User:Geo Swan/opinions/"False Geber" and what a biography should contain

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An administrator recently deleted an article I was the major contributor to. It had recently been through an {{afd}}, survived as "no consensus". This administrator chose to delete it, without prior discussion, based on their opinion it was a violated WP:BLP. I asked them to explain more fully. Their explanation is included below. I have highlighted one part of their explanation I plan to address here:

I deleted it because it was not a biography of the subject, as it claimed to be. A biography should be a balanced summary of an individual's entire life and, when appropriate, work. This article was focussed almost entirely on one aspect and even, at the time of deletion, included a number of statements of dubious relevance to the subject. CIreland (talk) 20:47, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Ideally a biography should include the subject's date and place of birth, information about where they studied, information about the early aspects of their career -- and possibly information about their family, illnesses, death, other crises.

But, if we can't find that background information, but there is something remarkable about that subject, we should go with what we have. I strongly dispute this administrator's assertion that biographies that lack background biographical information are violations of policy.

One of the most important books in my personal library is Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science. It is 800 pages long and includes close to 1000 brief biographies of Scientists associated with significant advances in Science. They are arranged chronologically. Biography 71 is about an Arab chemist named Geber. Biography 101 is about another chemist known as the "false Geber". Asimov wrote:

[101] false Geber flourished around 1300 Nothing is known about him, not even his name (for he wrote under the pseudonum Geber), except that he was probably a Spaniard, like Arnold of Villanove, and that he wrote around 1300. He was the first to write about Sulfuric acid the most important single industrial chemical used today. The alchemical discovery of sulfuric acid and the other strong acids is, by all odds, the greatest chemical achievement of the Middle Ages.

The article goes on for another sixty or seventy words.

I suggest that Asimov's coverage of "the false Geber" is a counter-example that illustrates that perfectly adequate biographical articles can be useful -- even if they lack every single element of the course of the subject's life, except for their work -- when their work itself merits coverage.

Candidly, Geo Swan (talk) 18:32, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

See also