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

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

For low-level BLPs, a large proportion of the views may be Wikipedia editors.

> 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.

But what if that is all the reliable sources there are? And there are
no more and no more likely to be forthcoming? We are effectively
bequeathing to future generations a large number of stubby articles
that may never have any more sources written about them. Would you
like the job of (in 50 years time) sorting through these articles and
deciding which ones to try and ascertain year of death, and which ones
to expand from obituaries (if any exist), and which ones to delete
because they turned out to have sunk back into obscurity and only
dedicated research in primary documents (mostly not allowed under
WP:OR) will be of any use?

> 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.

<snip>

It's not just writing about things too soon, but poor choices of what
to write on. There needs to be some judgement that goes something like
this: (1) The longest biographical coverage of the subject in sources
is of such-and-such a length. (2) Our article should not attempt to go
beyond that length until the next level of biographical coverage is
written. (3) If the subject has dropped out of the public eye and that
next level of biographical coverage is unlikely to be reached, then
delete.

If you don't follow something like those guidelines, you get people
pulling together different sources to create the next level of
biographical coverage, and being the first to do so. Wikipedia
shouldn't be in the business of attempting to write biographies of a
new type (aggregating existing sources) where nothing similar has been
done before.

Carcharoth