[WikiEN-l] Single incident 'biographies' - disallow??

[daniwo59 at aol.com]

I think this whole conversation is missing some points. 
 
1. There are people who are out there who are only famous for doing bad  
things. John Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. Notoriety is no reason for  
exclusion from an encyclopedia. There may even be only one bad thing that they  
did: Lee Harvey Oswald and Gavrilo Princip surely deserve article, if only for  
his single action of killing a president. In both cases, there are fairly  
comprehensive articles about them, even though nothing else they did was  
notable. Sure, these are extreme cases, but they still shoot down the argument  
about deleting articles that contain only negative material. 
 
As for the astronaut, Lisa Nowak, the article about her has existed since  26 
July. Even today, the first paragraph makes no mention of jilted lovers or  
alternative underwear. It talks about her role on a space mission, her 
expertise  in manipulating the shuttle's robotic arm, etc. There is a whole section on 
her  pre-rampage life, including her education, her space mission, etc. She 
is not in  Wikipedia because of her little stunt. That came later. 
 
Having said all this, there is another criteria for inclusion--how much has  
been written about them. How much are we simply reporting history, rather than 
 being in involved in perpetuating urban folklore (even if it is not an urban 
 myth). How much will their actions be remembered five, twenty, one hundred 
years  down the road, and how much is the reported action indicative of who 
they are.  Alternately, how much are we responsible for them being remembered for 
 something. If it is the latter, then we should be very careful about what we 
 include. 
 
Danny
 
In a message dated 4/23/2007 5:05:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com writes:

Jeff was  arguing that we can't delete a biography which only contains 
negative  material as "What about the astronaut who went cross country in 
an  alleged
>> attempt to murder her jilted lover?  Guess what - her  biography's going to
>> be based on that one incident, no matter what  the eventual outcome.  This
>> isn't a bad thing, either - it's  simply reality.

Now, that's a fair point. There may only be one  incident that's 
newsworthy - and there may be no reason to exclude us  reporting it.

But biography is by definition a record of someone life,  not an 
incident. If the incident is encyclopedic and verifiable then we  should 
have an article on the incident, and the individuals involved in  it, but 
disallow a biography, since we have inadequate material for  such.

If we don't have appropriate information for a biography, we  shouldn't 
have a biography. And if all the information relates to the one  
incident, we should simply have an article on that.

Further, as has  just been pointed out to me:

"The biggest argument in favor of  relegating an incident involving
a person to a non-bio page, is that a bio  page features the name
of the person in the title of the article. This  causes the bio to
rank *much* higher in the search engine rankings when  searching
for that person's name. By the time all the internal linking  to
that bio is carried out inside of Wikipedia, you also have the  weight
of anchor-text content added to its ranking. Presto! Number  one
in a search for that name."

And that is where the problems  begin







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