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

[Thomas Dalton]

I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose
isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful
information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that
BLPs are useful to people. As long as there are sufficient reliable
sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why
we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the
General Notability Guideline says.

I do think we have a problem with writing about things too soon, but
it isn't so extreme that we should wait until people are retired or
dead to write about them. I did have a policy proposal prepared a few
years ago that I never really proposed because I thought it was too
unlikely to be successful. It was to set a limit on how recent
something can be and still appear on Wikipedia. I can't remember what
the limit I was going to propose was, but it was about a month - if
something happened less than a month ago, don't write about it on
Wikipedia. Write about it on Wikinews and either link to it from an
existing Wikipedia article or create a redirect to it if the subject
is new or newly notable. Then, after a month once everything has
settled down, we can write a decent article (as opposed to one where
every paragraph starts "As of").

I think that kind of policy would be useful for BLPs, particularly
1EVENT cases. It is often much easier to tell after a month whether
something is really notable for an encyclopaedia than it is straight
away (how many AFDs have we all seen where people are saying "This
will almost certainly be notable." - much better to wait and see
rather than try and predict notability).