David Gerard wrote: > 2009/2/24 Delirium <[email protected]>: > >> David Gerard wrote: >> > > >>> There was some coverage of this matter in WP:BLP - that only >>> noteworthy details of a noteworthy person should be included. (The >>> hypothetical example given is the subject having had a messy divorce - >>> for a minorly notable physicist it's probably not relevant, for a >>> politician it may have been a widely reported scandal.) >>> > > >> I this more than by subject area, it varies especially by fame of the >> person. For famous people, all aspects of their professional and >> personal lives are interesting to historians, who attempt to construct a >> full picture of their lives, tease out possible influences and >> motivations, and so on. You would be hard-pressed to find a book-length >> biography of a physicist or mathematician that fails to discuss their >> personal lives, for example. For less-famous people, it's not notable >> because frankly nobody really cares about them: since nobody is >> interested in teasing out possible influences and motivations, we don't >> need to know any of that info. >> > > > It has to be applied on a case-by-case basis. e.g. [[Mitchell Baker]] > - her hobby is trapeze. Is this relevant to mention? Well, it may not > be for most people, but quite a few biographical articles on her > mention it because it's an interesting thing about her. > > Similarly, a biographical article not listing the subject's family > would seem odd where that's uncontroversial public information. OTOH, > there have been cases like one I dealt with where someone put this > apparently uncontroversial info into an article, but it was actually > something unsourced the subject worked hard to keep out of the public > eye and had to be removed and the revs deleted unless and until a good > public source came up. >
This seems to really be an issue specific to biographies of living or recently deceased people, for a variety of reasons. For non-recent people, say someone who died in the 19th century or earlier, just about everything that you can find in reliable sources is relevant. Certainly book-length biographies consider anything they can find relevant: the goal of a biography, properly speaking, is to try to give as full as possible an illustration of all facets of a person's life, figure out how they intertwined, etc. So something like a messy divorce would certainly be interesting in trying to determine why the career path and thought of a famous philosopher, physicist, politician, or mathematician took the path it did. It might turn out not to have had a big impact, but a biographer would at least mention it. Even somewhat shorter biographies consider this information relevant: if we recently discovered some personal drama in the life of a 14th-century archbishop, encyclopedia entries would be duly updated to mention it. I'd submit that in the cases where some of this information is considered *not* relevant, it's because we actually don't want a proper biography of the person at all. Either they aren't all that interesting, or the interestingness doesn't outweigh the privacy concerns. Instead, what we really want is something akin to an entry in a subject-specific biographical dictionary, like the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (to pick one at random I've been consulting lately). Sources like that don't purport to be full biographies of their subjects, but instead to more narrowly describe their academic careers, perhaps with brief mentions of very notable things outside those academic careers. Less a biography of [[Personname]], and more an article on [[Personname's academic career]]. In extreme cases we do actually do this renaming, e.g. people known for one event are usually rolled into an article on the event. I suppose it'd be impractical to actually change the titles in the rest, but I think it's worth considering that these articles are still something different than real biographies. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
