[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>>  But this
>> feeds into my point about whether such articles should be brought to a
>> minimum standard, instead of roughly referenced along with a lot of
>> others ones being worked on at the same time, and then the people
>> doing this rough-and-ready referencing moving on to other articles?
>>
>> My standards would be to ensure minimum copyediting standards have
>> been met, that the birth year has been found and securely referenced,
>> and that a standalone biography (even if only a mini-biography from
>> who they work for, or a conference biography, or some form of press
>> release) is found and used as a reference.
>>
> But I don't think the issue will be resolved by more "guidelines". This
> is an interesting example where the web material is largely of the kind
> of self-validating, not really third-party stuff that can be
> problematic. (I don't think having the biography is problematic, but the
> critical approach is quite helpful here, in indicating what it should
> contain.) There is a great deal of point in being selective: much of
> academia has to be taken on similar terms, and I don't think we should
> slide too far into rejecting departmental home pages as references.

The interesting thing is noting at what point someone reaches some
critical mass of *real* notability (i.e. not Wikipedia's definition of
it) and they start to gain widespread recognition from their peers,
and then start receiving awards and whatnot, and also how competent
those writing biographies and obituaries are, and whether someone
makes the cut for being included in Who's Who and things like the
Dictionary of National Biography, or specialised biographies.

There are many people we have biographies for who will never reach
that standard, and for which there will not be comprehensive
biographical material unless some researcher goes and writes a
biography (which does happen more often than you might think).

It would easily be possible in some cases for Wikipedians to scrape
together material, but there needs to be some "verdict from history",
from a reliable authority in the field, for such articles to be
anything more than biographical newspaper clippings.

The final verdict on whether an article on someone is sustainable is
sometimes not clear until several decades after they have died - or
even longer - there are people publishing biographical material about
World War I generals today (there were over 1000 of them in the
British Army alone), but consider someone in 2050 considering who to
write about from our time - unless material gets deposited in an
archive and there are enough reasons for someone to study that
person's life in detail, many of those we have articles on will have
nothing more written about them. Ever.

Most people get nothing written about them. Some only get a bit
written about them, and an obituary. Only a very few get their lives
pored over in great detail with multiple biographies published about
them. We should draw the line somewhere, and in a way that is easy to
assess.

Carcharoth