[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Andrew Gray]

2010/1/27 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:

> * B1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points have appropriate
> inline citations.
> * B2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious
> omissions or inaccuracies.
> * B3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or
> more sections of content.
> * B4. It is free from major grammatical errors.
> * B5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an
> infobox, images, or diagrams.
>
> Should all BLPs meet that standard?

I think it's an excellent goal. A B-rated article should, in theory,
be something we are happy to print and to leave untouched because,
well, it's enough. It could be better, but it's not incomplete, we
don't have to think of it as a work in progress, and it's not wrong!

Interestingly, one field where milhist anecdotally finds problems with
getting articles to B-class is biographies, albeit usually of dead
people rather than living ones. It's point B2 - no obvious omissions -
and it ties in to some comments upthread.

Unless someone's actually gone and written a conventional biography,
we don't tend to know much about most military figures - we can
construct a robust chronology of their career from public sources, and
fill in the major points where they "intersected with history", but at
the cost of an almost complete gap covering their personal life. It's
often very hard to find things like marriage or children, and god help
you if you want to write about what they did after retiring to
civilian life, or include any of the "colour" we like in biographical
articles.

In other words, we can write a pretty good example of what you call
"biographical newspaper clippings". There's some synthesis, sure, some
editorial commentary we can draw on about one aspect of their life -
but in some ways it just highlights the gaping void of stuff we don't
even manage to address with primary sources.

(You have a similar problem with a lot of sporting articles, I believe
- Y competed in the 1924 Olympics, he got a silver in the
pole-vaulting, which we can tell you all about... and then he
presumably went back to Poland, end of article.)

As such, it's quite easy to fall down on "obvious omissions" - if you
can look at the article and say, we stop talking about him at 45, he
died at 70, what happened?, then it's clearly got omissions; it's a
cruder test than the "reasonably comprehensive" rule we use for GA
ratings, but it's a pretty effective one.

I suppose an interesting "hardline" position would be to say that, for
someone where we can't actually fulfill this sort of
comprehensiveness, we should be asking if they should have an article.
If someone is public in such a limited way that writing about them
makes it clear how little we know - and that isn't itself a point of
interest because it's obscured - then it's an interesting flag. I'm
not sure I support this idea at all, but it's one way to help
distinguish that old question of how we determine public figures!

Still, that's beyond the scope of this discussion...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk