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

[David Goodman]

The suggested criterion is INEVERHEARDOFIT -- if a nonspecialist
reader knew every name, we wouldn't need an encyclopedia at all.  ~~~~

On 5/30/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.