[WikiEN-l] Re: Clearer policy on self-written and obscure biographies

Thu Jan 1 18:32:18 UTC 2004

Sheldon Rampton wrote:

>
> Having said all this, I think there _is_ a potential problem with 
> "vanity biographies," but this is really just a special case under 
> Wikipedia's NPOV policy. It might be a good idea to have a policy 
> against people _creating_ biographies of themselves, even though this 
> would be impossible in practice to enforce.

I guess we have to distinguish between cases:

Case 1: a person about whom we'd write an article anyway. In this case, 
we'd perhaps be wary of NPOV problems. If the person is just adding 
information, this should be fine.
Case 2: a person about whom we *wouldn't* write an article. This is the 
"vanity biography". It's this I was alluding to.

Anyway, it seems we have a couple of pages on this already
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Probably_not_famous_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Auto-biography

They need a bit of cleaning up though