Only notable persons need apply

My father working as a geologist
in Africa in the 1930s

I was a bit surprised that one had to pass a set of "notability guidelines" to be posted on Wikipedia. I was thinking of writing a biography of my father, who had been a mining engineer and exploration geologist for the better part of 40 years in the Caribbean and Africa. Given the lack of references to his experiences available over the Internet, it would be difficult to have the biography stay up for any length of time, as editors, or wikipedians as they are called, would have the power to remove it. I suppose I could approach the biography backward by creating Internet records based on the written records I do have of his experiences, but that would be a tedious effort, and I assume the notes would be examined as well.

This led me to ask what makes a person "notable?" Obviously, notability in one field doesn't necessarily carry the same weight in another field. Then there are the strange cases where one is notable for being a well-documented murder victim like Kitty Genovese or falsely convicted of murder like Amanda Knox, having lived uneventful lives before these incidents took place. This is more "notoriety" than it is "notability," but I don't write the rules.

It apparently is not enough that someone lived an eventful life, the events themselves have to be significant enough to warrant consideration. Even then, the person has to be more than notable by association, he or she has to have contributed significantly to that event. "Relationships [alone] do not confer notability." So, the fact that he worked for the Marshall Aid Plan after WWII, by helping to provide badly needed raw materials may not be enough. He has to have been more than a minor role player.

I suppose these guidelines keep persons from simply posting obituaries on Wikipedia, as it would get cluttered with names pretty quickly that have little interest beyond family members. Wikipedia is rather cluttered as it is. But, I'm curious to learn what it is to be a Wikiepedian and if there is room for my father on Wikipedia.

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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