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

[Charles Matthews]

On 24 March 2012 11:37, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

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

> > 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.
>

<snip>

>
>
> 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).
>
>
Oh, there's definitely a knack to this business. Imagine that we wanted to
hive off the "Internet meme" etc. stuff from WP to some hypothetical sister
project (there is a genuine argument along the lines that "historians of
the future will be grateful to have at least some of this stuff on
record"); and leave the material of which it could be said "this guy is
just a footnote now ... but it's a footnote we should have". Now try to
translate what that means into the kind of language our policy documents
tend to use (all universals and epistemology). Doesn't work easily (cf. the
GNG).

We'd have to get a bit sophistimacated about our content, in terms at least
of current versus permanent interest.

Charles