User:John Carter/Biography

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I'm having some trouble getting access to the irc, so I'm making my comments here. Please feel free to read them.

The scope of the Biography project is literally huge. As is, however, we have difficulties giving any degree of focused attention to any of the various groupings within biography because of the comparatively few "subprojects". I personally think that the in some cases overlarge scope of some of these subprojects may prevent them from working effectively. On that basis, I would request that we consider setting up dedicated subprojects for each of the following areas. By the way, if you balk at the number of subprojects below, please note that Military history has some 40 subprojects, and probably gets better results than we do.

Sports

  • Baseball people
  • Basketball people
  • Football (soccer) people
  • North American football people - including College football, NFL, CFL, and Arena Football
  • Ice Hockey people
  • Tennis (maybe)
  • and at least one other. I might call it "international competitions", because many of these biographies will in one way relate to the Olympics and similar international competitions. Each of these groups would deal with players, coaches, officials, administrators, and so on.

Please note that I believe in each of the cases above the existing project(s) for these subjects basically already deal with very substantial content related to biographies of individuals involved.

Entertainment

The majority of the scope of this subject is already covered at least adequately by the Actors and Filmmakers, Screenwriters and Musicians projects, among others. Having said that, I could see maybe setting up "authors" subprojects, maybe including

  • Mystery writers
  • Science fiction & fantasy writers
  • Historical fiction writers
  • Romance writers
  • Adventure fiction writers
  • YOung adult and children's writers

Humanities

There are a wide number of extant projects which deal with the humanities where the theories discussed are, at least to a degree, influenced by the life of the individual who proposed the theory. This makes the biographies very closely related to the subjects, and I believe that there is sufficient basis for the existence of separate subprojects for these disciplines. I might include each of the following:

  • Psychology
  • History
  • Business
  • Academics
  • Architecture
  • Politicians
  • Lawyers
  • Computer scientists
  • Aviators
  • Economics/business theory
  • Philosophy (note WikiProject Philosophy already has a Philsophers subproject)
  • Geoscientists
  • Astronomy/Space
  • Mathematicians
  • Technologists
  • Chemists
  • Physicists
  • Medical/Biology

and maybe a few others.

Religion

OK, this is my specialty, and I acknowledge I may be biased. Having said that, it seems to me that religion is very dependent on the people involved. On that basis, I do think that at least one religious biography work group is called for. And, in all honesty, I think we could very reasonably argue for specific groups for Judaism, Christianity (maybe including separate groups for Catholicism and Orthodoxy), Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and NRMs.

Project setup Now, regarding the existing project setup. We desperately need a few more A-Class reviewers, and probably general peer reviewers as well. Having someone keep up the newsletter would also be extremely beneficial. We could probably stand having some sort of, maybe unofficial, group of people trying to work actively to develop the project.

One of the greatest specific needs there is someone who can make changes to the project banner. At least one of the groups above, the Religious figures group, has already got more than enough members to function, but I can't figure out myself how to make the banner work.

One of the most problematic areas the project has is the core biographies. Only 1/4 of those already designated for inclusion are at GA class or higher. I think at least part of this is due to the lack of any existing input on this static list and the fact that, frankly, there's no real incentive to work on them. Also, at this point, I can honestly say that given the fact that the people who determined who would and would not be included have no in many cases left wikipedia, the rest of us really aren't necessarily motivated to want to fill the requests of others who, based on the number of improvements to the articles, never seen particularly interested in the list themselves. Certainly, breaking up the project into smaller groups, possibly as outlined above, might help remedy that problem. Maybe, maybe not. I still think, and several people can object, that one of the weaknesses it has is, while perhaps academically defendable, almost arbitrary (why 200 instead of 100, 300, 10, or 1000? Who knows?), itself not necessarily completely nonbiased (look at the discussion on the inclusion of Columba for instance), and, well, the to date almost total lack of interest.

I personally think any number of other proposals, possibly taking this list as one of the bases for determining the names to be included in a collaborative effort, may well work much better. However, I think it would almost by definition have to at least potentially include those individuals who are of extreme significance now, as articles on them will be accessed so regularly. Here I'm thinking of people like leading politicians or candidates for major office (President of the US, leader of the UN), leaders of groups involved in wars, and the like. Simply because Bruce Lee may have been judged a person of greater lasting importance, given his inclusion on the list, doesn't mean Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush should not have their articles receive substantive attention as well. In fact, I can honestly think they would probably deserve more.

Another possibility would be to work with the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team and try to focus on improving those biography articles which have perhaps been rejected on the basis of quality concerns alone, or were included despite the lack of quality.

Possibly we could try to recreate an active single article collaboration. Alternately, maybe we could set up an article improvement contest like Military History already has. Maybe we could work a bit more actively with other collaborations as well. All these things are possible, and, I regret to say, almost all would probably be as effective, if not more so, than the Core biographies list has been itself to date.

Anyway, if you've read through all this, thanks for your attention.