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It's an interesting notion, and Wikipedia used to be more like that, but Wikipedia has gone the other way for a lot of good reasons, including fairness to both readers and subjects.

Readers are poorly served by a one-line biography for somebody obscure, and even more poorly served by the typical marginal biography, which is a couple paragraphs of poorly written cruft sans citations.

Subjects are poorly served by shaky biographies because suddenly the top search result is a couple of semi-random sentences covering the few things that happen to be verifiable about them.

For example, when you search for my mom's name, the top result is her obituary. I carefully wrote it in consultation with the family to give a balanced view of her life, so I'm happy to see it there. But suppose there were a Wikipedia article about her. If you went and pulled all her public records, I think you'd get a) her birthdate, b) her bankruptcy, c) her real estate broker's license, and d) the times she was the victim of a crime. I would hate it if she had an article in Wikipedia, because nothing that really matters about her life would be a part of it, and if I tried to put it in I'd (correctly) get [citation needed].



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