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

[geni]

On 24 March 2012 11:25, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>


Zee problem with this standard is that it would preclude having an
article on the person currently running mali (admittedly the article
isn't up to much but I think it could be argued that we should at
least try).

-- 
geni