-----Original Message----- From: Charles Matthews <[email protected]> To: English Wikipedia <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 2:23 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] "A short article is not a stub."
Delirium wrote: > 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. OTOH - biographies have been subject to a kind of mission creep. A biography of Beethoven used to be 200 pages where you'd learn something of his life and character. Then it was 300. Biographies are now commonly 600 pages. And _serious_ biographies are huge: often now they are even trilogies. I bought one of Melville that is around 2000 pages. Michael Holroyd started to shorten his own long biographies. To get back to the point: an article on Wikipedia is no substitute for a book-length treatment, if the latter and its detail is what you want. Defining it as "the WP biography of X should tell you whether or not you need to consult a full biography" says it better. I wish I knew the technique for filleting a biography to write the article (I don't write that way, but by building up a piece from various scraps and fragments); there is a big pile of biographies to the right of my desk and I'd be delighted to get rid of any from which the "salient" facts have been extracted already. The fact that I tend to use the biography of X to find verifiable facts about Y who crossed paths with X at some point tells its own story, I feel. I actually like the idea that Wikipedia articles printing to a few pages can give the essentials of a book. I'm not anti-academic - far from it - but there is a point in being anti-magpie. Charles>> That is why we really have to allow the community to decide what *it* finds interesting, important, salient and not try to impose too much from the top down. The community should be creating from the bottom-up and our "rules" should merely reflect what the community is doing in this type of case. If many members of the community want to know the names of Brad Pitt's children, then we should allow that, if they can be sourced. Names do not invade privacy when they have already been widely disseminated. I can find the information in about two seconds. Reflection of what is reality is not an "invasion" of privacy. Now, as our policy already states, if the only way to find a piece of information is with a primary source, and if the door to that information has not been already opened by a mention of some sort in a secondary source, than we should not include it either. However many sources mention that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have children, and so we should as well. Some sources mention their names as well, and so we should as well. If a marginally notable physicist had a messy divorce only covered in a small local newspaper and only tangentially mentioning "and their two children", and the only way to find more details on those children is by examining birth certificates, court papers or school records, then we should not be mentioning those details. However, if those same sources gush about how one daughter is a "famous art historian working for the KGB" then they themselves are opening the door to dig out the information. If they want to be private, they need to stay private and not display their peacock in public. Will Johnson _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
