Wikipedia:Not every story/event/disaster needs a biography

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The following Little Green Box was drawn up by Uncle G during a deletion review discussion in May 2007, and is still relevant. Concerned with the hasty creation of a biographical article (now Crystal Mangum) related to the 2006 Duke lacrosse case Uncle G eloquently and forcefully argued against the tendency of Wikipedia editors to jump toward creating a biography on every individual. He did not say that this tendency is a result of our cult of personality, but one may play the relevant song in the background. The attentive reader may close their netbook afterward to renew their familiarity with On the Beach's "Ambulance Blues": "You're all just pissing in the wind / You don't know it but you are / And there ain't nothing like a friend / Who can tell you you're just pissing in the wind."

Not everything in Wikipedia requires presentation in the form of a biographical article. That a person receives a namecheck in a larger article about a subject that involves that person does not automatically warrant a redlink, or a biographical article for that person. We should not present things in a way that the sources do not. If sources for biographical information only cover the person in the context of something else (such as an event or a court case), and are not wholly separable from sources for that something else, then there should not be a biographical article in Wikipedia separate from an article on the something else. Court cases, crimes, conflicts, and controversies, for examples, should be presented as unified articles that involve all sides, not as individual articles, pretending to be biographies, that present each of the sides separately.