On 24 March 2012 19:42, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think it is important to remember why we're
doing this. Our purpose
isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful
information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that
BLPs are useful to people.
For low-level BLPs, a large proportion of the views may be Wikipedia editors.
Wikipedia editors count as readers too.
As long as
there are sufficient reliable
sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why
we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the
General Notability Guideline says.
But what if that is all the reliable sources there are? And there are
no more and no more likely to be forthcoming? We are effectively
bequeathing to future generations a large number of stubby articles
that may never have any more sources written about them. Would you
like the job of (in 50 years time) sorting through these articles and
deciding which ones to try and ascertain year of death, and which ones
to expand from obituaries (if any exist), and which ones to delete
because they turned out to have sunk back into obscurity and only
dedicated research in primary documents (mostly not allowed under
WP:OR) will be of any use?
I did say there needs to be enough to write *more than* a stub.