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

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> *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.

This is an excellent point (along with the rest of the posts from
Charles and Andreas). I was thinking explicitly of the sense you get
of what constitutes a 'proper' biography when reading how it was done
in the past (especially the 19th-century Dictionary of National
Biography and the 2004 update/expansion/revision of that, the ODNB).
If you spend your time reading and looking at numerous biographies
across a wide range of subjects (as I do, both on Wikipedia and
elsewhere, and as Charles does), then you get a good sense of what
sources are used for a genuine biography, and what sources are
features of more ephemeral biographies.

Other biographical sources I'm familiar with include the Australian
and Canadian dictionaries of national biography, the Biographical
Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society journal, the similar
publication in the USA, produced by (I think) the National Academy of
Sciences for their members, and the Dictionary of Scientific
Biography.

The point about Wikipedia (for BLPs) being ahead of the proper sources
to use is another excellent one. There is a natural progression to
biographical sources that (for obvious reasons) parallels the
subject's life. People record their own lives at first (diaries,
letters, CVs and the like), and then gradually others start to write
about that person and you get short descriptions such as author and
contributor biographies, and short news items. Then, as someone
becomes more prominent, you get more considered material, such as
interviews, feature articles, and so on. Very prominent people get
official and official biographers that document that person's life
(e.g. US Presidents and some other politicians). Towards the end of
someone's career, you may get tribute articles and the like. Then,
when the person dies, you get obituaries, and then (possibly) entries
in the histories relevant to that person. Very prominent people get
entire books written about them. Others get less.

If Wikipedia jumps into that natural progression too early, and tries
to establish, or maintain, a biography before there are sources to
support one, the result can be a mess. Even if done carefully, it can
still be a problem. I mentioned the example of Robert E. M. Hedges,
who's article I've just been updating. If I hadn't updated that
article, it likely would have remained without an update until more
material was published. In all four cases I've given as examples of
BLPs that I've created or edited extensively, I've felt uncomfortable
at times that I was doing what should, properly, be left until the
right moment for those people's colleagues and peers to do - write
that person's life story (in some ways, the difference between an
authorised and unauthorised biography). That is why it is important to
have the foundation of a proper biographical source to build on, not
go too far, and to be clear that BLPs are always a work in progress,
waiting for the definitive accounts to be written by others (and then
summarised and incorporated into the Wikipedia article).

There are other examples, but I'll leave those for another time.

Carcharoth