[WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

[Andreas Kolbe]

I would second this. In addition, I believe we should allow
borderline-notable people to opt out of having a biography, to prevent the
sort of drama we are currently having with the Hawkins biography.

Otherwise, we are digging our own graves. As we all know, editor numbers
are stagnating, or positively diminishing, while the number of biographies
rises daily. We are already too stretched to look after biographies. Johann
Hari's slurs remained in the vandalised biographies for days and weeks on
end.

In addition, for little watched biographies, our biography writing process
is often little more than dirt accretion – anonymous people who have no
interest in producing  a balanced biography adding derogatory information,
or random stuff they read and found "interesting". The results are not
pretty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_M._Blow&oldid=482965680

More than half of a biography about an alleged religious slur? This stuff
is typical of the anonymous dirt accretion method (ADAM) of biography
writing. It's the sort of process that's resulted in a 1,500 word biography
about a US politician of which 1,250 words were about alleged complicity
with Scientology (because she had once looked at a Scientology drugs
rehabilitation programme), or a BLP of a UK member of parliament that was
50 per cent about expense investigations and cherry-picked to create the
false impression he had financially profited to the tune of over £10,000
from an error in his expense claims.

That's the sort of thing that will really endear Wikipedia to legislators.

- We need fewer biographies.

- We need to give borderline-notable people (people like Hawkins; not MPs)
an easy opt-out.

- We could probably benefit from making real-life name registration
mandatory for BLP editing, and hosting them on a different project, or at
the very least introducing flagged revisions for BLPs, and making the right
to approve BLP changes one that requires familiarity with BLP policy, and a
commitment to uphold it.

- We need to abandon ADAM and make sure, somehow, that biographies are fair
and balanced. We can't do that with the amount of biographies we currently
have.

Andreas


On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> I'm posting here an argument I made in a recent AfD, explaining why I
> think more stringent notability requirements are needed for
> biographical articles:
>
> "The right point to assess someone's notability and write a definitive
> article about them is at that point (or sometimes when they retire).
> Any BLP is only a work in progress until that point is reached. [Some
> say] "Notability, once attained, does not diminish." That might seem
> true, but what is being assessed is not the subject's true notability,
> but a fluctuating 'notability during lifetime' that can wax and wane
> over time, with the true level of notability not being established
> until someone's career or life is over. Some people gain awards and
> recognitions and have long and diverse careers and have glowing
> obituaries written about them, and pass into the history of the field
> they worked in. Others have more pedestrian careers.
>
> The point is that it is rarely possible to make an accurate assessment
> until the right point is reached. What you end up with if you have low
> standards for allowing articles on BLPs is a huge number of borderline
> BLPs all across Wikipedia (heavily weighted towards contemporary
> coverage [...]), the vast majority of the subjects of which will not
> have prominent (or any) obituaries published about them, and in 50
> years time or so the articles will look a bit silly, cobbled together
> from various scraps and items published during the subject's lifetime,
> but with no proper, independent assessment of their place in history.
>
> It has been said before, but that is why specialist biographical
> dictionaries often have as one of their inclusion criteria that
> someone has to be dead before having an article. I'm not saying we
> should go that far, but there is a case for many BLPs of saying 'if
> there is no current published biography, wait until this career/life
> is over and make an assessment at that point', and until then either
> delete or have a bland stub."
>
> The above is why I rarely edit BLPs. It is far easier (and more
> satisfying) to edit about a topic once it is reasonably 'complete',
> not ongoing. The latter statements applies to more than BLPs
> (biographies of living people), for example it applies to any 'news'
> topic, but it does apply especially to BLPs as they are a minefield
> because they require careful maintenance.
>
> To give some examples of articles I've edited or created that are BLPs:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Mestel
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Lieberman
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_W._Moore
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._M._Hedges
>
> Those aren't very good examples. What I'm really looking for is a way
> to illustrate how some people become notable, and then fade into
> obscurity, while others maintain notability and accumulate coverage in
> reliable sources throughout their lives, rather than only briefly. The
> latter are good topics for encyclopedia articles, but the latter tend
> not to be. Is there a way to argue for more stringent notability
> requirements that won't get shot down? Essentially, what I'm saying
> Wikipedia needs to avoid is bequeathing a lot of stubby articles to
> future generations of editors who will get stuck trying to find out
> anything more about people who have faded back into obscurity and for
> whom it is often difficult to ascertain if they are still living.
>
> Carcharoth
>
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