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

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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.

That's a good point. I recently edited a BLP to help clean it up, and
was struck by two points:

1) It was difficult to know where to start and when to stop, as there
is a need to not leave a BLP in a half-finished state, even if you are
stubbing it down and slowly expanding, as even slow expansion can
still leave it somewhat skewed and looking 'unfinished' (even if
better than before). Those making subsequent additions need to bear
that in mind as well.

2) If no-one else has written substantially about that person, it is a
very uncomfortable feeling that you might be the first person to be
doing that, and you start to wonder what right *anyone* has to write
about a living person without working with that person to make sure it
is accurate.

This veers into the realm of discussing authorised and unauthorised
biographies. Doing an unauthorised biography of a famous person and
getting it published can make the author money, and most publishing
firms will only publish if it is accurate and non-libellous. But doing
short pages on non-notable or borderline notable people is something
entirely different, and the motivations are often entirely different.

Motivation is something that should be looked at as well. In my case,
the articles are people working in science and that interests me. But
is that enough of a reason? What about someone who wants to write
about the leader of some small obscure country on the other side of
the world? (And then you have the classic case of the motivation being
to do a hatchet job on someone). Sure, the mantra is to use reliable
sources and be faithful to the sources, but it is still very different
(and difficult) writing about a living person who can (in theory) turn
up and object to what has been written.

Carcharoth