Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 58

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Notability. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 55

Archive 56

Archive 57

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RFC: when are community radio stations notable?

Comments requested on the topic of community radio station notability, and whether it is reasonable to expect significant secondary sources for radio stations covering a small area, here. JMWt (talk) 10:08 am, Yesterday (UTC−8)

The above section was deleted, without so much as an edit comment, in this edit by Neutralhomer (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). As far as I can tell such action is precluded by WP:TALK and none of the exceptions apply. (It wouldn't have been better with an edit comment, either.) I am aware that Neutralhomer has moved to close the RFC started by JMWWt but this seems to me to be exceptionally heavy-handed. An added note here about the move to close would have been appropriate. Jeh (talk) 14:29, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Indiscriminate exclusion of topics

There is a passage at the beginning of this guideline that says that notability serves "to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics". I think we should change the word "inclusion" to "inclusion or exclusion". I don't think this would change the meaning of the guideline as one literally cannot have indiscriminate inclusion without also having indiscriminate exclusion at the same time. What it would do is more explicitly acknowledge that notability already serves to avoid indiscriminate deletion by creating a presumption against deletion. It would be less easy to twist the new wording into a claim that notability is a deletionists' charter, which it is not and should not be. James500 (talk) 08:57, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Can you give an example of your hypothetical twisting ever actually happening? And whence your idea there's a "presumption against deletion"? EEng (talk) 10:44, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

"Exclusion" in the context of notability is not a valid approach. Notability is only a test for a stand-alone article, not exclusion of topics which might be better covered in broader articles. --MASEM (t) 14:42, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

And BTW, notability is only part of the test for a standalone article, as I'm having great trouble getting people to understand right now. EEng (talk) 15:21, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

I sure I can recall many instances of editors indiscriminately waving around "indiscriminate inclusion" as if it was a license to delete any topic they do not like, or to put it another way, any topic against which they are prejudiced. It might take a considerable amount of searching to produce links, as I would have to search several years of editing. If editors were to go around excluding topics or articles because they simply don't like them, that would be indiscriminate exclusion in the sense that it would create indiscriminate gaps or holes in our content (I am tempted to make an analogy to a piece of Swiss cheese). They would be indiscriminate at least in the sense that there would be no consistent inclusion/exclusion standards, which would instead appear approximately random. Notability guidelines do create a presumption against deletion (or even merger/redirection) because N says "A topic is presumed to merit an article if:" it meets GNG or SNG and doesn't fail NOT. That presumption is a positive obstacle that makes it positively harder to exclude such articles (and presumably their topics as well) than it would otherwise be if notability did not exist. It is true that the presumption can sometimes be rebutted by a stronger argument (but not if no such argument can be validly applied to the article in question), but I don't think that matters since the presumption is always an additional hurdle. In any event, in many cases the presumption is practically conclusive. We are never, for example, going to decide to no longer have article on the Crimean War. One of the reasons we are never going to do that is because there is simply too much coverage of that war in too many suitable sources (a phenomenon that we call GNG). My understanding is that before notability existed, editors could and did attempt to argue to delete/exclude articles/topics that they simply did not like (cf. WP:IMPORTANT). The presumption created by notability, and GNG in particular, certainly makes it harder to do that. If, on the other hand, preventing "indiscriminate inclusion" means that we do not have articles on everything (or an excessively large number), then GNG certainly does help to prevent indiscriminate exclusion in the sense of having no articles or content (or an excessively small number), by creating a possibly impenetrable obstacle to that. If as Masem argues, notability is only a test for a stand-alone article, not exclusion of topics which might be better covered in broader articles, then it cannot be a test for inclusion of topics which might be better covered in broader articles either. If he is correct, the passage in the introduction should read "indiscriminate inclusion or exclusion of articles", not topics. That said, his reasoning might not be correct because it assumes that all topics can be merged into an article on broader topic. That might not be true, particularly as pages have an absolute 2Mb size limit. Either way, the presumption created by notability does help to prevent indiscriminate exclusion of something, whether it is articles or topics. James500 (talk) 01:35, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

(a) Can you fucking learn to indent your post like everyone else, or at least use {{od}}? You've been asked before. (b) Is the answer to my question in there somewhere? EEng (talk) 01:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

"Can you fucking learn to indent your post like everyone else"? EEng, did you mean to post that to Wikipedia talk:Civility, where you've also been posting in the past few minutes? You might want to head over to that page, as you have a boatload to learn about that topic. Alansohn (talk) 01:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@EEng: see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Don't bold your !votes for a quasi-explanation -- it's disruption for the sake of taking a principled stand along the lines of the essay which was being discussed there. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:58, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

It isn't a principled stand, it is a piece of straightforward copy-editing that you personally strongly disagree with. It has no relation to that essay whatsoever, which has nothing to do with notability or INDISCRIMINATE, except that you have followed me from that venue via another essay. You might like to read AVOIDYOU and HOUND. James500 (talk) 05:19, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@James500: I read your comments about indenting there (in response to the usual requests to indent), to be related to what I would most certainly characterize as a "principled stand" in not bolding votes. I can accept I may have misunderstood what you meant. So instead it's just been "a piece of straightforward copy-editing" that happens to disregard common practice and numerous requests of other editors (until now, perhaps, given your comment below?) As for following -- and I don't think this is the first time you've thrown that one against the wall -- I watch pages related to deletion and notability. This page in particular has been on my watchlist for years now. You clearly watch them, too. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:43, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

We seem to have crossed wires here. The straightforward piece of copy editing is the proposed change to N, not anything to do with indentation. I've never taken any principled stand, or any stand whatsoever, against indenting. All I have done in the past is to point out that the guidelines tell us to outdent when a column of text has become so thin it is difficult to read, and that indentation is for replies to earlier comments, not completely new comments. The non-indentation of my earlier comment was an accident. I'm sure you've made mistakes before. James500 (talk) 01:31, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@Alansohn: He said a bad word, which is not ideal, but it was specifically about a user's actions, not the user himself. Obviously it's supposed to be here, since it was immediately below an unindented comment by someone whose persistently refuses to indent like everyone else (and whose indenting was even mentioned [disclosure: by me] above on this page). The "boatload" comment seems like an unnecessary poke all things considered (but, of course, EEng might consider refactoring to add a minced oath instead, lest people evaluate other arguments by poor word choice) — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:07, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

You don't have to explain things to poor Alansohn. I guess he follows me around now like a little puppy. I'm happy with my word-choice -- it's an entirely appropriate response. This guy's like the guy who insisted on omitting spaces after periods and commas. [1] EEng (talk) 02:16, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I will use a greater level of indentation in future if it will make you happy. James500 (talk) 05:19, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Use the system at WP:THREAD, as called for at WP:BOTTOMPOST. EEng (talk) 05:33, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

All you've done is appropriate the word "indiscriminate" in order to eat away at the concept of WP:INDISCRIMINATE. This sense of ~"indiscriminate exclusion" is not actually a counterpart of WP:INDISCRIMINATE -- it's just a similar wording for an entirely different concept. You're arguing for changes based on what the purported actions of "deletionist" bogeymen. Finding diffs wouldn't be persuasive as there are people who mischaracterize and misuse Wikipedia policies and guidelines to fit their own point of view all the time. If someone says something is WP:INDISCRIMINATE and you disagree, disagree with them. Same as with anything else. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:54, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I could only answer by repeating what I have already said about the meaning of INDISCRIMINATE, and pointing out that copy-editing to improve clarity is a good thing. James500 (talk) 05:19, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

That said, there is absolutely no way that the proposed change could "eat away at the concept of INDISCRIMINATE", because no good faith editor (let alone that policy) supports indiscriminate exclusion of topics. James500 (talk) 03:54, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

The only connection between the two concepts is that you've appropriated the word "indiscriminate". You're proposing inserting it into a sentence which would serve no purpose other than to safeguard against what extreme bad faith radical deletionist bogeymen might do (and it's quite clear that you see this monster far more often than anyone else does), while at the same time providing an angle to wikilawyer against invocations of WP:INDISCRIMIANTE ("yeah, well, it's not indiscriminate exclusion either!"). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Indiscriminate exclusion of topics clearly would result in an "indiscriminate collection of information", which is what is actually prohibited by the policy. It would remove, amongst other things, structure, order, consistency and context. It might end up removing all content altogether. The two expressions are obviously opposite sides of exactly the same thing. I think they are actually synonyms (in the same way that describing a glass of water as "half empty" or "half full" both mean the same thing). [Note that the word "collection" in the policy refers to the end product, not to the activity, such as inclusion or exclusion, that produces it. On that note, I would not necessarily object to the use of wording such as "avoid becoming an indiscriminate collection of information".] If we were to altogether replace the existing reference to indiscriminate inclusion with a reference to indiscriminate exclusion that would produce no more scope for wikilawyering than the present text. The text actually proposed would contain considerably less scope for wikilawyering, because it would be expressed in unbiased language. Retaining the present wording serves no purpose other than to safeguard against what extreme bad faith extreme inclusionist bogeymen might do (and it's quite clear that you see that monster far more often than anyone else does). James500 (talk) 09:13, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Sigh. No, just one or two. PS: By flipping that language to say that not changing the guideline to include "indiscriminate exclusion" is the extreme position, when it's clear that not only does the change not have overwhelming support but indeed clearly will not even find consensus, you're kind of making my point that you characterize many things that have very broad support as extremist while trying to characterize your own position as not being a minority viewpoint. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Even if consensus was a majority vote, the opinions of two or three people in what has been the briefest of discussions on a page with a not particularly massive level of traffic would not be sufficient to make predictions about community consensus, because the sample is far too small. If, for example, Andrew Davison and Diego Moya, who commented above and who might just be busy at the moment, were to return to this conversation and agree with me, as I imagine they might, the numbers would be immediately reversed, as they were in the thread above. But since consensus is not a majority vote, there is no point in talking about majority or minority positions. Consensus is actually determined by weighing the merits of arguments, and I think that your arguments are poor. Masem's are much better, though I think the logical conclusion of them is for a slightly different change to the essay. Instead of making clairvoyant predictions about the future of this discussion before it has even really started, why not wait and see if other people weigh in? James500 (talk) 07:09, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

You need to remember we have no inclusion policies or guidelines. WP:N is not an inclusion guideline. It is a means of determining (alongside other tests) if a topic has enough information to have a standalone article. If it doesn't, then that topic can be covered elsewhere, as long as it meets NOT/V/NOR/NPOV. Period. --MASEM (t) 15:28, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

If that is correct, the existing reference in the introduction to inclusion of topics, as opposed to inclusion of articles, should be removed altogether as an error. James500 (talk) 07:09, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

No, that's not what it says. It says WP:N supports WP:NOT#IINFO, not that it is specifically avoiding indiscriminate inclusion of topics. --MASEM (t) 15:04, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

But it specifically uses the words "indiscriminate inclusion of topics". If I read you correctly, you are telling me those words are not accurate. I therefore suggest replacing the words "avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics" with something like "avoid violations of WP:INDISCRIMINATE". No one could argue that was not an accurate paraphrase of INDISCRIMINATE. James500 (talk) 05:26, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

You're taking the phrase out of context of the sentence it is used it on this page. It does not say that WP:N is about indiscriminate inclusion of topics, but is that it supports that goal which is set by WP:NOT. And while replacing it with NOT would end up functionally being the same thing, it introduces an extra step to the editor to understand what the passage means when we could put it right there. --MASEM (t) 17:15, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

The words "indiscriminate inclusion of topics" clearly do not help editors to understand what the passage means. Your latest explanation of what you think the passage is trying to say is so baffling that I absolutely cannot fathom it, or comprehend how it can be compatible with your previous explanations. I am now completely convinced that the passage must either contain a serious error of logic, or be expressed in terms so oblique that no mere mortal has a chance of understanding it. I therefore strongly urge the change that I suggested in my previous edit, namely replacing "indiscriminate inclusion of topics" with a direct reference to INDISCRIMINATE, or perhaps even remove it altogether. James500 (talk) 10:18, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Way back I asked, "Can you give an example of your hypothetical twisting ever actually happening?" Your answer included (as 1/10,000 of 1% of your posts so far to this thread), "It might take a considerable amount of searching to produce links, as I would have to search several years of editing." How about just one or two examples? EEng (talk) 13:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I will conduct a search as soon as I have time, but I cannot make any commitment as to when that will be. James500 (talk) 07:20, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Recent changes

This appears to be edit warring against consensus. That wasn't my personal interpretation. That was the original text until mid-November. What User:EEng has done is to restore recent changes by Esquivalience that have never been discussed, let alone approved, on this talk page, as far as I am aware, unless I've missed something. Esquivalience's edit summaries even said that he was making "bold" (ie undiscussed) changes. Where is the alleged discussion of Esquivalience's additions? I can't see one. James500 (talk) 11:42, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I have had another look at archive 57 and I can't see any discussion of the recent changes that User:EEng has restored, and there is no discussion on this page now. They should be reverted to the original text that existed up to 13 November. What is supposed to happen is "bold, revert, discuss" not "bold, revert, revert again, and then discuss", which is what EEng has done. James500 (talk) 12:10, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Without yet commenting on the content of the change, I'll just note that "edit warring against consensus" is a pretty gross mischaracterization of that one edit. When you remove what someone wrote and a third person restores it, that's not edit warring -- it's two people disagreeing with you. And "against" consensus would mean there is consensus against adding the material (edit warring against the version which has consensus would also characterize someone fixing a typo and restoring the fix upon its removal, too). I think what you meant is Esquivalience and EEng have both added some content that you personally object to and which you feel is a substantial enough change to merit discussion first. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:55, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Changes' boldness wears off with the passage of time, especially a hard-to-miss series of them, which other editors have built on, on a page with 2000 watchers. At this point the boldness would consist in removing them. EEng (talk) 15:00, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

When there are literally about a few hundred comments on this talk page since my edit, the change can be presumed to have little objection. WP:BRD does not apply here, and would amount to vetoing, not objecting to, the change. Esquivalience ^t 21:10, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

