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

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> My thinking is that a constructive and asymptotically approaching perfection
> (hopefully as rapidly as humanly possible) way of doing a good bit of easing
> of some of the tensions, would be to start compiling a list of criterions which
> make someone absolutely 100% a chinch to need a wikipedia article about
> them, no matter what. Not a list of "articles every wikipedia should have" or
> anything like that, but a list of no-brainer wikipedia inclusion
> criteria

<snip>

The problem with such lists is that other publications and other
websites don't do it like that (unless they are specialist ones
attempting to cover their entire field, and that is what some people
see Wikipedia as, a collection of specialist areas, but there aren't
really encyclopedias of modern radio presenters, are there?). What
would be easier is to look at the field of biographical writing as a
whole, and ask what criteria other publications use to compile their
entries. Encyclopedia Britannica has (online) entries on living
people. Where do they draw the line? And so on. The critical thing,
though, is to look at the *length* of the sources used in the
biographies. Some are book-length sources, some are only a paragraph
or two. The critical difference is between:

i) Summarising book-length sources to produce a Wikipedia article
shorter than a book
ii) Replicating article-length sources to produce a Wikipedia article
of about the same length
iii) Aggregating shorter sources to produce a Wikipedia article that
is longer than its sources

[Summarising, replicating and aggregating, are deliberate word choices there.]

Those three approaches are all, to some extent, valid, and all have
their problems and advantages and disadvantages, but it is crucial to
be aware of the breadth and depth of the available sources to have an
idea what sort of coverage Wikipedia should have and how to condense
and/or aggregate the sources. I should also mention here that some
topics (even biographical ones) produce more than one Wikipedia
article. Some biographies are split into sub-articles. Not very often,
but some people have made that approach (sort of) work.

The main problem with writing about *living* people, is that approach
(i) is rare. Those who are living and have published book-length
biographies are clearly already notable by anyone's measure. Those who
are living and only have article-length sources it is usually possible
to write about. Those who are living and have only scraps of
information floating around in various places are practically
impossible to write about, other than to produce poorly maintained
stubs.

That is the entire BLP problem in a nutshell. If the sources aren't
there, the articles are placeholders that will only be short and
stubby until someone out there writes more about that person, and if
that never happens, then is it ultimately worth maintaining such
articles?

Carcharoth