2010/1/27 Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com>: > * B1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points have appropriate > inline citations. > * B2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious > omissions or inaccuracies. > * B3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or > more sections of content. > * B4. It is free from major grammatical errors. > * B5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an > infobox, images, or diagrams. > > Should all BLPs meet that standard?
I think it's an excellent goal. A B-rated article should, in theory, be something we are happy to print and to leave untouched because, well, it's enough. It could be better, but it's not incomplete, we don't have to think of it as a work in progress, and it's not wrong! Interestingly, one field where milhist anecdotally finds problems with getting articles to B-class is biographies, albeit usually of dead people rather than living ones. It's point B2 - no obvious omissions - and it ties in to some comments upthread. Unless someone's actually gone and written a conventional biography, we don't tend to know much about most military figures - we can construct a robust chronology of their career from public sources, and fill in the major points where they "intersected with history", but at the cost of an almost complete gap covering their personal life. It's often very hard to find things like marriage or children, and god help you if you want to write about what they did after retiring to civilian life, or include any of the "colour" we like in biographical articles. In other words, we can write a pretty good example of what you call "biographical newspaper clippings". There's some synthesis, sure, some editorial commentary we can draw on about one aspect of their life - but in some ways it just highlights the gaping void of stuff we don't even manage to address with primary sources. (You have a similar problem with a lot of sporting articles, I believe - Y competed in the 1924 Olympics, he got a silver in the pole-vaulting, which we can tell you all about... and then he presumably went back to Poland, end of article.) As such, it's quite easy to fall down on "obvious omissions" - if you can look at the article and say, we stop talking about him at 45, he died at 70, what happened?, then it's clearly got omissions; it's a cruder test than the "reasonably comprehensive" rule we use for GA ratings, but it's a pretty effective one. I suppose an interesting "hardline" position would be to say that, for someone where we can't actually fulfill this sort of comprehensiveness, we should be asking if they should have an article. If someone is public in such a limited way that writing about them makes it clear how little we know - and that isn't itself a point of interest because it's obscured - then it's an interesting flag. I'm not sure I support this idea at all, but it's one way to help distinguish that old question of how we determine public figures! Still, that's beyond the scope of this discussion... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l