What a stream of utter nonsense. What a load of hogwash. The consensus that I referred to was the consensus established in previous discussions that the guideline should be the way it is. Two people are unlikely to represent a change of that consensus. The length of time that a unilateral change has survived has no relevance to consensus. It is well established that silence is the weakest possible argument for consensus, and ceases to be valid the moment one person objects. That is a rule. The point is that if an editor fails to revert an edit that does not indicate he supports it. The most it can indicate is that he is neutral, or simply unaware of it. The number of watchers of this page is irrelevant as the vast majority will be inactive. Boldness does not wear off over time. It is obvious from the level of participation on this talk page that only a small number of editors are watching closely. Mere copy editing of a change proves nothing either, as editors regularly copy edit material they personally strongly disapprove of. Again, that proves nothing more than neutrality. The edits were incredibly easy to miss. I didn't notice them for several weeks and days respectively. And I am watching more closely than most. Subsequent copy editing makes that worse, because the copy edit shows up on the watchlist instead of the major change, obscuring it. The number of edits on this talk page is irrelevant, as it can at most prove neutrality or ignorance. Moreover, those edits on this page were made by a very small number of editors, mainly in a single discussion that I started recently, who were, as you might expect, pre-occupied with the topic of that discussion to the exclusion of all else. On top of all that, putting a time limit on the reversion of changes would mean that editors could only revert if they have a page on their watchlist and check it constantly. Aside from being an unreasonable burden, that would violate the policy against asserting ownership, as the vast majority of editors don't, indeed can't, watch this page at all, or that closely. All of that doesn't really matter of course, because consensus is not a majority vote, but instead depends on weighing the merits of arguments. It does not depend on the number of people who support something, let alone the number who can't be bothered to oppose it (not the same thing). It depends on whether you can advance convincing arguments in support of those changes. Since you haven't advanced any arguments whatsoever, let alone answered those in my edit summaries (and I can think of more), there is no consensus for what you want. I don't think you will be able to advance any compelling arguments for those changes as they are uniformly awful. James500 (talk) 10:12, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Some of the undiscussed changes appear uncontroversial. However, one of the changes is a material modification that should be discussed before it becomes policy. The change at issue is the following insertion: "Often, sources need to cover a topic solely to provide context to the primary topic being discussed. If there is no indication that the source deems that topic notable, the source does not contribute to the topic's notability." I believe it should be removed unless/until it is discussed and a consensus is established. Cbl62 (talk) 21:48, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

The change actually appears to conflict with long-established policy. WP:GNG has long stated in describing significant coverage that the subject "need not be the main topic of the source material." The proposed change appears to be a attempt to reverse long-established policy. It absolutely should not have been inserted without discussion! Cbl62 (talk) 21:51, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

@Cbl62: The GNG says that it need not be the main topic, but if a topic is covered solely to provide context to the main topic being discussed, then it should not contribute towards the topic's notability. For example, let's say a newspaper is covering driving under the influence (DUI). If the newspaper explicitly singles out a specific organization or small group of organization that combats DUIs, then it does contribute to that organization(s)' notability, but if it covers, let's say, all the anti-DUI organizations in their area with equal weight, then it does not contribute to any of those organization's notability. Esquivalience ^t 01:28, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I understood your addition differently. Your language was ambiguous and appeared, to me at least, to suggest something different. Now that you've clarified somewhat, your concept is less sweeping than I thought, but I still don't fully understand your concern (nor agree to the extent I understand it). If you care to clarify further and propose it here, that's the proper way to proceed, but significant changes should not be made to WP:GNG without first ascertaining a clear consensus here on the talk page. Cbl62 (talk) 01:53, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I support the version advocated by EEng and Esquivalience. Reyk _YO! 10:42, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Strongest possible oppose. Esquivalience's changes are amongst the worst I have seen in all my years here. They are likely to cause serious harm to the project if allowed to remain. (1) The proposed footnote removed by Cbl62 plainly directly contradicts the existing wording of the guideline to the effect that a topic need not the primary, let alone, sole, subject of a source. Moreover, it is clearly not the case that sources often need to cover a topic solely (or even primarily) to provide context. Anyone with common sense should be able to see that. Further, this proposed passage invites ludicrous crackpot arguments such as "although Encyclopedia A has a whole article on Topic B, this is trivial because Encyclopedia A is not, as a whole, solely (or even primarily) about Topic A, because it consists mostly of articles about other topics". Moreover there is no such thing as covering a topic "solely" as opposed to primarily, since it isn't possible to describe one topic (beyond giving its name) with mentioning other topics. If, for example, a biography says a person went to a particular school, without further exposition, that is (probably trivial) coverage of the school in question. There is no such thing as a one topic source. The notion that we should require a source to indicate they deem a topic notable is even more bizarre as reliable sources never contain such indications. No reliable source ever says "and I think this topic satisfies the Wikipedia notability guidelines" or anything like that (unless the source is actually about our notability guidelines, in which case it will be criticising them as too deletionist). Reliable sources that are not about Wikipedia are generally totally disinterested in our policies and guidelines, as they have their own in-house rules (that are not infrequently better than ours). So I don't see what sort of indication such a source could possibly contain. Moreover this proposal plainly seeks to prevent us from looking at the sum total of coverage in all sources, and to force us to look only at coverage in individual sources, an aim that is unjustifiable on any grounds and, frankly, ludicrous. (2) Re the addition to WHYN: There is no conflict between maintainability and comprehensiveness. Notability guidelines have nothing to do with such any such imaginary conflict. They exist because the community does not like very short articles about relatively unimportant topics. The example offered is nonsense. If the seven billion people on this planet wanted to maintain an article on everyone, those seven billion people have the sheer manpower to do that quite easily. Having an article on everyone would be a very bad idea for lots of reasons, but none of them relate to maintainability problems due to lack of manpower. Those reasons include privacy (BLP and the fact that many editors do not want an article on themselves), the fact that most of those people are relatively unimportant and uninteresting, the paucity of verifiable information about most of those people which would result in very brief and uninformative articles, and so forth. But there is no problem with 'maintainability', which is just a convenient myth originally dreamt up by deletionists looking for a pretext. There's no evidence that making the encyclopedia more inclusive of articles on verifiable topics would harm 'maintainability'. Quite the reverse is true. As far as I am aware, it is a statistically proven scientific fact that increased exclusion of articles on verifiable topics causes editors inclined to maintain content to leave the project or not join in the first place, thereby making maintenance of what is left harder, not easier. I also suspect that deletionism has the effect of funnelling incompetent editors into articles on more important topics, where they do more damage, and which have a 'too many cooks' problem partly as a result of this. Likewise, it probably funnels incompetent/trolling deletionists into policies and guidelines where they do more damage. Moreover one could put this argument in reverse and say that having as many articles as possible is the best possible way to defeat vandalism, because vandals are almost exclusively interested in the most prominent articles, and the sheer bulk of content could make it impossible for the vandals to edit all but a tiny fraction of it, because there is simply too much of it and they are a tiny minority. (3) Replacing "someone" with "author or organisation" is gibberish as there are such things as 'joint authorship' and 'corporate authorship'. The change does not clarify the text, it just increases the amount of blather, making it very unclear how the text applies to organisations. (4) Re the attempt to paraphrase WP:NOT as "does not belong on an encyclopedia": (a) "on" is grammatically incorrect and should read "in"; (b) WP:NOT isn't about what belongs in an encyclopedia: It is about what belongs in this encyclopedia, not external ones such as Britannica: It isn't our place to say what belongs in non-WMF encyclopedias, indeed doing so constitutes POV/soap-boxing/NOTADVOCACY; (c) paraphrasing policies is generally undesirable as it usually involves some distortion and discourages editors from looking at the policy: wikilawyers will take the appearance of the words "does not belong on an encyclopedia" as an excuse to argue that anything they don't like 'does not belong', regardless of whether NOT actually has anything to say about it. (5) Some of Esquivalience's changes have been reverted. Someone should revert the rest of the disputed changes back to the previous stable version, as they contradict consensus. James500 (talk) 15:18, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

(1) The proposed footnote removed by Cbl62 plainly directly contradicts the existing wording of the guideline to the effect that a topic need not the primary, let alone, sole, subject of a source. Moreover, it is clearly not the case that sources often need to cover a topic solely (or even primarily) to provide context ... — The main purpose of the clause is to show that a topic can still be deemed notable by an author even if it isn't the main topic of the source. The key here is deemed notable. If a source covers a topic solely for context and there is not even one hint that it deems it notable, then it doesn't deem that source notable. It may indicate slight attention, but in general, they should not be counted.
Further, this proposed passage invites ludicrous crackpot arguments such as "although Encyclopedia A has a whole article on Topic B, this is trivial because Encyclopedia A is not, as a whole, solely (or even primarily) about Topic A, because it consists mostly of articles about other topics". Moreover there is no such thing as covering a topic "solely" as opposed to primarily, since it isn't possible to describe one topic (beyond giving its name) with mentioning other topics. If, for example, a biography says a person went to a particular school, without further exposition, that is (probably trivial) coverage of the school in question. There is no such thing as a one topic source. The notion that we should require a source to indicate they deem a topic notable is even more bizarre as reliable sources never contain such indications. — The above applies, and it is easy to determine if a source deems any topic notable or not. The above driving under the influence (DUI) example also applies. If a source covering drunk-driving also covers organizations that combat drunk driving, then it does not automatically mean that the source deems them notable. However, if the source covers only some of the organizations in their geographical scope or covers their significance, then it does deem it notable. If there is even a slight indication, then it passes. However, if they cover all the organizations in their area or otherwise does not significant (again, the source even passes if there is a slight indication), then it does not deem it notable.
Moreover this change [not proposal] plainly seeks to prevent us from looking at the sum total of coverage in all sources, and to force us to look only at coverage in individual sources, an aim that is unjustifiable on any grounds and, frankly, ludicrous. — I would like for you to elaborate on how it is unjustifiable and "ludicrous". It does not take long to assess coverage from an individual source, and it would actually result in a more accurate assessment.
(2) Re the addition to WHYN: There is no conflict between maintainability and comprehensiveness. Notability guidelines have nothing to do with such any such imaginary conflict. They exist because the community does not like very short articles about relatively unimportant topics. The example offered is nonsense. If the seven billion people on this planet wanted to maintain an article on everyone, those seven billion people have the sheer manpower to do that quite easily. Having an article on everyone would be a very bad idea for lots of reasons, but none of them relate to maintainability problems due to lack of manpower. Those reasons include privacy (BLP and the fact that many editors do not want an article on themselves), the fact that most of those people are relatively unimportant and uninteresting, the paucity of verifiable information about most of those people which would result in very brief and uninformative articles, and so forth. — Wikipedia not only needs to be a comprehensive encyclopedia, it needs to be maintained and existing articles have to be improved. Having many articles is good, but if there are too many articles, then how can our limited editor base maintain all those articles and prevent the encyclopedia from rotting? Indiscriminate creation of articles drives our focus away from notable to obscure topics. To address the "seven billion people" objection, it is unlikely that the subjects would like to maintain their article. It would constitute a conflict of interest.
As far as I am aware, it is a statistically proven scientific fact that increased exclusion of articles on verifiable topics causes editors inclined to maintain content to leave the project or not join in the first place, thereby making maintenance of what is left harder, not easier. I also suspect that deletionism has the effect of funnelling incompetent editors into articles on more important topics, where they do more damage, and which have a 'too many cooks' problem partly as a result of this. — This is an argument against deletionism, not any of my changes in particular. A "statistically proven scientific fact" is an opinion until it is really statistically and scientifically proven. Although it is, by observation, true that deletion is likely a cause of low editor retention, articles created on non-notable topics should not be kept simply because of mercy. Instead, new editors should be educated on what is and isn't a notable article (generally), and even given time to prove their topic's notability. I have created the essay Wikipedia:Give newbies time for their new articles that says exactly this. Deletionists do not wish for new editors to leave just because they have created an article on what they determine is a non-notable topic. Although views on notability differ, I believe this holds true for both sides.
@James500: I will respond to the rest of your concerns later. Esquivalience ^t 22:11, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

(1) (a) The clause has nothing to do with whether authors deem topics notable because authors don't deem anything notable. Wikipedia deems things notable. We invented "notability", and authors are generally not interested in our invention. I don't think there is any such thing as a topic covered solely for context. Even if there was, it is obvious that labelling coverage as such is going to involve putting your own opinions into the author's mouth, since he will not have actually said that the topic is so covered. (b) Your "driving under influence" example is nonsense. If a book titled "drunk driving" gives us a list of organisations that oppose it, that is an indication that those organisations satisfy LISTN. Whether those organisations are notable depends on whether they receive enough coverage in that and any other relevant sources, on whether there is enough information in all the sources to write an article of reasonable length and quality. It is certainly not necessary that such an organisations is given a greater level of coverage than others to be notable, because they might all satisfy GNG (though that isn't likely for this type of organisations). To say the author does not think the organisations notable because he covers all of them in the same level of detail, and does not omit any, is simply putting your own personal opinions into the author's mouth, which opinions he has not himself actually expressed at all. He could just as easily think they are all notable and equally notable. What matters is the level of detail with which he covers the organisation that is the topic of our article, not the level of detail with which he covers other topics. I can offer a counter example: suppose that a book about the British Government contains a biographical dictionary of all Prime Ministers, and each of them gets an article of exactly the same length and detail. That clearly does not indicate that the author thinks that none of them is individually notable. In fact, all of them are notable, and he would have to be insane to think otherwise. In any event, none of this matters because GNG has nothing to do with whether sources think that a topic is notable (or important, significant or anything else), and everything to do with the amount of information they give on that topic, and whether it is enough to write a Wikipedia article of reasonable length and quality. What you propose is not a clarification of GNG at all but a completely new and independent exclusion criteria that aside from being pointless will be impossible to assess. (c) Requiring sources to contain significant coverage individually instead of collectively would not result in a more accurate assessment, it would result in a more deletionist assessment. The only purpose it could serve is to delete more articles for the sake of doing so. There is nothing else that it could achieve. It is obviously possible to build a perfectly satisfactory article from multiple sources, none of which is sufficient by itself, but which, when put together, contain enough detail. WP:BASIC, for example, expressly instructs us to do exactly that. (2) (a) There is no such thing as too many articles to maintain. The fewer articles we delete, the more editors we will get. Our editor base is not limited. What has happened is that we have driven editors away by deleting stuff. If we were to abolish notability, there would be a massive influx of new editors large enough to cope the maintenance of all the new articles that would result. (b) The seven billion people don't have to maintain their own article. They could each maintain the article of a total stranger, therefore no COI. Or 1% of them could each maintain 100 articles each on one of 100 strangers, or possibly quite a lot more than that. (c) I am not saying that we should get rid of notability. I am merely pointing out that the existence of notability guidelines has nothing to do with maintainability. They exist for other reasons. James500 (talk) 01:22, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm just going to comment on the idea about "Requiring sources to contain significant coverage individually instead of collectively would not result in a more accurate assessment, it would result in a more deletionist assessment." Let's assume an extreme case, where there exists 100 works (all reliable, third-party, and independent) where there is exactly 1 sentence that mentions a topic, compared to where there are 10 sources with 10 sentences, and 2 sources with 50 sentences - roughly the same "quantity" of information. The problem is that if there is only so little discussed about a topic in the 1-sentence-in-100-works, there is assuredly no way that the work is giving significance to the topic with that one bit of nugget of information. In contract, 2 source with 50 sentences is clearly going to be able to establish much more about the topic at hand, being able to dwell and give us a proper secondary source that, per definition, is transforming information into something useful for us as an encyclopedia, as opposed to just re-iterating a fact in one sentence. The 10 sources with 10 sentences case is not always a sure thing, because I can see some works use those 10 sentences effectively to make them secondary, while other sources may stick to a primary review and not have enough time to talk about that. Note that none of this requires the work to be exclusively about the topic, only that the topic is given proper depth of coverage in tht work, which you clearly have for 2-50, not so much in 10-10, and definitely not in 100-1. There's a reason why we dismiss breadth of coverage - aka importance or popularity - for notability because that does not always equate to depth of coverage, though a topic at times may have both good depth and breadth of coverage (such as World War II for example with a bazillion books written solely on that topic).

