[WikiEN-l] And now for a word on trivial BLPs

[Slim Virgin]

On 5/30/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> If we could drop the hyperbole for a minute, Doc has a serious and
> valid point.  News stories about an incident do not make the victims
> of that incident notable.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_rail_crash - very notable.
> Survivors?  Mostly not.
>
> Let's draw a distinction between information and knowledge;
> information about the dates of birth of victims does not increase our
> knowledge of the world we live in, does it?  In many cases merging the
> significant cases to the relevant incident is a good start.  In
> others... well, maybe we should leave some of this to WikiNews.
>
Perhaps a good way of looking at this is whether people who don't know
the subject personally, and who are generally knowledgeable in a
relevant field, would tend to recognize the subject by name or only by
description. Would people who read about train crashes be likely to
know the name Mary Smith, or would they only recognize the description
"one of the 20 women who survived in the front carriage of train crash
X"? If the former, have a bio; if only the latter, then confine
material about that person to the article on train crash X. Otherwise
*we* become responsible for making them more notable than they were,
and we should be reporting notability established elsewhere, not
establishing it ourselves.