[WikiEN-l] I suppose we had to see this news story soon enough

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting RLS <evendell at gmail.com>:

> joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu wrote:
>> Quoting Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com>:
>>> It could be something for us to take into account, no? If the 
>>> deletion of an
>>> article on grounds of notability draws widespread and/or mainstream media
>>> attention, it seems worth taking a second look. There's still questions of
>>> maintainability (if all we can reliably source about a person is "media got
>>> pissed off when Wikipedia deleted their article," BLP is still a 
>>> pretty dire
>>> concern, say).
>>
>> As I've attempted to explain before, BLP as a privacy concern doesn't
>> make sense
>> if the person wants an article. There are exceptional cases like the
>> Archimedes
>> Plutonium example- Archie wanted an article as far as people could tell but
>> he's also likely has a serious mental problem. However, it doesn't 
>> make sense
>> in general to make such a BLP claim when the person wanted an article.
>> Furthermore, I suspect that if this sort of situation did end up occurring a
>> likely side effect would be additional material getting included in the
>> reliable sources since no one is going to write an article of the 
>> form "Random
>> No Name X had their Wikipedia article deleted. And we aren't going 
>> to tell you
>> anything aboutX at all."
>
> BLP's privacy component isn't at all what would be the problem in that
> kind of case. Instead, I'd think we'd run into more problems with the
> "source it or don't say it" component of BLP.
>
> If the only reliable sources cover the subject in reference to a
> controversy about the article itself, then per BLP, that would be the
> only thing possible to discuss in detail in the article.  Yes, the
> sources discussing the article controversy will mention some *very
> basic* facts about the subject; but we wouldn't really have enough to
> write a truly comprehensive encyclopedic article.
>
> --Darkwind

Yes, but that's true for many articles and isn't a reason not to have 
an article
. We need to accept the fact that for many people, even fairly 
prominent people,
we will not have much beyond basic biographical sketches for the material that
is tangential to what makes them notable.