On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > Carcharoth wrote: >> But this >> feeds into my point about whether such articles should be brought to a >> minimum standard, instead of roughly referenced along with a lot of >> others ones being worked on at the same time, and then the people >> doing this rough-and-ready referencing moving on to other articles? >> >> My standards would be to ensure minimum copyediting standards have >> been met, that the birth year has been found and securely referenced, >> and that a standalone biography (even if only a mini-biography from >> who they work for, or a conference biography, or some form of press >> release) is found and used as a reference. >> > But I don't think the issue will be resolved by more "guidelines". This > is an interesting example where the web material is largely of the kind > of self-validating, not really third-party stuff that can be > problematic. (I don't think having the biography is problematic, but the > critical approach is quite helpful here, in indicating what it should > contain.) There is a great deal of point in being selective: much of > academia has to be taken on similar terms, and I don't think we should > slide too far into rejecting departmental home pages as references.
The interesting thing is noting at what point someone reaches some critical mass of *real* notability (i.e. not Wikipedia's definition of it) and they start to gain widespread recognition from their peers, and then start receiving awards and whatnot, and also how competent those writing biographies and obituaries are, and whether someone makes the cut for being included in Who's Who and things like the Dictionary of National Biography, or specialised biographies. There are many people we have biographies for who will never reach that standard, and for which there will not be comprehensive biographical material unless some researcher goes and writes a biography (which does happen more often than you might think). It would easily be possible in some cases for Wikipedians to scrape together material, but there needs to be some "verdict from history", from a reliable authority in the field, for such articles to be anything more than biographical newspaper clippings. The final verdict on whether an article on someone is sustainable is sometimes not clear until several decades after they have died - or even longer - there are people publishing biographical material about World War I generals today (there were over 1000 of them in the British Army alone), but consider someone in 2050 considering who to write about from our time - unless material gets deposited in an archive and there are enough reasons for someone to study that person's life in detail, many of those we have articles on will have nothing more written about them. Ever. Most people get nothing written about them. Some only get a bit written about them, and an obituary. Only a very few get their lives pored over in great detail with multiple biographies published about them. We should draw the line somewhere, and in a way that is easy to assess. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
