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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 24 March 2012 19:42, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Wikipedia editors count as readers too.

>> 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 did say there needs to be enough to write *more than* a stub.