To also add, no one is saying that a source has to come out to say "X is notable" for us to have an article on X. As you state, notability is something we at en.wiki have made up to judge the appropriateness of a standalone article. And so we are free to determine the bounds of when X is notable. And because these bounds can be difficulty because it is impossible to prove the negative that no coverage exists for a topic, we use the presumption of notability to give topics the benefit of doubt for inclusion. --MASEM (t) 01:43, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think I can agree with this line of reasoning because I know that under WP:PROF we have accepted h-indexes, which merely count the number of citations, as proof of notability. In fact, there are quite a few editors in that field who obviously care about nothing but h-indexes. I don't think that depth of coverage in your example depends on how the 100 sentences are distributed, but on whether they contain different information, and on the nature of that information. 100 sentences in 100 sources are likely to be useless because they are the basically same sentence, because they all say more or less the same thing and, if we compiled them, would be likely to result in a one line article (eg if they all effectively say "Mr. X was mayor of Anytown from 1990 to 1995" and nothing more, that is something that is destined to be merged). Or it might be that the information they contain, whilst different, is something you can't build an article out of (such as information which when put together would amount to a software changelog, something forbidden by NOT). The question of whether sources are secondary is a separate question to whether they are significant. You might reject the 100 sources because they are not secondary, even if they add up to significant coverage, but that is a separate test. Combining the two tests is likely to really confuse people. That said, Esquivalience's changes are going much further than what you are saying, and, using your examples, basically amount to saying that there must be one source with 100 sentences, and that even 2 with 50 sentences is always unacceptable per se. His changes are saying that we can never look at the sources collectively. That must not be included in the guideline. And even if his changes do not go so far as to say that sources must expressly say "this topic is notable" (and they almost certainly do go that far the way they were worded), they are certainly requiring us to put those words into the source's mouth if they don't say that, which is something we should not do either. You might not be saying these things, but ( is. James500 (talk) 14:45, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Actually, PROF cautions on the use of h-indices since these are of questionable reliance, so articles on professors that are only being kept because of a high h-index are likely not compliant with PROF or GNG.

But on the second part, the language in question that was added, "Often, sources need to cover a topic solely to provide context to the primary topic being discussed. If there is no indication that the source deems that topic notable, the source does not contribute to the topic's notability" I do agree can be taken to read "a source must be solely about a topic to deem that topic notable" which is not true at all, so I agree to its current removal. What I think the point is to understand the difference of mentioning a topic in passing, and covering the topic's importance. But this latter part can be done in an article that is solely dedicated to another topic (For example, in a bio with an artist, the artist may give insights onto certain paintings that would help to lend notability towards those specific paintings, but just mentioning the painting's name in passing is not sufficient). --MASEM (t) 18:52, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Could all you guys please break your posts into bullets or something? You're making my head swim! EEng (talk) 02:09, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Swimming here, too. Perhaps each of Esquivalience's significant modifications to WP:GNG could be discussed under a separate subheading? Cbl62 (talk) 05:52, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Revert to 13 November. I agree with James500. These recent changes are garbage, pure and simple. It's someone's personal agenda. Msnicki (talk) 06:24, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

While Msnicki's language is strong, he has a valid point, and the manner in which wholesale changes were made to a critical policy is dubious. All the more dubious given the fact that the person making the unilateral changes (User:Esquivalience) has a banner on his/her talk page stating that he/she is an avowed "deletionist." The language of WP:CONLEVEL come to mind:

Wikipedia has a higher standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines than to other types of pages. This is because they reflect established consensus, and their stability and consistency are important to the community. As a result, editors often propose substantive changes on the talk page first to permit discussion before implementing the change. Changes may be made without prior discussion, but they are subject to a high level of scrutiny. The community is more likely to accept edits to policy if they are made slowly and conservatively, with active efforts to seek out input and agreement from others.

Here, a self-described deletionist has made multiple, significant changes to core policy without having sought or obtained consensus on the relevant talk page. As a procedural matter, I would support Msnicki's call to revert such changes until they can be discussed one at a time and a consensus ascertained as to whether or not each should be implemented. Cbl62 (talk) 15:55, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Will someone please actually go ahead and revert the rest of the disputed changes of Esquivalience. It is obvious that there has never been consensus for them. James500 (talk) 17:26, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Per WP:BEBOLD, I have reverted the page back to 13 November, where it stood before any of these change. It's simply impossible to believe there is a consensus for any of the recent changes. It doesn't get more important here on WP than how we define notability. Every word deserves discussion and consensus. Msnicki (talk) 19:53, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
@User:Msnicki: Actually you have reverted some changes made not be Esquivalience, but by User:EEng that were agreed on in the thread headed "One sentence mention" above on this talk page. Those rewritten examples are good changes and have the support of several editors, including myself (which shows just how good they are), and, as far as I can see, no opposition whatsoever. I assume this was a mistake. I would be grateful if you would agree to restore them. I have no doubt that if an RfC was done they would be snowball accepted. James500 (talk) 20:30, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Done.[2] Msnicki (talk) 21:24, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Quick comment on this change, Msnicki is absolutely correct. We have been absolutely against any hard number for how many sources are sufficient, as it is a number that can be gamed hard. We look for the quality and coverage those sources provide, not quantity. --MASEM (t) 01:26, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

RfC

I have no time to argue in depth for the rest of my changes, so I'll start at Special:Diff/690403454 first (minus the footnote 4 that I added). In this change, I did not change the meaning of any of the statements, but reworded them; placing quotes around the key words distorts them.

If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.

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 need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:
- The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial.
- Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton,^[1] that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
Reliable sources with editorial integrity are needed to allow verifiable evaluation of notability, per the reliable source guideline. Sources may encompass published works in all forms and media, and in any language. Availability of secondary sources covering the subject is a good test for notability.
It is preferable for sources^[2] covering the topic to be secondary sources, as those provide the most objective evidence of notability. There is no fixed number of sources required since sources vary in quality and depth of coverage, but multiple sources are generally expected.^[3] Sources do not have to be available online or written in English. Multiple publications from the same author or organization are usually regarded as a single source for the purposes of establishing notability.
Independent sources exclude works produced by the subject or an author or organization affiliated with the subject. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent.^[4]
Significant coverage in reliable sources creates the presumption, not a guarantee, that a subject should be included. A more in-depth discussion might conclude that the topic actually should not have a stand-alone article—perhaps because it violates what Wikipedia is not (see also Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information).^[5]

If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article.

References

^ Martin Walker (1992-01-06). "Tough love child of Kennedy". The Guardian.
^ Including but not limited to newspapers, books and e-books, magazines, television and radio documentaries, reports by government agencies, and academic journals. In the absence of multiple sources, it must be possible to verify that the source reflects a neutral point of view, is credible and provides sufficient detail for a comprehensive article.
^ Lack of multiple sources suggests that the topic may be more suitable for inclusion in an article on a broader topic. It is common for multiple newspapers to publish the same story, e.g., a wire service story may be picked up and published with minor alterations or different headlines in dozens or even hundreds of media outlets, but such instances do not constitute multiple works. Similarly, a series of publications by the same author or in the same periodical is normally counted as one source.
^ Works produced by the subject, or those with a strong connection to them, are unlikely to be strong evidence of notability. See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability#Questionable sources for handling of such situations.
^ Moreover, not all coverage in reliable sources constitutes evidence of notability for the purposes of article creation; for example, directories, databases, advertisements, paid death notices, and wedding announcements are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as reliable sources.

In addition to the above, I propose adding an intermediate example of significant coverage to emphasize that notable topics do not need book-length coverage:

It is relatively uncommon for sources to devote a book to a topic, but book-length coverage is not required. Dennis Overbye's coverage of the Poincaré conjecture in this article only dedicates one page to Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who proved the conjecture, but it is nonetheless non-trivial.

- Esquivalience ^t 01:48, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

(1) This is not an RfC. (2) The text above that is supposed to show the effect of diff 690403454 contains a number of additional changes that were not made in that diff. This makes it very difficult to be sure what changes are actually being proposed. (3) I still strongly oppose the inclusion of the expression "author or organisation" in the guideline for the reasons that I explained in the thread above. The expression is gibberish as there are such things as 'joint authorship' and 'corporate authorship'. The change does not clarify the text, it just increases the amount of blather, making it very unclear how the guideline applies to organisations. I also don't think that the passage that roughly reads "perhaps because it violates WP:NOT (see also WP:INDISCRIMINATE)" makes sense. The words "see also" are not appropriate because INDISCRIMINATE is part of NOT. Wording such as "and particularly" or "and especially" might be better. (4) I support the proposition that the single page dedicated to Grigori Perelman in the proposed example is significant coverage, but ... (A) I don't see why it should be an intermediate example. I think the book length example already in the guideline is far too long and should be altogether replaced with an example that is much shorter. (B) I don't like the appearance of the word "only" in relation to the single page. It isn't only one page, it is actually quite a large amount of text, that I would expect to be accepted without question. (C) I don't like the first sentence up to the word "but". I'm not convinced "relatively uncommon" is particularly meaningful. The only thing in the universe that isn't relatively uncommon is hydrogen. As for "sources to devote a book", our normal terminology is that the book is the source, rather than the output of the source. James500 (talk) 09:25, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Mixed messages

The introduction to WP:N states:

"A topic is presumed to merit an article if (it) meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right" (including WP:ATHLETE).

That statement is contradictory. WP:ATHLETE's opening paragraph says it exists to help determine if the subject meets GNG. In the very next sentence, it says that the subject must meet either the GNG or the SSC, which mirrors the intro to WP:N as above. It would be illogical to have a GNG if certain people who merely satisfy an SSC at its lowest level can thereby bypass GNG, so surely the goal of a subject is to meet GNG with the SSC as one form of evidence (i.e., that he has achieved a certain standard within the sport). It is illogical that WP:ATHLETE (and similar categories) can be intended as an alternative determining factor.

I propose amendment of the above statement to read:

"A topic is presumed to merit an article if (it) meets the general notability guideline below; evidence of notability may be ascertained by it meeting the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right".

If there is no opposition to my proposal within the next seven days, or if there is a consensus in favour, I will assume it is agreed and make the change accordingly next Sunday. Thanks. Jack | ^{talk page} 10:47, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Oppose. This is a significant change in meaning. It would be better to fix WP:ATHLETE rather than this guideline. --Michig (talk) 10:52, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

I have proposed a change at ATHLETE too but there is the consistency aspect. If we alter ATHLETE so that its SSC are contributory to GNG, not an alternative, that would still leave WP:N with wording that states the SSC is an alternative deciding factor instead of evidence to help GNG evaluation. What do you think? Jack | ^{talk page} 11:07, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Subject-specific criteria always have been an alternative route to notability, at least as long as GNG has existed as I believe the subject-specific guidelines pre-dated the GNG. --Michig (talk) 11:31, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Oppose Michig explained it well. This conversation was had many times before, just search the archives. Dream Focus 12:54, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
Comment- SNGs have never had the ability to "trump" the GNG. Reyk _YO! 13:10, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

It's not a matter of 'trumping'. We started with some fairly common sense SNGs and the GNG came later. As long as we have had both we have accepted either as a way of establishing notability. --Michig (talk) 18:26, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
Actually as many AFD have shown, suspect specific notability guidelines do equal articles being kept, regardless of if they meet the GNG. An award winning scientist is notable for their accomplishments, even if they get don't get any coverage anywhere like famous people do. Wikipedia is a legitimate encyclopedia, covering legitimate topics, not just popular culture items the media decides to write about. Dream Focus 20:24, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

The key word in our SNGs is "presumed". A presumption of notability means that when a topic meets an SNG, it is "given the benefit of the doubt" in AfD discussions - because there is a strong likelihood that sources exist (ie it will pass GNG)... even if those sources are not yet cited in the article. Yes, there are occasions where our presumption is wrong (occasional topics where sources don't actually exist to establish notability)... but those are actually extremely rare, and can be dealt with on a case by case basis (ie you have to demonstrate that the presumption was wrong in the specific case, and that sources don't actually exist.) Blueboar (talk) 13:21, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
- Pretty much this, and to add that NSPORT's language followed to this point too. I do wonder, separately, if we should describe WP:N's goal is to assure that articles, at the end of the day, are encyclopedic, meeting the core content policies particularly WP:V and NPOV's stress on third-party, secondary sources, and are "long enough" to cover the topic, rather than to just document it. That is, both the GNG and the SNGs should been seen as to meeting this goal by enabling articles to be created on topics that presume to have enough sourcing to get there. --MASEM (t) 15:07, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree something to this effect is needed. Unless you want to argue that Wikipedia should have articles on subjects that have not received "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject", I don't get why this is so controversial. WP:N is, effectively, "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" (and other ways of saying that). The section titled GNG is just that statement with explanations of each part of the statement, framed to be broadly applicable. Is the dispute about the definition of specific parts of the statement? Or are people really arguing for guidelines that refer to "notability" but are free to contradict the notability guideline? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:41, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Any other project to build an encyclopedia from scratch would likely start by determining the type of topics they want to include and then set a level for each subject area above which a topic is included, based on importance/significance/impact/etc.. It seems unlikely that any other encyclopedia would come up with something as unrelated to encyclopedic relevance as the GNG as a starting point. Wikipedia should have articles on subjects that we decide belong in the encyclopedia based on importance/significance/relevance/impact, bearing in mind that WP's scope is way more broad than any other encyclopedia. We need reliable sources to verify facts. The more sources we can find and the more depth in which they cover a topic simply mean that we can write a longer and more detailed article. GNG is a reasonable catch all (with caveats) as an alternative to criteria based on agreed indicators of enclyclopedic relevance, but would be a bizarre choice as a primary consideration for inclusion. --Michig (talk) 18:26, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
- Some encyclopedias attempt to be more than a tertiary source, so rely on the editors' own subjective judgment of what's important. We explicitly do not do that, so we need a baseline sense of what it means to be a tertiary source and what it means to be a crowdsourced encyclopedia with policies of verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no original research. So we require that subjects we cover receive significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. The various topic areas can then develop guides to how that standard can be met within that area. It's not like the GNG says something like "must win an award" or "must have 5 academic journal citations", which clearly don't apply to every field. It's just an explanation of a fundamental extension of other policies (particularly, WP:NOT, WP:V, and WP:NOR). To say various topic areas should be exempt from the GNG requirements is only to say that some subjects do not need to receive significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:52, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
  - No we don't *require* that subjects we cover receive significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, we have notability criteria of which that is just one, and we look for evidence of meeting those criteria by reference to independent third party sources - the GNG and the SNGs are only guidelines - people are supposed to apply some sense rather than following them as if they were policies (they're not). If we were to require GNG to be demonstrably met in all cases then hundreds of thousands of perfectly good stubs and short articles would get deleted, because common application of the GNG comes down to "can we find these sources" rather than "do these sources exist", and we would keep a lot of crap just because other people have written about it .--Michig (talk) 19:08, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
    - Actually, we do have policies that require third-party coverage (WP:V), and secondary coverage (WP:NPOV), as well as various quality and style policies that we want all articles to aim for in time without a deadline to worry about. Notabilility's purpose is to allow articles that may not immediately have all these features to be developed and expanded by the wisdom of the masses. The GNG is fundamentally a direct means to prove these can happen, while the subject-specific guidelines are presumptions that these can happen based on editors' knowledge of how this can generally be sourced. --MASEM (t) 19:29, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
      - Verifiability and neutral point of view do not require GNG to be met. Those policies need to be met all the time and have little or nothing to do with notability guidelines. A source can verify facts without comprising in-depth coverage. Our SNGs started out as a common-sense attempt to specify what should be included - see an early version of WP:N here - no mention of the GNG at all. Simply repeating the view that the SNGs are only there as indicators that the GNG could be met doesn't make it any more true.--Michig (talk) 19:48, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Michig... Remember that policy/guidance is a living breathing thing here on Wikipedia. What was consensus back in 2006 is not necessarily consensus today. And, the interpretation of how the SNGs relate to GNG may not be the same today as it was back then. To put it another way... if enough people keep repeating the view that the SNGs are "only there as indicators that the GNG is likely to be met"... then that view of the SNGs reflects consensus and DOES make it "true" (at least for now... consensus can change). Blueboar (talk) 20:03, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Consensus is not a majority vote. James500 (talk) 20:47, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

