[WikiEN-l] The outside world on biographies of slightly notablepeople

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/06/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Also, I still maintain that we are doing the subject something of a
> > *service* by writing something *neutral* about this.
>
> We are not. We are merely publicising her humiliation further. This is
> not helping *anyone*, least of all us - no matter how we posture here,
> we're not doing the right thing by continuing to publish a "neutral"
> account of how she became a sex object for the trivial amusement of
> the internet.

I think I want to discuss this a little further - it brings up a very
interesting aspect of how we deal with people.

The Washington Post article is well written (with a couple of
regrettably silly editorial glitches), tactfully executed, and touches
on the interesting issues raised by this little frenzy. It's low-key;
it's retroactively toned, presenting the story as the ongoing effects
of a momentary burst of online idiocy. It's a human-interest story,
and so is written from the victim's perspective, and as such gives her
full and fair opportunity to pass comment, which she makes use of.
It's a good example of how to write a story on this event - if you're
going to suffer national press coverage, this is the least bad kind.

But it is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it remotely an
appropriate topic for one.  It's a passing news story about a passing
Internet fad and its unwanted effects on the life of a *private
individual*.

It is appropriate to cover as a human-interest news story. It is not
appropriate to transform into a significant event in the historical
literature, which is what we are effectively trying to do - it
certainly isn't appropriate to do so whilst the proverbial ink is
still wet.

If we have this article, we are asserting, like it or not: a) this
person is of fundamental importance to human knowledge; b) because
she's pretty. If she was famous in her own right, a clear public
figure, it would be different, perhaps appropriate to mention it in
passing (if done right). But she's not; she's an eighteen-year-old
high school athlete who did pretty well, and got in the newspaper for
other reasons.

[and let us now begin to generalise...]

----

The continuing inclusion/exclusion arguments have gone on for years
and will continue to go on, and we keep asserting some fleeting way of
defining "notability" - have they done this, scored so highly on that,
published X many books or worked for Y organisation or won the Z
Award? Taking no sides, it's not unreasonable to say that our average
threshold for inclusion is gradually lowering over time with regards
to individuals - if not in principle then certainly in practice, as we
gradually "fill up" the lower-importance slots. We bicker about the
line to draw, but the community is mostly accepting that "notability"
is a critical pass-or-fail test involved in the editorial decision of
whether or not to include an article.

Which is fair enough. I've written about a few semi-notable figures
myself, and been quite pleased with the results. (Oddest hobby
Wikipedia has driven me to: researching the lives of mid-ranking naval
officers of the French Revolutionary Wars. They had such unusual
careers...)

But somewhere along this line, we lost track of the concept of being a
"public figure", someone whose life is accepted as being in the public
gaze and who no longer has a reasonable expectation of absolute
privacy. It's a legal term, but one with a pretty well-generalisable
meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure - not the best of articles, but hey.

To be "traditionally encyclopedically notable", someone needed to be a
president of somewhere or a major author or a great violinist or a
renowned judge - a public figure virtually by definition. Even the
intensely private ones of these Great Figures - the JD Salingers or
Neil Armstrongs - have an undeniable public existence, it is just one
they choose to strongly disassociate their personal life from (with or
without success).

Then we came along, and created an encyclopedia with four hundred
thousand.biographies - and if we were to "fill out" that, based on the
various precedents we've set for what we consider a legitimate article
subject, it would probably be an order of magnitude more. It's
wonderful we have all these articles, wonderful that we can write
encyclopedic material on people you wouldn't expect anyone to care
about.

But there's a hidden bug. The threshold we have set ourselves for
notability has now come so low, driven by this vast amount of
biographical material, that we're on the public-figure divide. We are
happily asserting people to be of "encyclopedic notability" who are
not, by any reasonable definition, public figures - we never used to
have to apply this test before, so we never thought to sit down and
make it on a case-by-case basis.

So, this points up two things.

a) Should we start considering whether or not the subject is a public
figure in deciding whether or not the article is appropriate? There
is, of course, no clear bright line...

b) If not, why not? (Bonus points for giving an ethical argument)

I suspect a *lot* of our current problems with biographies of living
people can be partially attributed to this - we're trying to apply a
single test, "notability", when we really ought to be applying two.
Comments, especially on the general case, appreciated - I think we
might be on to something here.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk