I think we should turn that on its head and ask "Why *should* we, given that no else does?"
If we were to adopt an opt-out clause for borderline notables, I think it would generate significant goodwill among the public, because this is seen as one of our major problems.
Sarah