- - - - It is not that Verifability and neutrality require the GNG to be met, but instead, by meeting the GNG or an SNG there is a presumption that verifability and neutruality can be met. Notability is a measuring stick where V and NOR are not obviously met immediately. --MASEM (t) 20:56, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
        There is no correlation whatsoever between notability and neutrality. GNG is irrelevant to verifiability, as that is satified by any coverage whatsoever in any reliable source whatsoever. This discussion is a waste of time. James500 (talk) 22:47, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
        Yes there is. WP:V requires third-party sourcing (one aspect of GNG). NOR requires secondary sources (the other major branch of GNG). And arguably NPOV is achieved through independent sources, which is also something in the GNG, though NPOV itself is not as strict on sources as V or NOR. --MASEM (t) 23:12, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
        V requires at least one third party source, but it does not require significant coverage in such sources, or in any sources whatsoever. NOR does not require secondary sources. It says that tertiary sources can be used to establish a topic's notability instead. Nor does it suggest that significant coverage is required from any type of source whatsoever. NPOV is a feature of Wikipedia articles that does not depend on sources. James500 (talk) 23:42, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
        You are created a problem by reading these policies and guidelines for their exact wording when WP policies and guidelines are means as descriptive that may reflect long-standard consensus. They are not meant to be used as prescriptive rules of law in that the wording is important. To that end, you're missing the point about what I've said about V, NOR, and NPOV. In particularly, NPOV absolutely does depend on sources as we are supposed to reflect viewpoints as given by the sources, which is why we want independent sources. You cannot just pass WP standards with a single third party source, or with a single tertiary source. GNG supports how these policies are practiced. --MASEM (t) 00:10, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        
        Agree with Masem. If you are reading differences in thrust between WP:V and WP:NOR, you have fallen into the mistake of two pages describing the same thing from different angles. You would be better off reading WP:A instead. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:50, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        No, I am rejecting your interpretation of V, NOR and NPOV because it is not, in my opinion, in accordance with the spirit of those policies any more than with their letter, because it has nothing to do with them, and because it would produce an overtly deletionist result which cannot possibly have been intended. WP:A is an irrelevant failed proposal. James500 (talk) 02:09, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        Except, of course, WP:N was written with these content policies in mind, and remains a means of presuming if these can be met to allow a standalone article. --MASEM (t) 02:21, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        Except that, if that is the case, the framers of GNG have seriously misinterpreted those policies, because there is simply no way that all of what GNG says is necessary for compliance with those policies. In which case, the solution is to perform corrective surgery on GNG, and does not consist of perpetuating GNG's misconceptions in our SNG. That said, it is quite obvious that GNG serves other purposes above and beyond anything required by any policy. James500 (talk) 03:48, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        Yes it is. We expect - it time - that an article on WP will have numerous third-party, secondary, independent sources and sufficiently in detail. That's what the content policies are all about. If you can't write an article with all these quality , after exhausting all possible sources, it should be merged or deleted. The GNG and the SNG set a presumption that we can get to that point by the simple requirements set out since we know it can be difficult to locate sources for any topic that isn't easily searched on the Internet. There's no deadline either to get to that point. This has been the nature of this guideline for years, all in compliance with policy. --MASEM (t) 04:23, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
        
        I disagree. James500 (talk) 06:36, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Oppose and close this thread at once. It has long been settled that a topic that satisfies an SNG that is less restrictive than GNG is notable. GNG is not the only route to notability. There is good reason for this. We have had this discussion a million times before including in a thread above on this page. The answer is always the same. It is true that some SNG, such as ORG, purport to place restrictions additional to GNG. Those SNG are probably an invalid local consensus and should be changed. Even if they are valid, no changes to N are needed as the meaning of N is clear enough. There is nothing wrong with the present wording. There are more important discussions taking place on this page and this thread is unjustifiably distracting attention away from them. In any event, the outcome of this thread is going to be a WP:SNOWBALL. James500 (talk) 20:47, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
Oppose: If the SNG is broken, fix the SNG. Esquivalience ^t 00:56, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Oppose: Whether SNG's can trump either in favor of notability or in restriction of notability the GNG is a perennial issue here. The real problem is that GNG and the SNG's are all edited largely independently, each by their own constituency. A reasonably (but not entirely) successful effort was made two or three years ago to make it clear that the GNG always applies, either for or against notability because at that time the SNG's were all over the map, some claiming primacy over the GNG and some making it clear that they were subsidiary. I've not looked, but I rather suspect that the gains achieved by that effort have slipped since that time. What's really needed, if anyone cares about this enough (and there's some reason not to care that much in light of the disconnect between notability and AfD outcomes), is a Notability policy, not a guideline, which sets no notability standards itself (GNG would remain a guideline, as would the SNG's) but which sets procedural standards for what a SNG can and cannot do. That might indicate that SNG's cannot trump GNG, that they can relax GNG in favor of specific standards, that they can set higher standards than GNG, do both, or do neither. But whatever standards are set that a SNG that goes beyond them is invalid unless a specific exception for it is set in a subsection of the procedural policy. Until something like that happens (and I'm not at all sure that it's possible), I think that we have to live with this issue being unclear and variable and it's not worth taking the time to argue about. As others have said, the fight at this time should be at the specific SNG's. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 16:08, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

A notability policy would be a very bad idea. It would further entrench an unsatisfactory and unpopular concept. I think we should instead be looking to remove existing references to notability from policies (and relocate them to a guideline). Since notability as a whole lacks sufficient support to be promoted beyond the status of a guideline, references to it should not have been sneaked into policies. James500 (talk) 03:06, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Re: "notability as a whole lacks sufficient support to be promoted beyond the status of a guideline..." You misunderstand the distinction between "Policy" and "Guideline". It's not a strict hierarchy, where "Policy" is stronger than "Guideline". "It's only a guideline" has never been an accepted argument on Wikipedia... many of our "Guidelines" have extremely strong support (some contain concepts that have stronger support than some of our "Policy" statements). In an ideal world, there would be a clear distinction between "Policy" and "Guidance"... "Policies" would state "the rules" while guidelines would explain those rules, and delve into their exceptions and nuances. But in reality, we don't make that distinction. The two frequently overlap (with Policies explaining rules, and Guidelines stating them).

The basic statement that "topics must be deemed notable in order to merit inclusion as a stand alone article" has extremely strong support... so strong that (if wanted to) we could easily "promote" it to "Policy" status. However that would be about all such a policy would say. We would still need a "Guideline" (or rather several guidelines) to explain what we mean by "notable"... how to establish "notability"... and the topic specific contextual nuances involved with "notability". However, there is no need to "promote" it... since there is no sharp distinction between "Policy" and "Guidance". Blueboar (talk) 18:32, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

I disagree. Policies have a greater degree of acceptance than guidelines, fewer exceptions than guidelines, and take precedence over guidelines. This is clearly stated by WP:PG. The reason notability is a guideline is because it is under-developed and has a lot of opposition. The proposition that we should have some kind of article inclusion standard has a lot of support, but that is not the same thing as support for "notability" being that standard. A policy containing no actual definition of "notability" would have no prospect of promotion. It would be recognised as being meaningless. James500 (talk) 23:56, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

The reason WP:N is a guideline is that it is a guideline based on highly subjective criteria - how much coverage is "sufficient" for example. There's also a lot of mainspace content which WP:N does not apply as compared to where WP:V, WP:NOR, etc. apply to all mainspace topics. Which is why when notability of a topic is challenged it is always sent through an xFD process to make sure it is not one person's voice speaking for it, and also why we have the SNGs and why we generally favor keep if there's any non-consensus on a point. --MASEM (t) 19:12, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Oppose. We do not impose a requirement upon anything in article space or in anywhere else, including our guidelines, policies and AfDs, that requires every page to be 100% consistent with every other nor would that be helpful or even possible. What we can do is work from the top as we've done here, stating the most general guidelines for determining notability here on this page, then allowing domain-specific discussions to decide how to interpret these general guidelines for specific topics, including possibly deciding that in certain cases, we should have exceptions. We do this case-by-case and we work by consensus. It's fine the way it is. Msnicki (talk) 20:23, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility)

From the history of the article:

TransporterMan (talk | contribs | block) [rollback: 1 edit]

(Undid revision 697575678 by PBS (talk)Courtesy revert of good faith change needing discussion on talk page here. This, especially re royalty, seems inapplicable to the section where it's been added.)

TransporterMan

have you ever known me to mad a bad faith change if not why add of "good faith" and not write "Courtesy revert of change"?
Do you have a reason for a revert? If you have one then why "Courtesy"?
"re royalty, seems inapplicable to the section where it's been added.)" -- as the naming convention covers both Royalty and Nobility it is not inapplicable and whatever section to which it is added it is relevant to the titles of articles about nobility.

-- PBS (talk) 19:50, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Your edit was reverted for good reason and TransporterMan has my support. Ignoring the spelling error (it's "title", not "tile"), your edit simply made no sense. That section has nothing to do with royalty or article titles, it's about whether notability applies to content. I also think you're way off base complaining that he acknowledged your good faith. Msnicki (talk) 20:18, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

It was courtesy simply because I thought you had made a mistake and wanted you to have the chance to reconsider it; similarly, I mentioned good faith only to make clear that I thought that you were trying to do something which was considered and not pushy and it was meant as a compliment, not as a veiled accusation. However, the basic reason for the revert is, as Msnicki says, that it didn't make sense on its face (especially a link to article titles about royalty, but in general as well). Like all changes to policy and guidelines, BOLD changes are fine if they stick. If they don't then it's time to discuss. My mind is open, but what you say above is still opaque to me: How is a guideline about article naming — especially article naming about nobility — germane to this guideline about notability? Perhaps my feeble brain just doesn't get it... Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:09, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

I have to agree with the revert... a link to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility) seems out of place where it was added.

I assume the intent was to help those who might confuse the words "Notability" and "Nobility" (and thus end up at the wrong guideline). If so, I could see adding a link to WP:NCNOB at the top of this guideline page.... but I don't understand why the link to WP:NCNOB was placed where it was (in the section on this guideline not applying to content). Perhaps PBS can explain? Blueboar (talk) 14:45, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Nomination of Texas Longhorns football series records for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the list of Texas Longhorns football series records is suitable for inclusion as a stand-alone article according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Specifically, the article presents issues of the interpretation and application of our notability and suitability guidelines to lists of sports statistics. The discussion may be found @ Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Texas Longhorns football series records. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 23:40, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Do we really want to start posting individual AfD notices on this page? Unless there's something truly extraordinary and/or project-shaking, I think this page should be used to discuss broader policy issues rather than to provide notice of one of the dozens of AfDs that are initiated each day. Cbl62 (talk) 04:34, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, Cbl. I posted the notice here intentionally because the proper interpretation and application of the notability and other suitability standards for stand-alone lists of sports statistics need to be addressed by wider input from editors who bring a broader perspective. It was not an accident. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:41, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I assumed it was not an accident and meant no criticism. I happen to agree with deleting the list at issue, but believe that this talk page is better used for discussing broader issues rather than posting notices of individual AFDs. Cbl62 (talk) 04:49, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Suggestion: The applicable wikiproject talk page (in this case, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football) might be a better place to post an AfD notice of this type. Cbl62 (talk) 04:52, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. As you know, I'm a regular WP:CFB participant, but I also think it's time that the wider community of regular contributors to notability discussions be invited to participate in these stats lists discussions. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:57, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Note: The above notice under discussion was significantly modified/edited by Dirtlawyer to make it less generic after I lodged my complaint. Dirtlawyer's modifications makes the notice a bit less of a concern, but I do still think we should not be posting generic AfD notices here. Cbl62 (talk) 05:02, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Just to be clear: I do this rarely, Cbl, and only when I believe that a LOCAL CONSENSUS is evolving in contravention of project-wide policies and guidelines. In such cases, I believe it is entirely appropriate to request the participation of the wider community of regular notability discussion participants with notices on the talk pages of the relevant policies and guidelines. That should not be a problem here or anywhere else, and consistent application of the guidelines should be the goal. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 05:32, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually ... From the prior discussions of this same issue (now linked in the AfD discussion), I simply don't see any local consensus in support of these series records lists. To the contrary, the project consensus appears to have been against such lists. Cbl62 (talk) 05:53, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose Notifications of individual AfDs should not be placed on this talk page. They are off-topic and liable to make the page too big to load or edit. James500 (talk) 17:31, 2 January 2016 (UTC) James, it's rather difficult to find anything on this talk page or the guideline which you have not "opposed." One more oppose more or less matters little. Cheers. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:30, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Initial hubbub

I come across situations like the following:

A new product is exhibited at a trade show, and a number of enthusiastic writers publish articles lauding it and pondering whether it's the next game-changer.
A few people manage to raise several million dollars in capital to start a new venture, and all the local business journals and newspapers run articles reporting it and marveling at the amount of money involved.

How many of these will fade immediately after and never be mentioned again? One-hit wonders, as it were.

