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

[Charles Matthews]

On 26 March 2012 16:17, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Mar 2012, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
>
>> In almost all cases, a stub with the basic information is better than
>>> a loose aggregation of factoids. The problem is that well-meaning
>>> people (and sometime less well-meaning people) come along later and
>>> try and 'expand' what is there. I'd be in favour of locking down BLPs
>>> once they reach a certain stage of development and requiring a very
>>> high standard of sourcing for new additions.
>>>
>> These sound like sensible ideas.
>>
>
> Doesn't work.  Since we already require a high standard for sourcing for
> everything, this doesn't actually put any additional requirements on BLPs.
>
> For some reason a lot of BLP policy is like that: "here we have the same
> policy we use for everything else, but we really mean it this time".  This
> never works, of course.
>

That's an overstatement, of course. In several ways.

Anyone would think that we have no BLPs that are respectable. I know of
some that aren't - there are a couple of troublesome ones I have babysat
like that - but the issues there do seem to come from setting the bar too
low for sourcing (either of laundered gossip that is negative, or dubious
positive stuff, do come up).  If we set an "academic" type of standard,
rather than a "mainstream media", some of the problems would go away.

Of course a proportion of the BLPs would also go away also. So it's no good
pretending it's not a trade-off; and the community still decides whether
the bar should be raised.

Charles

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