Wikipedia:What is significant coverage?

"Significant coverage" is an important concept in Wikipedia's general notability guideline (GNG) and other notability guidelines. To contribute to a topic's notability, sources are required to provide significant coverage. This page covers how this concept is generally interpreted in practice.

Official definitions

GNG defines significant coverage as follows:

"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

• The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial coverage of IBM.
• Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.

Some other notability guidelines provide additional details. Particularly, the guideline for companies and organizations, typically viewed as a more restrictive version of GNG, has a section on significant coverage.

Unofficial interpretations

Wikipedia editors have widely differing interpretations about how much detail is required for a source to qualify as significant coverage, with deletionists tending to have higher standards than inclusionists. The essay Wikipedia:One hundred words argues that sources with at least 100 words of coverage of a topic generally count.

See also

• Wikipedia:Extracting the meaning of significant coverage