I know notability isn't temporary, but if the products, businesses, people, etc., over which all this initial hubbub arises never get off the ground and fall into oblivion, perhaps we should have some guidelines that sources don't suffice to establish notability if they consist solely of initial hubbub. Perhaps these situations fall under the category of WP:ROUTINE: it's routine for publications to have whole articles about every last piece of trivia that falls into their purview, with no indication of significance to be inferred therefrom. Perhaps they fall under the category of WP:ONEEVENT. What do you all think? If you agree with me that these situations shouldn't lead to a finding of notability, do we have already have language in this page or a related one that clarifies that, or should we add language somewhere? —Largo Plazo (talk) 14:38, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

In fact, if the hits are big enough, one-hit wonders like Lou Bega and the Baha Men are notable, as can be seen by perusing the lengthy lists of same (List of one-hit wonders in the United States). This is as at should be, whether we're considering the realm of music, publishing, or business. There is IMO no need for a new "initial hubbub" guideline, as our existing standards can effectively separate the Wheatus from the chaff. Cbl62 (talk) 16:58, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I have to agree... what you are highlighting is that there is a distinction to be made between long term Notability and short term Notoriety. One of the ways we can tell whether a topic is Notable or Notorious is to examine whether there is ongoing coverage of the topic. It is true that "Notability isn't temporary"... but this fact can be used as a test - to see if a topic actually is Notable. A topic that is actually Notable should get ongoing coverage. If a topic does not get ongoing coverage, then we we know the topic is not actually Notable. It just has notoriety. To put it another way... the flip side of "Notability isn't temporary" is: "Temporary isn't notable". Blueboar (talk) 15:07, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:NOT#CRYSTAL is a better approach here. It is one thing if, say, Apple announces the iPhone n+1, as there is a strong track record that if Apple is announcing something, it will be publicly made available. It's another thing for a brand new, never-before-heard-of company to announce a product that we have no track record to judge. As such, I would use a combination of NOT#CRYSTAL and the ONEEVENT aspects above to discourage articles on such products or companies. This doesn't prevent the information being added to an established article (say in the second example if one of the persons already has a WP article on them), just avoids the attention of a new article on the yet-proven venture. --MASEM (t) 15:59, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

A problem with both ROUTINE and ONEEVENT is that each takes us to a specific notability article: respectively, WP:NEVENT and WP:BIO. We need them to be applicable throughout the spectrum of topics, so I have a cogent response to an article creator who wants to argue that WP:ROUTINE would apply only if the article were about the event of a person or a business having received funding, rather than about the person or business but basing the claim of notability on the one event. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:24, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't think WP:CRYSTAL addresses my question. That's about people predicting that a topic that hasn't been covered will be. I'm talking about topics that have received coverage, possibly substantial, in reliable sources. Perhaps one could say that the sources that covered a topic were themselves indulging in crystal ball gazing and would, themselves, if you asked them, acknowledge that the jury's still out on whether the topic will make a genuine mark. —Largo Plazo (talk) 00:23, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

That's how it is often used however. For example one principle used by the Film project is that regardless of how much coverage an unreleased movie gets, editors should not create an article until production has actually started, as to avoid films that stay at the writing desk table. --MASEM (t) 00:37, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Largoplazo: This thread might be relevant: Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies)#Depth of coverage -- funding reports, although it looks like it's sort of petered out. When an organization attracts venture capital, it seems it's guaranteed some sort of coverage regardless of whether a product even goes to market. Seems like the point of WP:ROUTINE to me, but absent language to that effect it could be argued that the coverage it gets constitutes significant coverage in reliable secondary sources. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:50, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose We have already had this discussion above on this page, in the routine coverage thread, where this proposition was rejected. I oppose this proposal for the same reasons that I and others opposed it last time. I also agree with the reasoning of Cbl62 above in this thread. This proposal has nothing useful to add to NTEMP. If a topic has received continuing coverage over a reasonable length of time, it does not matter that it was a commercial failure or that the person or organisation had no further commercial successes. In fact, a topic can be notable because it was a commercial failure, such as where a large amount of money was wasted on it; hence one finds lists of the biggest film box office failures in reliable sources. This whole line of reasoning is completely wrong. And we have more important things to discuss, such as how to stop the very serious problem of deletionists taking advantage of the subjective nature of GNG. Or the problem of deletionists getting plainly ludicrous exceptions to GNG inserted in SNGs like ORG. James500 (talk) 18:14, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

It seems like any time anybody brings up an aspect of notability you don't like (which is nearly all of them), you claim there have already been discussions with clear consensus against. In fact, none of the above threads even mention companies, funding, venture capital, etc. which is the subject of this thread. We all know you don't think WP:ROUTINE is valid and will oppose anything to do with it -- you're entitled to that opinion, of course -- but it doesn't help to make ad nauseum McCarthyist appeals to "what deletionists will do" and blow smoke in an effort to neutralize discussions along lines you don't like or to stop proposals before they get off the ground. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:30, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

If there is a material difference between this thread and those, I fail to see it. New examples of the same general principle are not a material difference. I didn't make any claim about what deletionists might do if the proposed change was effected. I merely pointed out that we have more pressing problems to worry about, such as the failure of our existing notability guidelines to deal with the problem of deletionism, and suggested we discuss those instead. James500 (talk) 20:24, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

You should be well aware that we've long moved off the "inclusionists/deletionists" war that happened about 4-some years ago. This is continuing to bring this up that implies there are editors that are not acting in good faith in considering topics for inclusion or deletion. Notability has been a stable guideline for several years so there's really no point into trying to question the core fundamentals that are accepted across the encyclopedia. --MASEM (t) 21:12, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not aware that there was a 'war'. It is obvious that a significant proportion of the community are not happy with the status quo. We've just had a lengthy thread with many participants saying so at VPP. The notability guidelines are not particularly stable beyond the general principle that article topics should be notable. I said nothing about 'good faith'. Deletionism, in the sense of excessive deletion, is a problem regardless of the reasons for which it is being done. James500 (talk) 22:00, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

The thread at VPP is nothing about notability, but the nature of AFD. And assuming that there's deletionists or deletionism all around is not assuming editors are working in good faith to building an encyclopedia. Reading the archives and knowing about the inclusionists/deletionists conflicts we had is rather insightful to understand how notability works. --MASEM (t) 00:37, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The problems with the nature of AfD are partly attributable to the subjective nature of GNG which fails to provide the clear boundaries that some editors need. I don't see why "deletionism" should be an accusation of bad faith. WP:RANDY acts in good faith. Incompetence and bad faith are not the same thing. James500 (talk) 09:19, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

James500, I posed a question about the handling of topics for which coverage consists solely of initial hubbub (whether because the focus of the hubbub just happened, or because it happened years ago and nothing ever became of it). You've responded by talking about topics that have received follow-up coverage since the original flurry. Therefore, you have not responded to my question, but to a question I didn't ask and already knew the answer to. —Largo Plazo (talk) 21:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Your previous comments, such as your reference to "one hit wonders", did not make your intended meaning clear. However, I also oppose any restriction against coverage that consists entirely of "initial hubbub", as such a restriction would serve no useful purpose whatsoever. James500 (talk) 03:18, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I believe the "never mentioned again" part of "How many of these will fade immediately after and never be mentioned again?" was clear. —Largo Plazo (talk) 03:29, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Counter proposal In fact, I will go further than what I said above. I think we should generally eliminate the requirement for continuing coverage for non-BLPs on grounds that it is based on a misconception that contemporary sources somehow get forgotten about or go away. In fact, university libraries, and other large libraries, everywhere keep huge quantities of contemporary sources. They have miles and miles and miles of shelves of old periodicals going back decades and centuries. This stuff is kept for use, and at least to some extent as a substitute for buying new sources about the same topics. If sources have a tendency to be contemporary, the reason new sources lack a market is not because consumers (eg librarians) are saying "I don't care about this old topic" but rather because they are saying "why should our library buy a new periodical article on this notable topic from [say] March 1905 when we still have our copy of The Really Old Periodical from 10 March 1905 [to pick a date at random] which covers this topic as well as it could possibly be covered?" If contemporary sources were not good enough, libraries wouldn't keep huge quantities of old contemporary books and periodicals. And these things are also being re-published on the internet because there is huge demand for them. James500 (talk) 19:30, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "requirement for continuing coverage for non-BLPs...is based on a misconception that contemporary sources somehow get forgotten about or go away"? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:48, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Our test for notability is different from "popularity" for very good reasons to avoid flash in the pan type articles as well as speculation that is routinely done in mainstream sourcing. --MASEM (t) 20:02, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

No, what I am saying is that what might appear to be a "flash in the pan" if you only look at the date on which the sources were originally written, may in fact be no such thing because those sources have continued to be distributed (because libraries continue to lend them and don't chuck them away), and even reprinted (albeit without changes) long after they were originally written, even for decades and centuries, which indicates continuing importance of the topic. James500 (talk) 20:38, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

That's not our test either. We do assume that sources do not vanish (and strongly encourage archiving for web-based sources to avoid this), but just because something is reprinted does not mean it is a "new" article. We always look to the data of first publisher in evaluating flash-in-the-pan elements. --MASEM (t) 21:16, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Closer inspection of NTEMP suggests that there is no such restriction as you assert for topics generally. However, we should not use the test you propose because it would be a bad test. James500 (talk) 17:47, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

"As such, brief bursts of news coverage may not be sufficient signs of notability, while sustained coverage would be, as described by notability of events." It's right there. --MASEM (t) 18:04, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
The prevailing view seems to be that passage only applies to events, and not to other topics, despite its unsatisfactory wording. I don't think it should apply to events either. James500 (talk) 01:11, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

When we speak of a topic receiving coverage in multiple sources, we don't mean one source that has been borrowed from the library multiple times. As long as they are both reliable sources, we don't distinguish a newspaper with 100,000 readers from a newspaper with 1,000,000 readers.

I don't see how we even could go by any measure of readership. If The New York Times writes an article on John Doe, it speaks for itself. If a library archives that edition of the Times that contains the article and then 100 borrow it over the years, we have no expectation that that article is what the people were borrowing the paper to read. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:19, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

@James500: There is no "continuing coverage" requirement in WP:GNG. If you are referencing WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE, that guideline explicitly applies only to events and not to other topics such as biographies of non-living persons. As to such topics, our general rule is WP:NOTTEMPORARY. Can you clarify where the "continuing coverage" requirement that you seek to eliminate is to be found? Cbl62 (talk) 22:16, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I am proposing to remove the words "brief bursts of news coverage may not be sufficient signs of notability" from NTEMP, as I think the existence of newspaper libraries etc with collections going back hundreds of years, and similar collections re-published online, means their date of original publication is generally of no importance. The wording of NTEMP doesn't make it sufficiently clear that it only refers to events, and NTEMP isn't a place to restate NEVENT anyway. I would not oppose getting rid of the requirement for events either, but that will have to take place at WT:NEVENT. I was under the impression that the wording of NTEMP was once even more restrictive, but perhaps it has been changed. James500 (talk) 03:05, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely wrong. The age of the work has no importance here, it's how brief the coverage is at the time the event or occurrence happened, taking into account the time period (today, a burst of news may only take a day, while 50 years ago, it might have taken a couple days, and a century or later, a week). An event without a sufficiently long "tail" of coverage is a good since of a burst of news that has little enduring importance, regardless whether it happened a week ago or a century ago. --MASEM (t) 03:14, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Duration of distribution and re-printing (in a broad sense including digitisation) is not the same thing as age. Some sources are disposed of quickly. I recall, for example, reading an discussion of the National Archives disposing of a large number of bonds and other records of no historical value. But newspapers are typically kept. James500 (talk) 17:47, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

We do not care about distribution and re-printing in evaluating sources for notability. A source reprinted 100 years later is not a new source in terms of evaluating the duration of coverage. We care about when it was first published relative to the time of the event. --MASEM (t) 18:04, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I disagree. That approach appears unjustifiable. A source reprinted 100 years later definitely is a new source. James500 (talk) 01:11, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely not. That would then make things like the Bible a new source continuously which makes absolutely no sense. We always go by the date of first publication, period. --MASEM (t) 21:12, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

New editions of that book arguably are new sources. James500 (talk) 22:00, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

In such a case, notability should be based on whether the sources actually cover the company and not just "W venture capital firm invests X million dollars to receive a Y percent interest in Z company". WP:GNG is enough.

For example: Pets.com fell after the dot-com bubble burst, but it was prominent in the public, and thus the company, not just the venture capital and/or stock, was covered. Meanwhile, other technology companies whose coverage is just "new tech company X will see Y dollar gains within Z time period" would not be notable, because the sources do not cover the company itself. Esquivalience ^t 23:47, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Getting back to the subject, my attention was directed to WP:NOTNEWSPAPER. List items 2 and 3 are useful in connection to my inquiry, above, —Largo Plazo (talk) 00:44, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Request for comment

Members may wish to comment at Wikipedia talk:Notability (music)#Bias against notability of artists from early recordings. Best.4meter4 (talk) 16:03, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Small proposed change per Wikipedia:Article size

One aspect hidden from new users and new participants at AfD about Wikipedia inclusion guidelines is splitting. The notability guideline makes note of this only in WP:NOPAGE. Thus, I have saw more and more nominations on long-yet-appropriate articles on subtopics of a larger topic.

I propose for the notability guideline to be changed as follows:

This is not a guarantee that a topic will necessarily be handled as a separate, stand-alone page. Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article. Similarly, editors may also split an article into to maintain a reasonable size and balance or its usefulness to readers; articles created by a split may be justified regardless of notability. These guidelines only outline how suitable a topic is for its own article or list. They do not limit the content of an article or list. For Wikipedia's policies regarding content, see Neutral point of view, Verifiability, No original research, What Wikipedia is not, and Biographies of living persons.

– Esquivalience ^t 00:34, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose I am not sure this is a good idea or good language. Just taking the words at face value I could interpret it to mean:

Content split out of a notable topic into a new article is presumed to notable (and thus the new article cannot be deleted on notability grounds)
Articles split out of another notable topic do not need to meet notability guidelines. (and thus non-notable topics become permissible in WP)

If I am incorrect in my interpretation I apologize. But I would support neither of the above as they would lead to chaos in the realm of notability. Although the sentiment is honorable, I think it would be extremely difficult to segregate those article splits that were truly due to size and those that editors executed merely to create articles out of otherwise non-notable content and topics. One would have to establish “split police” to ensure such splits resulted in two truly notable topics. I think the fundamental guideline that all topics in WP should meet GNG or SNG regardless of their origin should be paramount. --Mike Cline (talk) 22:56, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose I will tentatively agree with Mike Cline here, in that it is vague. From a notability standpoint, and considering WP:Summary style, we do allow articles on a sub-topic of a topic that would normally be part of that topic's article if WP:SIZE wasn't in play, and do not require these to be shown notable though still must meet all other content policy. The most common example being things like lists of characters from a work of fiction or a list of episodes for a television show. That said, there are a lot of little issues that we have to be careful of that relate more to how to a proper summary-style split rather than to notability in general. There might be wording to adapt here, but not the above suggestion. --MASEM (t) 23:13, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Support in principle the proposition that we should be able to SPINOUT article content in essentially the same way that we can spin out list content under LISTN. The problem we have is that the technical limitation on page size prevents us from presenting some notable topics properly because we don't have the flexibility of a print book that can just keep adding pages and volumes. If we rely on GNG alone, a test which is not really any good for determining when to spin out content, we find that there is some important information that we ought to include but cannot, because we presumably can't create a second article page for "Topic X" titled "Topic X (continued)". I agree entirely that SPINOUT should not be automatically subject to GNG or SNG. Notability is a guideline. It has exceptions. This is and should be one of them. Likewise there are some topics that would be better if presented in a separate article than in an article on their parent topic: a good example of this is a topic that has more than one parent topic, and none could be considered the main parent topic. James500 (talk) 17:18, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Contrary to what is said below, I take the view that GNG is the loophole, not SPINOUT. It also seems to me that the subjectivity of GNG is the main source of drama on the project. SPINOUT is at least objective in that it provides us with an actual number, which is about 100kB, IIRC. James500 (talk) 15:34, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose The issue seems to be adequately addressed in the existing guideline Wikipedia:Summary style. This change creates a loophole to get material which does not pass GNG but is worth addressing in a more general article its own article through a back door. Does not provide more benefit than the drama it would create. Jbh ^Talk 17:52, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

NTEMP

My understanding of "notability is not temporary" is twofold:

Once a subject has been the subject of sustained coverage in reliable sources such that it could be considered notable, it is notable indefinitely, regardless of the subject's changing circumstances or subsequent coverage.
Because notability is not temporary, for a subject to be considered notable, it should receive coverage that spans a period of time. For that reason, a brief flurry of news coverage is often insufficient to demonstrate notability.

