Quoting RLS evendell@gmail.com:
joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
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.
It's not a matter of "acceptance." See [[WP:BLP1E]]. If someone is only notable because of one event, then there should be an article about the event but not a biography that we can't source.
If they're notable for, say, significant contributions to one subject area, that's different; but there should already be material we could source from to create a BLP-compliant biography article, and it wouldn't have been deleted in the first place.
--Darkwind
Up to a point. If someone almost but not quite met notability for one thing and then made a lot of noise about the matter and so got notability for the noisemaking, as an editorial decision it would make more sense to simply make an article under the person's title. Furthermore, in certain cases, a person is notable for a single event, but the notability is so high that we keep them anyways. To use an extreme example, we have an article on [[John Wilkes Booth]] and a separate article on [[Abraham Lincoln assassination]]. Even if Booth were alive today we wouldn't merge his article with the main assassination article.