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

[Charles Matthews]

On 24 March 2012 16:23, 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. 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.
>
> One of the more obvious problems with WP:NOTE is that it has been fairly
unclear whether it is a necessary or a sufficient condition for notability.
As currently written it is phrased as a sufficient condition, which
somewhat surprises me.

(Not the confusion itself, which explains why a thread like this can
contain diametrically opposite opinions.)

But for reasons internal to what we think guidelines are there for.
Guidelines, after all, function best when they give editors a clear idea of
what Wikipedia expects of them, personally. Like it says ,"a generally
accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow".  Editors should
attempt only to create articles on notable topics, in other words.

Reading the guideline the other way round is obviously possible; and the
way the main text is phrased might suggest it. But, and here's the point of
the thread in fact, it is perfectly possible to argue that reading the GNG
as a sufficient condition for anything is flawed. Wikipedia is a wiki, and
wikis do give you permission to edit. Saying that verifiability from enough
reliable sources is a sufficient condition that an article can exist
carries its own assumptions.

In particular the "salience" condition for biographical facts gets lost. I
see that whatever we used to have written about this concept has become
hard to find onsite, which is troubling. Non-salient facts from dodgy
sources added to biographies is almost a definition of tabloid writing, so
I think we should be concerned.

Charles