The second, which is foreshadowed in the "nutshell" of the guideline, creates some obvious gray areas (as any guideline does). Specifically, how long of a period of time is long enough, and how much coverage is necessary to be considered more than a "flurry". As I see it, it comes down to editor judgment as to what experience shows is likely to receive sustained coverage. A major natural disaster, for example, is an obvious exception where if nominated for deletion it would not be deleted because it's sure to receive sustained coverage. An Internet meme, on the other hand, enjoys no such certainty. I feel like this is a pretty standard interpretation.

The thing is, I keep running into people arguing that NTEMP only means the first. The problem is, the first is quite plainly stated whereas the second, by operating with gray areas, is a bit more ambiguous. I'm wondering what other people think and whether (a) my interpretation is indeed in line with consensus to the extent I believe it is, and (b) if there's a way to tweak the wording to be clearer to that effect. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:42, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Balloon boy incident has been claimed as a benchmark of notability for a non-recurring event. Unscintillating (talk) 22:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

@Unscintillating: I don't know what to do with that. Are you agreeing? Who claims, where do they claim, and why do they claim? That article cites articles from a span of several years (5 years after the event, there was a musical inspired by it, for example). It doesn't look like it even went to AfD... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:46, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I find (2) to be shoe-horned in where it is, but the point is that it links to WP:NEVENT. A complication is that WP:NEVENT overlaps with WP:NOT's WP:NOTNEWSPAPER. Unscintillating (talk) 01:33, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Both parts are necessary. The second part is important to distinguish flash-in-the-pan style reporting compared to actual long-term events. Particularly with today's media that tend to parrot each other in a manner to magnify otherwise trivial events. Now, how long of the endured coverage for the short term to meet the second part is of debate and will vary based on topic area, the time period (news moved much slower 50 years ago compared to now), etc. We do want to see a tail of coverage, and ideally with the tail being more secondary and transformative/reflective sources. That is, interpretation of events, making conclusions as to what they will mean to others, etc. There's no hard advice about this but it does need to be taken into account. --MASEM (t) 23:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

It seems to me that the second proposition only applies to events and only because of NEVENT etc. I oppose any extension of that. I am inclined to support the elimination of the second proposition altogether, mainly because it is an irrational rule and also because this isn't the place to restate the SNG either. James500 (talk) 17:27, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I also note that extension of the second proposition to non-events was rejected in the "initial hubbub" thread above. James500 (talk) 17:46, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

"Was rejected" ... by you, essentially. Other than your input, the discussion tended to be more about achieving what amounts to this proposition 2 by means of existing guidelines. —Largo Plazo (talk) 18:24, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
It's hard not to just repeat exactly what I said in that thread: "It seems like any time anybody brings up an aspect of notability you don't like (which is nearly all of them), you claim there have already been discussions with clear consensus against." In fact, it's another in a long, long line of blatant mischaracterizations to push this particular POV. If you don't like the idea of #2 being part of WP:NTEMP, nobody has a problem with you saying so and arguing your position. Just stop with these disruptive attempts to quash discussions about things you don't like. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:29, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Except it was also rejected by Cbl42 and Esquivalience. I wish you people would stop making things up. Rhododendrites, you are the one with a real talent for distortion. And this thread was already going nowhere long before I opened my mouth. Nor am I capable of making or preventing that from happening. I merely realise that it is as predictable as clockwork. James500 (talk) 04:02, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

So doubling down, then, and requiring that we spend considerable time pointing out your nonsense until we run out of steam or create an impenetrable wall of text. Even if Cbl62 and Esquivalience agree with you on this point, they most certainly did not reject #2 from this section in those comments.
Everything Cbl62 wrote: In fact, if the hits are big enough, one-hit wonders like Lou Bega and the Baha Men are notable, as can be seen by perusing the lengthy lists of same (List of one-hit wonders in the United States). This is as at should be, whether we're considering the realm of music, publishing, or business. There is IMO no need for a new "initial hubbub" guideline, as our existing standards can effectively separate the Wheatus from the chaff. Cbl62 (talk) 16:58, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Everything Esquivalience wrote: In such a case, notability should be based on whether the sources actually cover the company and not just "W venture capital firm invests X million dollars to receive a Y percent interest in Z company". WP:GNG is enough. For example: Pets.com fell after the dot-com bubble burst, but it was prominent in the public, and thus the company, not just the venture capital and/or stock, was covered. Meanwhile, other technology companies whose coverage is just "new tech company X will see Y dollar gains within Z time period" would not be notable, because the sources do not cover the company itself. Esquivalience t 23:47, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Where in either of those two comments do they reject the idea that for a topic to be considered notable, coverage beyond a brief flurry of news coverage is typically needed. If a band has a "hit" or if a company is "prominent in the public", it's going to be the subject of lasting coverage. Even if Cbl62 and Esquivalience agree with you on this, to say that what I said has already been rejected through these two comments is nonsense. I'm not saying they don't agree, but that those statements do not constitute rejection such that saying flatly declaring it's true is anything more than jamesing up the conversation. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:22, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
That isn't the only comment Cbl62 made in that thread. He expressly said there was no continuing coverage requirement for non-event topics in a later comment. I think it is fairly clear that if a user says they oppose an initial hubbub requirement practically indistinguishable from what you propose, they must also oppose what you propose. I think that a proposal that failed to achieve consensus after a full discussion could be fairly labelled as "rejected". James500 (talk) 14:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I missed the other one of Cbl62's comments, it's true. There, too, he/she is pointing out what I also pointed out: that our guideline is WP:NTEMP, but that the GNG does not expressly state a "continued coverage" requirement. Although you respond to every thread with "oppose/support", these are not "proposals" but "discussions". Now that you frame it this way, however, it does sort of make sense of your participation as a whole when it comes to notability-related threads: filibuster what you don't like, call it a "rejection", then use that fictional "rejection" to quash future discussions. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:44, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
You are the one filibustering here. Starting this thread shortly after the other one petered out in order to flog an already dead horse is a good example of that. The pattern of your editing consists of persistently telling lies about other editors with whom you disagree in the hope of prejudicing discussions and possibly in the hope of provoking them. James500 (talk) 15:28, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

"persistently telling lies about other editors with whom you disagree" is quite an accusation -- a much more straightforward WP:CIVILITY issue than e.g. wikilawyering/disruption. If you think anybody would find what you're saying to have any merit at all -- and that it wouldn't just boomerang because you're transparently making things up -- you might want to take it to WP:ANI. ...But this isn't even about NTEMP anymore. I've said my piece. I'll go ahead and stop posting to this thread-within-a-thread now. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 05:16, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree that the second part of NTEMP is necessary for all coverage, to prevent a magnification of "Saturday odd spot" type stories or WP:ROUTINE fluff from being enshrined as encyclopedia articles. Reyk _YO! 06:39, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:ROUTINE is deletionist garbage. At a time when excessive deletion has brought the project to its knees by causing the editor retention emergency, the last thing we should do is make our guidelines even more deletionist. If you want a historical analogy for the proposition to increase deletions on this project, consider the policy of 'overtaxation' of the Persian Empire under Darius and his successors, where they stubbornly and relentlessly kept doing the thing that was killing their economy. James500 (talk) 12:40, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, yes, we know, you think every essay, guideline, or policy that argues that anything at all is unsuitable for an encyclopedia is "deletionist garbage". You're like a broken record on this point, and you've spammed your hysterical bullshit on so many talk pages and spectacularly failed to convince anyone, that one can only wonder why you even try anymore. You also need to drop the canard about deletionism causing an editor shortfall. The reverse is true. Because editors are drawn from the encyclopedia's readers, it follows that anything that drives away readers drives away potential editors and the indisputable fact is that a proliferation of crappy articles, a dilution of useful content over several articles, and burying useful information under a mountain of cruft ruins the usefulness of the encyclopedia- thus driving away readers. A mountain of shiny useless baubles also takes more work to maintain, thereby causing a maintenance backlog and editor burnout. It's clear that indiscriminate inclusionism is actually a cause of the editor shortfall. Reyk _YO! 12:53, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

(1) What you say in your preceding comment is patent nonsense. (2) What is proposed here would not just apply to 'fluff' either. It would also apply to serious and meritorious topics in traditional academic subjects. James500 (talk) 13:03, 26 January 2016 (UTC) (edit conflict) (1) You are the broken record. You say anything that you think will advance the deletionist cause, no matter how obviously false it is. I am amazed that you think that anyone will believe some of the things you claim. I clearly do not oppose all exclusionary criteria (I'm perfectly happy with V, NOR, NPOV and the basic idea of notability amongst others). Why would you imagine that anyone would believe that I do? Why? (2) I can't take seriously the notion that the editor retention problem is caused by not deleting useless pages or content, because the evidence is otherwise (although unsuitable content should be deleted). I suspect that when you speak of things that are "useless", you really mean things that you personally don't like. James500 (talk) 13:32, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

(1) What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I dismiss it. You're the last person who should be calling someone else's views "patent nonsense", given your track record of poor self awareness and insane pronouncements. (2) When it comes to distinguishing a serious academic topic from, say, a youtube video of a coughing dog that sounds like it's saying "aloha", I back the Wikipedia community's judgement over yours every day of the week- no matter how many youtube hits and blog posts Hawaiiandog gets. Reyk _YO! 13:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
(ec) (1) You have a track record of making factually untrue statements over and over again. (2) That you think a coughing dog could be regarded by anyone as an academic topic, or that blog posts might satisfy GNG unless NTEMP excludes them, says it all. Why would you imagine that I would support such a topic? Why? James500 (talk) 13:53, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

That you disagree with something I say does not make it factually untrue. I am not the one arguing Hawaiiandog is a legitimate topic, but I have seen people vote keep on AfDs for similar things on the basis that they saw the youtube clip played on morning television or mentioned in the "odd spot" section of a tabloid newspaper. This is exactly the kind of junk that the second section of NTEMP aims to exclude, and your opposition to that equates to support for the junk whether that's your explicit intention or not. You claim this would exclude genuine academic topics; I claim the Wikipedia community has the sense to draw a sensible distinction, and that I back nearly everyone's editorial discretion over yours. Reyk _YO! 14:07, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
NTEMP will not exclude the coughing dog because there is nothing to stop either publication from continuing the coverage for years. The issue here is not that the coverage does not last. It seems to be subject matter of the topic itself or with the reliability of the source. James500 (talk) 15:07, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) If the topics are "serious and meritorious" then they will have sustained coverage. People write about "serious and meritorious" topics and we write about what others write about. We do not decide what topics are "serious and meritorious" those who write about them in secondary sources do. That is the whole point of our notability guidelines. By definition the topics this applies to are "fluff" because they do not have significant, sustained coverage. Jbh ^Talk 13:23, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

It would be wonderful if that was true, but it isn't. Meritorious topics do not necessarily get sustained coverage. James500 (talk) 13:53, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Then it is not Wikipedia's place to give them coverage. Once we start doing that we create a House POV based on what we consider "meritorious". That is not the place of an encyclopedia which values NPOV. No matter how great or good you or I or any other individual or group of Wikipedia editors thinks a topic is we do not decide because by doing so we substitute our POV. The requirement for sustained/significant coverage in independent third party reliable sources is the only way to have some, nominally, objective inclusion criteria. Jbh ^Talk 14:31, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
There is no requirement for sustained coverage for a non-event topic. Nor is any sustained coverage requirement necessary for the purpose of having objective criteria. Inclusion criteria would not be made more objective by having such a criteria in addition to GNG. James500 (talk) 15:37, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

The important thing to note is that notability is a guideline. This means that it has quite a bit of wiggle-room and so it is not possible to define such aspects in a rigorous way. All you can really do is look at outcomes and get a feel from those. For example, the weather is quite ephemeral and so you wouldn't think there's much long-term interest in particular storms. But there's an active project which assiduously writes about these and they regular appear on the front page as Featured Articles, In the News, and the like. The same applies to sport, which gets covered in detail in the daily press but which we filter in a rather discretionary way. Andrew D. (talk) 13:46, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
As similarly said above, the failure of a topic to meet even generally-accepted notability conventions (such as length of coverage) does not necessarily mean that topic should not be covered with a standalone article, as notability is an indicator, not a determiner, of significance or importance. The purpose of notability is to ensure that a) all topics belong on a encyclopedia, which emphasizes historical topics; not a newspaper, which emphasizes current topics and events and b) Wikipedia prevents indiscriminate inclusion of topics.

Editor discretion should be the main criterion when examining these edge-cases of short-term coverage. For example, if significant or important topics in a topic area are expected to receive lasting coverage (such as companies and products), but a topic under consideration in that area only receives short term coverage, then it is likely indiscriminate coverage. However, if the opposite applies; significant topics in the topic area are not expected to receive long-term coverage (such as natural phenomena) that belong in an encyclopedia should not be subject to such a requirement. Esquivalience ^t 02:02, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Currently there is a problem in that these two ideas, NTEMP#1 and NTEMP#2, are confounded on the project page. I think that NTEMP#2 is not a part of WP:NTEMP. Rather, NTEMP#2 is understood from either what is in the nutshell or what is below at WP:N#Events. Unscintillating (talk) 03:19, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
Proposal I suggest a new section title for NTEMP#2. Drawing directly from the nutshell, "Notable topics have attracted attention over a sufficiently significant period of time". Unscintillating (talk) 03:19, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Quantum_anthropology help

This page is for how to modify or improve the Notability policy, nothing else. - TransporterMan (TALK) 23:41, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi! I wrote an article about emerging field of anthropology and it is threaten by deletion (probably from people who are interested in another fields). So if somebody has a time for a quick view and discussion (keep or delete) the article will be glad!Wikiditor (talk) 09:17, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Clarification on GNG versus specific guidelines

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fabian Benko is claiming that https://www.football.com/en/guardiola-pleased-with-teen-benko/ and http://bundesligafanatic.com/one-for-the-future-bayern-munichs-fabian-benko/ are neither long enough for GNG and the second is claimed to definitely not be a reliable source. A journalism student who has editorial oversight seems to meed RS. Not sure why they would not meet GNG. 208.81.212.224 (talk) 19:50, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I can't comment on the reliability of the sources or if they meet the GNG (that should be discussed at the AFD), but it is correct that though this person may immediately fail the specific guideline for sports having not played at a professional level yet, notability can still be presumed based on meeting the GNG. --MASEM (t) 20:13, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I commented at the AfD myself, but to put it briefly, the first source is a short bit of which only half mentions the subject, and is routine sports coverage explicitly debarred by WP:ROUTINE, while the second source is a blog, and no evidence has been proffered regarding the accuracy and reputation of the blogger. Certainly claiming that a "journalism student" having "editorial oversight" comes nowhere near to meeting the requirements of IRS. I was a journalism major at a major American university: does that mean I can claim my own blog as a reliable source, because I exercise "editorial oversight" in it? Ravenswing 02:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
- Editorial oversight requires, at minimum, the involvement of two humans: one to write the item, and a second to "look over" it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Clarification on WP:LISTN

During a recent AFD I have run into the fact that the following sentence in the LISTN guideline might be open for different interpretations.

