But you're not disagreeing with anything I said. The amount of balance in an article between "accomplishments" (that is, what makes the person notable) and "biography" (that is, the story of their life) is handled by UNDUE. It doesn't really have anything to do with notability. And it doesn't enforce, nor preclude, including whatever biographic details the editors think is warranted. If someone was a great lawyer, involved a number of famous cases, and their article is half discussing their descent from the King of Portugal or something, that is undue. It's also OR unless it is well-sourced, and even so those sources might be unreliable ones. A person's biography becomes important because they are, not the other way round. Once the person has become important, that is when people want to read their biography. Pick any biography in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and they include mundane details that could apply to thousands of non-notable people (born in London, married at an early age, slain in battle, blah blah) and yet they include them. Those details are each not notable. It is because they happened to a *person* who is notable, that is what makes those mundane details encyclopedic. Will Johnson In a message dated 2/22/2009 5:31:15 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
Couldn't disagree more. Articles about people are intended to give the information that readers want. What they want ito know is what is important about them. What is important about them is what they are notable for. The personal life is not the important part. The professional (artistic, political ,scientific, business,...) life is the important part. Please excuse my putting it almost all in words of one syllable, but it's that basic. For an example, look at Shakespeare: the textual part of the article is 2/3 about the works, 1/3 about the biography. Same ratio for the lede paragraphs. About the same ratio for the illustrations. About the same ratio for the bibliography. And this is for a literary author, the sort of personal where the facts of the personal biography are generally thought especially relevant to the work. And not any literary author, but one whose disputed personal life has been of particular public interest for centuries. It will be even higher for most other personal subjects. Just for fun, I checked Bob Dylan, an article where the personal and professional material is presented together, and it seems to be about he same ratio. For Einstein, it's about 50-:50--I think because the work needs to be discussed more technically, so it's mostly in separate articles. We write about what's notable. The personal life of a person is only notable in relation to his accomplishments--if it were not for the person's accomplishments, we wouldn't care about the life & we wouldn't have an article i the first place. According to your principal , we'd have the fullest articles for he people about whose personal lives more was known, not the one's with the most accomplishments. On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:53 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their life. > That is what biography means. The story of a life. > Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to jail. > She is notable, and also she went to jail. > Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we > should present their biography. > If we wanted to only present, in a person's article, what they are notable > for, then we shouldn't have an article on the person at all, but rather on the > incident, mentioning the person with that incident-article. > > Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article. > It doesn't establish what all goes into that article. > > Will Johnson > > > > In a message dated 2/22/2009 3:09:56 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, > [email protected] writes: > > An article about a person should primarily be about what the person is > notable for. > > > **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. > (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000003) > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000003) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
