User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters/Academic and artistic biographies

Biographies of academics and artists, who are living or were recently living, raise several "special" concerns beyond those addressed generally in Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. Other types of biographies might be special in other ways, but philosophers, historians, novelists, visual artists, composers, non-star musicians, and so on, have a strong encyclopedic distinction between their work and their person.

Purpose

The main purpose of articles on academics and artists is to provide an accurate, neutral, accessible summary of their work, and of its place and influence in their discipline and in wider culture. It is not to provide a final judgement of the intellectual worth of that work, nor of whether its influence has been positive or negative, nor of the moral character of the subject. This distinction of purpose suggests some principles for the relevance of biographical and critical material. Description of a subject's personal life beyond basic dates and places is unnecessary unless the subject's personal life is a notable and documented part of her work or influence, or was otherwise subject to degree of media attention that would would make the subject notable on that basis alone.

Criticism is always worth including (concisely) if a subject's dialogue with that criticism refined, altered or refocussed the subject's work. Criticism may be worth including if the contrast between the work and the criticism helps explain the subject's work to readers; for example, criticism may highlight the ways in which a subject stands in contrast to most practictioners of her field. Criticism should not be included simply because it has verifiably been made: the focus of an academic or artistic biography should be the subject's work, not on the work of critics nor on general debates or schools in the subject's field (those topics can and should have their own articles instead).

It is right and proper for a biography of an academic to focus chiefly on the content of their intellectual work, to a much larger extent than is the case for other categories of biography subjects. Certainly basic facts of where an academic was born, lives, works, perhaps whom they married or had other significant relationships with, are unquestionably germane. But the bulk of these biograhies should be about their books, articles, paintings, recordings, and so on, and about what the content and influence of those works is. The problem is that it is easy to cover controversies (type the person's name in Lexis-Nexis and see what you get), but much harder to cover an academic's research, because it requires a fairly advanced level of knowledge on the thinker's field of study, or an artist's field of creativity, in order to summarize properly.

Pitfalls

Unfortunately, in working on a number of academic biographies, I have encounted a few problems with great regularity; these problems in many ways boil down to too much focus on the person and not enough on the work. For example:

• Large focus on personal life of an academic, especially on details presented in a negative light. Often these details are poorly sourced anyway, but even where the secondary source is verifiable, it often is irrelevant to their reasons for notability. For example, perhaps a mathematician who proved an important theorem also had a "messy divorce" that was reported in the local university newspaper. While true and verifiable, this event has little or nothing to do with the person's reason for notability.

• Misguided idea of the weight of "criticism". On the one hand there are many of the personalistic details like those mentioned above. Of subtler concern is the criticism that is part of the normal academic process. Any academic who has published a highly notable position or theory has ipso facto been widely "criticized" by other academics (possibly even more so in social sciences and humanities than in natural sciences). Much of that criticism is far less notable than the original thesis itself (inasmuch as the biographied figure is usually more notable than academics who may not merit biographies themselves, but have still published); however, many editors feel or claim that NPOV and balance requires such criticisms get extensive weight in the biography article.

Nothing in WP:LIVING contradicts the concerns I have for academic biographies. But there are concerns that are not addressed with enough specificity in the general biography policy. I would propose that a child guideline/policy be developed to describe the specific issues that arise in association with writing biographies of academics. Thoughts?