"The entirety of the list does not need to be documented in sources for notability, only that the grouping or set in general has been."

Some think this to mean that regarding a "List of wins by a sportperson", if is sufficient that for this guideline that merely the number of wins the sportsperson achieved is highly notable for a list article to be created and kept in this encyclopedia. Others think that it means that it isn't required that all the individual items (i.e. wins) have individual notability, but that list of which wins the person (and not merely the number) needs notability as a group to satisfy this guideline. So my question is which is the correct interpretation of the above sentence? T v x1 18:43, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Arguably it could be either way, because LISTN is not precise guidance. There is no clear allowance either way of interpretation here. And when you compare it to, say, lists of awards won by an actor or the like, there's little difference here beyond whether it really needed a separate article or not. --MASEM (t) 20:20, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Masem that LISTN doesn't answer these questions at all. I'd further say that LISTN confuses more than it really guides, with too many editors misreading it to think it's necessary for list notability rather than just sufficient. And the question LISTN asks, "have the list's members been discussed as a group?", is more often than not irrelevant if not outright nonsensical, and can be both wildly underinclusive and overinclusive depending on the topic. It is underinclusive when we're dealing with a very ordinary sublist/classification, such as a list of notable people from a notable place or notable alumni of a notable school, where LISTN would accomplish nothing but punching arbitrary holes in our indexing. And it is overinclusive when we're dealing with what might be best characterized as statistics, such as casualties from a notable accident or attack, where obviously the casualties have been described by reliable sources as a group, but only as a group.

I think LISTN is only useful when we're dealing with an unusual grouping or classification, such as List of Presidents of the United States with facial hair, where we really should expect some kind of specific treatment of the list's organizing concept in reliable sources to justify an instance of what is not an ordinary or presumptively relevant way of listing politicians. postdlf (talk) 19:22, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

It looks like you have offered two interpretations, and I think neither of them are ideal. The subject of your (example) list is "stuff this person won", and therefore you need sources that talk about "stuff this person won". The Wikipedia list may contain stuff that the person won, but which is usually omitted by most sources that are talking about "stuff this person won". You need more than just the "number of wins", but you do not need an actual "list of stuff this person won". A non-list prose source that talks about "stuff this person won" is perfectly acceptable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Notability as far as being included in footer template lists

I'm having trouble finding the guidelines for membership on one of lists in the various footer templates. I assume that subjects without articles (red linked) shouldn't be on templates, but I can't seem to find info here. Should it be added?Timtempleton (talk) 21:57, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think WP:N really covers what goes on in navboxes like that, though I would agree that we should not have redlinks in those boxes. However, appropriate redirects may be okay. --MASEM (t) 02:07, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

While it seems on the one hand that it's harmless to put in just a name on a template, perhaps with the intention of signalling that an article could be created, this could easily get cluttered with non-notable companies and things. I have no problem going with the general guideline that templates and category lists shouldn't have redlined articles. If someone looks for an company article and doesn't find one, or sees a list that seems to be missing a significant player, then they should submit a new article creation request.Timtempleton (talk) 04:26, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

That information should be at WP:NAVBOX or WP:Red link. Notability guidelines do not control article content, including whether or not the article should contain a red link. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Template:Notability edit request

An edit request has been made at Template talk:Notability to change the text wording and punctuation. It is a protected template, and some clear consensus should be established before any work to change its appearance is undertaken. Please discuss. fredgandt 09:51, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Does WP:N apply to drafts in userspace or draftspace?

No, notability guidelines do not apply to userspace and draftspace drafts. Some editors added that drafts may qualify for deletion for reasons apart from notability. czar 18:18, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

There is currently significant disagreement at MfD about whether GNG (and notability guidelines in general) applies to userspace and draftspace drafts. A look at the current slate of MfD discussions shows this disagreement clearly.

The question for this RfC is: do notability guidelines apply to drafts in userspace or draftspace? If you think they apply in one namespace and not the other, please specify in your comment. A2soup (talk) 21:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Responses

No - The purpose of a draft in userspace or draftspace is to develop an article until it meets mainspace standards. Accordingly, it makes no sense to apply mainspace standards such as GNG to drafts and delete them for failing to meet these standards.
Also, there is no benefit to deleting non-notable drafts. They should not show up in search engines because both userspace and draftspace are default NOINDEX. Deletion does not save server space because even deleted pages are retained, and the deletion discussion takes up even more space. If one wants to make drafts with article potential easy to find among masses of drafts without potential, adding the drafts to maintenance categories for high-potential or low-potential drafts is far easier, more effective, and less BITEy than deleting low-potential drafts at MfD.

Finally, from a policy perspective, WP:N says that notability is a test used to decide "whether a given topic warrants its own article." WP:ARTICLE (aka WP:MAINSPACE) says: ""Articles" belong to the main namespace of Wikipedia pages (also called "article namespace" or simply "mainspace")." From these two statements, that notability applies to articles and that articles are in mainspace, we can reason that pages in userspace and draftspace are not articles and thus not covered by notability guidelines. A2soup (talk) 21:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

No, but... Per Wikipedia:Drafts notability does not apply to drafts, but this does not mean non-notable drafts cannot be deleted, particularly if they go stale (no one works to improve on them after a few months) with no signs of sources being added and notability is not established. User/Draft space is not meant as website to keep non-mainspace articles around forever. --MASEM (t) 22:05, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

I beg to differ. The only drafts that get deleted when they become stalled are those that were created through the Articles for Creation process, i.e. they were created by a primary editor which abandoned the effort. There is no specific defined procedure for deleting other kinds of drafts, so they should go through Miscellanea for Deletion; and WP:PRESERVE is the governing policy (do not delete material that would belong in a finished article, only delete content that can't be fixed). Diego (talk) 18:23, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

No but with the understanding that the article is supposed to eventually meet all of the mainspace requirements, including WP:N. Reyk _YO! 22:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
@Reyk: What would the practical effect of this expectation be at MfD, if any? A2soup (talk) 22:37, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
@A2soup:- It would mean, for instance, that a draft that blatantly fails WP:V for having no sources whatsoever could be left alone while the author or authors have time to slowly find and incorporate them. It would also mean that an article about a young sportsperson who doesn't yet meet WP:ATHLETE would be left alone until they make their professional debut. Or a draft article about a company, while currently spammish and containing no actual evidence of meeting WP:N or WP:CORP, could plausibly do so at some point with enough fleshing out. But there is always the expectation that the draft article can and will eventually meet those standards. The draft about your cousin in lower management, or your crap now-dissolved garage band you formed with uni friends in the 90s, or the traffic roundabout down the street, these are all things that have no prospect of ever meeting WP:N no matter how much editing goes into them. Such things should be deleted at MfD. Reyk _YO! 08:05, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
@A2soup: could you point to specific threads/pages where people are arguing that GNG should apply? It seems an untenable position on its face, so I'm looking for context... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:22, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
I feel a bit biased giving the examples, but see:
A2soup (talk) 22:29, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
No. The point of drafts is to allow people to develop articles in good faith outside of the scrutiny applicable to articles in mainspace. It is true that if a topic isn't notable, the article will never qualify, as notability is a characteristic of a topic, not of the article discussing it. However, we have often had cases where someone (me, for example) has believed a topic not to be notable, only to have someone else turn up sufficient evidence of notability. Time to learn about notability, whether through helpful tips from other editors or from reading through the guidelines, and to attempt to establish it for one's topic while others hold judgment in suspension ought to be part of the leeway that comes with use of the draft feature. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:43, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes Just found this question that is bordering on misleading. The issue A2soup and maybe one other editor keep arguing is that a worthless stale draft (often years old) that does not meet a specific speedy delete tag should be kept because they believe that stale drafts should not be subjected to GNG at all. We are talking about stale drafts from users that have usually not edited for years and often the draft was their onlt contribution, not active users. The effect of this position is that garbage is protected from deletion. However, evidently they believe a Keep vote does not mean it should be sent to mainspace.
User draft space is for temporarily working on articles (or sections of articles etc) that are intended for mainspace. It is not a place to write about your WP:GARAGE band, favorite teacher, middle school crush, etc with expectation your musing will be protected from deletion forever because allegedly GNG does not apply to article space.
Significant accommodation is made for drafts that are being worked on toward something that meets GNG, but at some point everything on the site needs to have a valid purpose. Legacypac (talk) 22:54, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
- For pages about one's own garage band, see WP:U5. For a userspace page written in good faith about, say, an associate professor one admires, or even about a band to which the author has no personal connection and that has been making the rounds regionally for 20 years, I'd be happy to see some time limit placed on its existence, the same as for pages in Draft namespace. What is that, six months? Before that, what's the big deal if there's a draft about a non-notable topic, as long as it doesn't amount someone taking advantage of Wikipedia for one's own purposes? —Largo Plazo (talk) 23:12, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
  - To me, 6 months of inactivity and with no third-party sources, following by a reasonable google check, is sufficient to say "this is an abandoned draft of a non-notable topic, time for deletion". --MASEM (t) 23:17, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
    - I'm sure that you mean "no third-party sources have been published, regardless of whether the draft happens to link to them", and it appears that some of these noms, including Legacypac, would benefit from us being particularly clear about that point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:22, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
      - I do mean published third-party sources , and I would expect them to be at least linked/spelled out (proper citation format can come later). The google check is to make sure that we don't miss something that is obviously notable where there are clearly obvious third-party sources, but for something in draft, we're expecting that space is used to give the user time to find the sources. --MASEM (t) 23:26, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
- Of course "keep" doesn't mean "send to the mainspace in its current state". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
- Mm, I think your response is misleading, Legacypac. You don't delete -- or retain -- stale user drafts because the subjects might not meet the GNG. You delete them because they're stale. Arguing otherwise is like suggesting that burglars should go to jail because the Electoral College meets every four years to select the next US President; they're completely unrelated items. Ravenswing 06:49, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Maybe not understanding your point or where you think I said anything like that. No one wants to delete drafts on topics that meet N, or delete the good faith work of active editors. When a stale draft intersects both obviously failing GNG + a belongs under a long gone account, its time to delete. Legacypac (talk) 07:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

No, but... there are limits. Calling something a draft doesn't permanently exempt it from deletion. However, I've not yet seen any policy-based or practical reason why most of these drafts couldn't be blanked. (Also, I suspect that the noms are concerned about these drafts being found by search engines, but userspace is _NOINDEX_ these days, so that's irrelevant.)
I looked through the MFDs that A2soup kindly provided (I'd seen some of the other conversations elsewhere), and I found it enlightening. About half the MFDs involved an effort to delete a user draft on GNG grounds when the subject was notable (e.g., dozens of news articles about the artist, none of which happened to be linked in the draft) or already in the mainspace, and one is under active development. Since there was such a high proportion of WP:BEFORE failures, and since actual facts like whether sources existed for the subject seemed to be ignored by nearly all of the participants, I wonder whether drafts whose notability is doubted should be sent to AFD instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:22, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
No Index or not, these drafts do get mirrored by other sites. The MfD's linked were carefully selected out of hundreds to favor the user's argument. If you started and abandoned an alternate crappy version of Britney Spears would you expect it to be kept forever in userspace? Legacypac (talk) 23:29, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Of what concern is it to us what mirror websites carry? Deletionpedia even keeps articles because they've been deleted from here. So? —Largo Plazo (talk) 00:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Just to respond to the careful selection out of hundreds thing, you'll see it took me all of seven minutes from the request to the posting. Except for Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Thisisastackup/A_giant_crab_comes_forth (which I selected because that's where I first remembered arguing this point), I just selected the ones I could quickly find from the past couple days that included argument over the topic of this RfC - whether GNG applies to drafts. Even so, I noted my worry about bias when I posted them, so please feel free to supply other examples to even the scales. A2soup (talk) 03:54, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Legacypac, as I said above, "Calling something a draft doesn't permanently exempt it from deletion". However, I'm still waiting for you to explain why it's necessary to spend all this time on MFD discussions and then get an admin to push the delete button instead of the simpler, easier, quicker, more efficient, and friendlier option of boldly blanking the page and sticking a stale draft template on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:32, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
WP:NOTE only applies to articles that are in article space. Drafts in Userspace are, by definition, not in article space. There may be other policies and guidelines that would justify removing a draft from Userspace... But WP;NOTE is not one of them.

Indeed, one of the reasons why we created Userspace in the first place was to provide editors with a holding pen for potential articles on topics that might not be deemed notable now... but might become so in the future. Blueboar (talk) 01:06, 29 February 2016 (UTC).

Strong No but.... - It is absurd and bizarre to try to apply notability to draft pages and user pages. There are reasons to delete drafts, either stale drafts, or drafts that are being tendentiously resubmitted, via MFD. There are also reasons to delete drafts at CSD, such as attack pages. Lack of notability is not a reason to delete drafts, and to claim that it is is bizarre and absurd. Lack of notability is a reason to decline drafts at AFC. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:49, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
20-FREAKING-MEGATON NO: I doubt I could come up with better language to express my POV than Robert McClenon: this is absurd and bizarre. Ravenswing 06:44, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
No. Notability defines the existence of topics as stand-alone articles, and does not cover the content within a page; and drafts are not articles. Every fact which is listed within a draft with provided references could be in the future included in the corresponding article or a different one, as the topic develops, so per WP:PRESERVE we should keep it around just in case. This is exactly what we do with content appearing in Talk pages - which gets archived for future reference, not deleted; I have always defended that Draft space should be governed by the same rules as Talk pages; is what makes the most sense, as both are intended to contain undeveloped versions of an article's content in an iterative process of refinement.

