On 24 March 2012 11:37, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 24 March 2012 11:25, Carcharoth
<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
<snip>
The point
about Wikipedia (for BLPs) being ahead of the proper sources
to use is another excellent one. There is a natural progression to
biographical sources that (for obvious reasons) parallels the
subject's life. People record their own lives at first (diaries,
letters, CVs and the like), and then gradually others start to write
about that person and you get short descriptions such as author and
contributor biographies, and short news items. Then, as someone
becomes more prominent, you get more considered material, such as
interviews, feature articles, and so on. Very prominent people get
official and official biographers that document that person's life
(e.g. US Presidents and some other politicians). Towards the end of
someone's career, you may get tribute articles and the like. Then,
when the person dies, you get obituaries, and then (possibly) entries
in the histories relevant to that person. Very prominent people get
entire books written about them. Others get less.
If Wikipedia jumps into that natural progression too early, and tries
to establish, or maintain, a biography before there are sources to
support one, the result can be a mess.
<snip>
Zee problem with this standard is that it would preclude having an
article on the person currently running mali (admittedly the article
isn't up to much but I think it could be argued that we should at
least try).
Oh, there's definitely a knack to this business. Imagine that we wanted to
hive off the "Internet meme" etc. stuff from WP to some hypothetical sister
project (there is a genuine argument along the lines that "historians of
the future will be grateful to have at least some of this stuff on
record"); and leave the material of which it could be said "this guy is
just a footnote now ... but it's a footnote we should have". Now try to
translate what that means into the kind of language our policy documents
tend to use (all universals and epistemology). Doesn't work easily (cf. the
GNG).
We'd have to get a bit sophistimacated about our content, in terms at least
of current versus permanent interest.
Charles