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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 27 March 2012 17:20, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > So you have been arguing that without the BLP policy, and without the
> > noticeboard set up to help compliance with the policy, just the same
> close
> > investigations of the actual reliability of sources that nominally fall
> > within "RS" would be going on?  I don't agree, and I wonder if anyone
> else
> > does. I'm not the biggest fan of noticeboards, qua unchartered processes;
> > but in this case it seems to be working, and having WP:BLP there fairly
> > clearly has something to do with it.
>
>
> The key point to remember about BLPs is: no eventualism. If an article
> about someone dead 200 years says something nasty and wrong, that's
> not great, but it's not urgent. If an article about a living person
> says something nasty and wrong, that is urgent, and we can't just
> assume the wiki process will on balance fix it in the fullness of
> time. It's the simplest possible way of doing it and it's a vast
> improvement over the previous situation. It's not perfection, but
> calling it a "failure" is hyperbolic.



"No eventualism" is one principle that I would like to see spelled out in
BLP policy, in the Writing style section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Writing_style

People do tend to treat biographies like a research pad for all the things
that an author might justifiably want to include in a five-volume,
2,000-page biography.

The problem is, the other 1,999 pages never turn up, leaving something –
often something trivial, titillating, or unflattering – that might be
worthy of mention on page 1,547 as the biography's main point.

Andreas