On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonav...@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
