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

[Charles Matthews]

On 23 March 2012 15:06, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>


> - 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.
>
>
I think a serious "position paper" on BLP is possible.  There are several
aspects:

* We are currently not very good at recognising when biographical
information is "indiscriminate" (see
[[WP:INDISCRIMINATE<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:INDISCRIMINATE>]]).
We could get better at that, as a way of addressing what Andreas is calling
ADAM.

*We can certainly look at special notability guidelines for classes of
individuals (e.g. politicians, employees of the media, entertainers,
sportspeople, reality TV stars). Some divide-and-conquer to understand the
more problematic areas in their own terms would be good.

*We are currently lousy at judging "ephemeral notability", and issues
around it seem to be classic time-sinks. There is a bigger picture here,
and digging around in older biographical dictionaries can help to explain
what is going on.

*Certainly extending control of revisions to all BLP pages is an option to
consider; naturally this is a major step requiring wide community support,
and that in turn probably requires a reasonable amount of preparation, not
phrased in too much immoderate language.

*Tools and techniques. I'm a fan of the idea of using "Related changes"  on
chunks of BLP, so that patrolling say 1% at a time becomes easier. Hiving
off BLP into its own community isn't a solution that is clearly going to
work, let's say. Technical concentration on the material, on the other
hand, might do quite a lot to highlight the difficult cases.

Charles