On Feb 22, 2009, at 7:53 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to > jail. > She is notable, and also she went to jail.
I can agree with this: some facts about a person become notable simply because the person is notable. As David Goodman mentioned, Einstein's children are notable simply because they are Einstein's. > An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their > life. > That is what biography means. The story of a life. > Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we > should present their biography. Here's an opposing idea: A full-blown biography of a person, such as a book, should indeed tell a vast number of details, in order to present a full picture of the subject's life. But a biographical article in an encyclopedia does not aim at giving such a full picture. It's much shorter than and doesn't try to go as far as a full-blown biography. Also, telling the story of a life in rich detail requires a kind of literary finesse that we can't likely achieve on a large-scale wiki. A serious, rich biography requires the personal touch of an author to, among other things, select thousands of extremely fine-grained facts and weave them into a textured narrative. No other biographer would do it the same way. Stylistic choices blur with content. That's not compatible with a large number of authors, and it's especially incompatible with the way coarse guidelines enable authors to resolve editing disputes. > Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an > article. > It doesn't establish what all goes into that article. I'm very surprised to read this. It seems to me that every fact reported on Wikipedia must meet an encyclopedic standard for notability--a standard much higher than, say, the standard for a newspaper article or a book about that topic or even a chapter about that topic. Exactly where that line is cannot be defined precisely and must be continually negotiated, but in order to have a sense of common purpose, we need to understand that the "encyclopedic bar" for notability is much higher than those other bars. I'd like to hear some other folks' opinions about this. I had taken what I just said as "goes without saying" among Wikipedians for a long time. WP:NNC? Ben _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
