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

[Todd Allen]

Slim Virgin 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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>   
I think you have a very good point here. I think we do overuse
biographical style articles, when often information about a person would
be better covered in an article about the event. Now, of course, some
people do successfully use their "15 minutes of fame" to become
genuinely notable (for example, William Hung, Paris Hilton, or even
Monica Lewinsky). In that case, that's fine, we can have a bio on that
person. But generally speaking, we probably don't need bios on most
American Idol contestants or amateur porn stars (unwitting or otherwise)
or people involved in Presidential scandals. Even if the event is
notable, "notability is not inherited" applies to the people involved.
We can always mention the people in the article about the event, and
utilize redirects.

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