This means that there are reasons to remove then, but "no work is done on them" is not one of those reasons and "it isn't a finished article" is not a valid reason either. I agree with Reyk YO!'s caveat that the content in the draft should have some expectation of possibly being incorporated as part of a notable topic somewhere in the future; IMHO the WP:NOTFORUM and WP:NOTWEBHOST guidelines are enough to control this aspect. Diego (talk) 18:29, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

No. Drafts in userspace and draftspace are there because they do not yet meet all the requirements for being a Wikipedia article. Of course that's not to say that no such drafts should ever be deleted; but they should not be deleted for that reason.
Richard27182 (talk) 13:26, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely No - Possibly there might be criteria to designate drafts as "Abandoned Drafts" and thus make them eligible for CSD, but notability has nothing to do with that. --Mike Cline (talk) 15:02, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
No I agree with Robert NcClenon: There are reasons to delete drafts, but lack of notability is not a reason to delete drafts. To claim that it is is bizarre and absurd. Fagles (talk) 03:24, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
Comment - so far, everyone has been focused on userspace drafts for potential articles that do not yet exist. But there are other reasons to create a userspace draft. For example, I might create a draft in my userspace to work on a major rewrite an existing article... or to work on a potential merger of two (or more) existing articles. Are people perhaps confusing drafts that are in userspace with drafts that are in Draftspace (ie potential articles that have been submitted for consideration as part of the Articles for Creation process?) Blueboar (talk) 13:29, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
A draft in the draftspace or userspace cannot be deleted on the grounds that it is not notable. One of the functions of the draftspace is to allow editors to work on topics that are reasonably expected to become notable in the future. Another is to allow them to work on drafts without fear of WP:DEMOLISH. On the other hand, if the topic of a draft article in the draftspace is notable, there is a presumption that it should be moved into the mainspace. This is to stop deletionists from improperly moving mainspace articles out of the mainspace. James500 (talk) 12:51, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
COMMENT - I think we need to draw a distinction between Userspace and Draftspace. As I have said above, WP:NOTE does not apply to Userspace. However, I think WP:NOTE does (somewhat) apply to Draftspace. In Draftspace, we should start with the assumption that the topic is notable... and we try (as a community) to establish that notability. There isn't a time limit to this, however... there is an effort limit. If a reasonable effort has been made to find sources, with no results... I think it reasonable for the community to agree that it is pointless to continue the search, and accept that our initial assumption of notability was wrong. We can then say that the topic isn't notable, after all. We can remove the draft from draftspace - either by deleting completely or by userfying it (assuming there is someone who wants to adopt the draft and continue the effort to improve it). Blueboar (talk) 16:46, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
No, one should have the ability to start drafts on topics of questionable notability. But I agree with Masem and the others who have said that drafts can be deleted for other reasons, such as if they go stale. Wikipedia is not a free webhost, and userspace drafts are not immune to deletion. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 05:21, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
Yes Frankly, I am quite surprised at the responses here. If the subject of a draft indeed fails notability guidelines and is not a case of WP:TOOSOON either (meaning that the subject is not expected to become notable in the future as well), then of course it will never get to become an article. What then is the point of keeping such a draft? After all, the ultimate purpose of all drafts is to become articles one day. Could the "No" camp please answer this question? That being said, drafts shouldn't be MfD'd the moment they are created as that's too bitey. Also, yeah, it's a bit pointless to delete well-written drafts, but the reality is that 95% of the AfC rejected drafts out there are quite poorly written. 103.6.159.79 (talk) 14:55, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

As I've pointed out in this and several other discussions, the answer to your question is that the (valid and well-referenced) content in a draft may be reused in other articles, even if the topic for which the draft was created is not a notable one. We have a policy saying that this kind of content SHOULD be kept ("As long as any facts or ideas would belong in an encyclopedia, they should be retained in Wikipedia"), not deleted because of their poor presentation (i.e., it's not OK to delete them merely because they were written as an article that can't have its stand-alone page). Also, there are draft that do not originate from AfC. Diego (talk) 17:06, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Comment - An answer to the unregistered editor's request that someone in the No camp answer why notability doesn't apply to drafts, I agree that in some cases a draft should not be kept and may never become an article, but that is not a matter of blindly applying notability to drafts. One of the purposes of the draft review process is to provide feedback to authors that they need to find sources. If we were to apply notability to drafts, drafts that have inadequate references would be taken immediately to miscellany for deletion rather than declined. There are reasons for taking drafts to MFD, but mere failure to establish notability is not one; it is a reason to decline the draft. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:43, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

The "'No' camp" has already answered this question, and at length. Your blithe assertion that articles, once shown to fail guidelines, "never get to become an article" has been disproven ten thousand times over. Notability standards have changed down the years, subjects improve on their achievements, sources are uncovered by diligent editors, fresh sources and information are newly digitized. The point of keeping those drafts is that neither you nor I have a crystal ball, so as to be able to declare preemptively that it is impossible to improve a given article, and that furthermore no one will ever manage to do so.
Beyond that, as I've said before, whacking down drafts in userspace creates a chilling effect to the incubation of new articles there, and what you and the (seemingly barely extant) "Yes" camp has failed to demonstrate is the benefit to the encyclopedia in doing so. For those editors with a burning urge to purge Wikipedia of chaff, I commend to them the already extant AfD, which has far too few participating editors for the workload these days. Ravenswing 18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

OK, OK, you convinced me. 103.6.159.79 (talk) 11:46, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

No in my view FWIW. draftspace is a safe haven for editors to create articles. However, there is a precedent for deleting abandoned drafts after six months. It's done as a matter of course by Articles for Creation if a draft hasn't been edited for 6 months. Often the prompt of a speedy deletion threat will encourage the author (or a new, interested editor) to improve the draft to WP:GNG standard. Whether the six month rule can be applied more generally, well, I wasn't directly involved at AFC in creating the deletion process so I can't comment. Sionk (talk) 23:33, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
Not directly, but: Article drafts must have some reasonable hope of becoming articles at some point. A userspace "draft" about a subject that cannot reasonably be expected to survive AfD on notability grounds should be deleted as violating WP:NOT as a misuse of draft or userspace. This is in the same vein as WP:FAKEARTICLE. That user- and draftspace are given leeway does not mean there's any reason to keep decade-old one-off drafts by users who never did anything else but write about their sexual prowess or about how god-fearing their hometown is. I would honestly suggest that since there was no consensus to expand G13 to cover article drafts lacking the AfC template, that MfD be allowed to take drafts not eligible for G13 so there's actually a community discussion. In the alternative, I would suggest that WP:STALEDRAFT be amended to make the preferred remedy for an abandoned article draft by an abandoned user account be to tag it with the AfC template and list it for creation. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 03:41, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
No Drafts on subjects that the community may reasonably conclude have near-zero chance of ever becoming notable, no matter how much research or rewriting is done, such as the disbanded garage band mentioned above, or a draft article about the author's pet, might be deleted at MfD. But if there is any plausible chance that additional research will turn up sources needed to establish notability, or that the subject may become notable in time, or that editing might improve poor writing, then the draft should not be deleted simply because it fails notability at the moment. DES ^(talk) 13:36, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
No but... if a draft has no chance of developing into or being intergrated into a Wikipedia article it should still be deleted per WP:NOTWEBHOST and WP:STALEDRAFT. Other draftspace/userspace just becomes a webhost for hobbyist topics and the like. Brustopher (talk) 14:04, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

It's snowing in spring ... This RfC has been open nearly a month now, and the "No" sentiment is overwhelming. This probably ought to have been given a snowball close a week ago, and I'd do it myself if I hadn't voted in it. Someone anyone? Ravenswing 17:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Notability and reliance on primary+affiliated sources

We require "significant coverage" in reliable sources so that we can actually write a whole article, rather than half a paragraph or a definition of that topic. If only a few sentences could be written and supported by sources about the subject, that subject does not qualify for a separate page, but should instead be merged into an article about a larger topic or relevant list.
— WP:WHYN

In a situation I see often, the above quote might be the case—that only a few substantive sentences are supported by secondary sources—but still the article is overloaded (refbombed) with primary sources so as to appear to necessitate a full treatment of the topic. The above quote would normally encourage the reliably sourced material to be merged elsewhere, but the presence of the primary source material clouds editors' judgement about whether the topic is independently notable from that potential merge target. (Of course, that primary source detail is insufficiently noteworthy—or else secondary sources would have covered it—but editors then view that primary sourced stuff as something to be preserved rather than supporting detail.) Are there any guidelines, suggestions, or prior guidelines for dealing with these situations? I feel like I have to rehash these basic points often enough that I would expect them to be addressed somewhere else centrally. (For what it's worth, I view this as a corollary to significant coverage's "so that no original research is needed to extract the content": Topics that mainly rely on primary+affiliated sources for completeness are strong candidates for merger, as a dearth of secondary+independent source coverage indicates a dearth of reliable substance for a dedicated page.) czar 18:11, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I wonder whether you are really concerned about primary vs secondary, or independent vs affiliated here. WP:Secondary does not mean independent, and I'm more concerned about pages sourced to affiliated pages (e.g., the professor's page on his employer's website) than about independent primary sources (e.g., most news articles).

As a side note, I asked about the line "so that no original research is needed to extract the content" a while ago, and the responses were muddled to the point that I think the line is useless. The only coherent explanation was that if you're using a tweet here (about what she ate) and a press release there (about where she is) and a blog post over there (about what she's doing), then SIGCOV prohibits you from summing up those three sources as "She ate cake in Vienna while on concert tour" – and I seriously doubt that this is what was originally intended. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

In my case, primary and affiliated are synonymous (company websites, creator interviews, promotional materials), for what that's worth. I'm fine with swapping out "primary" for "affiliated" for any of the above. czar 00:33, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

For clarity: primary are sources that do not attempt any transformation on the original work but simply summarize the work; secondary ones do provide that. The distinction you might be going for is the difference between an independent and dependent sources. It is possible to have dependent secondary sources, where things like creator interviews that offer insight on the process fall into line, though there's a lot more nuances to that as well. --MASEM (t) 00:52, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

"primary" and "affiliated" are not synonymous. An affiliated source can report the facts, a primary source. An affiliated source can comment on the meaning of the facts, a secondary source. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:55, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Feel free to tweak my language above. Consider my case to be primary-and-affiliated. The thrust of the question remains czar 04:14, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

My take: A notable topic has at least a few (>4) sentences that can be supported by reliable (actually, "reputable' is a better word) secondary sources, directly covering the topic. Having established that the topic is notable, WP:N does not limit article content. As far as WP:N is concerned, once you have a couple of independent secondary sources, you can then have hundreds of primary sources. List articles, and table-heavy articles can be like that. It is not, in WPN-principle, a problem

If you find that a topic is overburdened with primary sources, you should go to WP:NOR, specifically WP:PSTS.

If you think a topic is overburdened with affiliated sources, then maybe try testing it against WP:NOTPROMOTION. I imagine that NASA space missions can easily contain an abundance of NASA affiliated sources. I don't think it is necesarily a problem.

Maybe the WP:NPOV policy, specifically WP:UNDUE, helps?

I suspect I may not have fully understood. Perhaps if you restate the question. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:53, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia term "Navel-gazing" usage in deletion debates

I've created an essay page on usage of the term "Navel-gazing" in deletion debates on Wikipedia.

Essay at: WP:Navel-gazing.

Feedback would be appreciated on the talk page, at Wikipedia talk:Navel-gazing.

Thank you,

— Cirt (talk) 20:22, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Notability question

Does an obituary beyond page 20 of the New York Times equate to de facto automatic notability? AusLondonder (talk) 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

When you say "beyond page 20" , are you meaning more the local obits rather than , say, full length obits that are there for clearly famous people? If so, those short obits absolutely do not confer notability. A longer obit is not a guarantee either is definitely at least one secondary source towards notability. --MASEM (t) 02:54, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I am specifically talking about this obituary (page 21) and this one on page 31. Both of those subjects are at AFDs and some editors asserted that such obituaries equate to inherent notability. AusLondonder (talk) 02:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

No, that's definitely not any guideline or policy. A obit that goes into significant details on a person's life is a good sign they may be notable, but there's no automatic notability granted by an obit. --MASEM (t) 03:02, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I would suggest that given Wikipedia is not a memorial, it's pretty explicit that an obituary does not confer any sort of automatic notability. Ravenswing 03:32, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

A paid obituary is not evidence of Wikipedia-notability, because it is not independent. Look instead for reports on the obituary. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:41, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
Comment I have alerted participants at the two AFD's to this discussion. George Breisacher and Walter Christie AusLondonder (talk) 07:51, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Presidential Campaign Pages

I am curious what determines the notability to create a presidential campaign page such as Gary Johnson presidential campaign, 2016? I would like to create a page for Austin Petersen's campaign as he is currently in 2nd for the run for the Libertarian Party nomination, but his Bio page was determined not ready for it's own article and was changed into a redirect after a deletion discussion. Is personal notability of the person running the factor or is the notability of the campaign, as an organization unto itself, the factor? His campaign has been discussed in multiple major publications ([3], [4], [5]) as well as minor reliable sources ([6], [7], [8], [9]), he was one of three (along with Gary Johnson and John McAfee) in the only nationally televised Libertarian debate on Fox Business, and currently the campaign holds the second most votes in the Libertarian 2016 primary. Being that the subject of his campaign (as an organization) is separate from the subject of his person, I believe this warrants the ability to create a page for his 2016 campaign as per WP:GNG and WP:ORG. Before I create the page I'd like to know what other wikipedians (especially those familiar with notability guidelines) think about the subject. Acidskater (talk) 15:36, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Public Libraries

Should individual branch libraries of city or county public library systems be considered notable for stand-alone articles, or should they be redirected to the library system? In the case in point, but not the only case, I see that District of Columbia Public Library has a list of branches, all of which are either blue-linked or red-linked. This implies an assumption that they warrant stand-alone articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:58, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

No, there's no inherent notability for branches. An individual branch may have its own notability however. --MASEM (t) 02:00, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

WP:AUTHOR: 'Significant'

An AfD discussion has raised the question of what exactly is meant in WP:AUTHOR by the criterion 'a significant body of work'. Does 'significant' mean simply the number of works issued? Is it defined by the reputation of the publishers (and if so how would that reputation be verified): or is what is meant here what Wiktionary defines as ""Having a noticeable or major effect; notable" (and if so how would that effect be verified)? My interpretation is the last of these, but I would be glad to know the opinions of others.--Smerus (talk) 09:00, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Given we're talking a subject-specific notability guideline, and notability is not inherited, "Significant" should be based on the latter meaning, having a noticeable or major effect. Just because a person has books published by a major publisher does not confer notability. --MASEM (t) 14:17, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

That was not the whole of the argument in the particular case Smerus is wikilawyering about. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:06, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I've looked at the AFD in question, and Smerus' interpretation is right on target. Just having some books published by mainstream publishers, with separate reviews of each book but not sufficient to make each book notable, is not "significant". The keep arguments there are working on assuming inherited notability, and we don't use that as a measure, and no one has shown how the written books are "significant" to the field. --MASEM (t) 16:26, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Globality of Wikipedia 'Notability' criteria

Notability criteria is "a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." There are some cases that admins and some users of a language (Arabic and etc) claim that a specific subject is not notable for them and claim that "they have their own rules!". I am aware that having a page on a Wiki does not warrant having a separate article on other languages. My objection is that whether we really have different concepts regarding 'Notability' in different languages and is it dependent on the language? For example can it be that a character be encyclopedic from the viewpoint of English speakers, while he is not encyclopedic from the viewpoints of others? So how do you justify the concept of Encyclopedia? Thanks. Mhhossein (talk) 12:03, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

We don't require sources to be in English, so the same applies to notability - if a topic's notability is only covered in works of a foreign language but translated for en.wiki, that's acceptable here. Similarly a topic notable only in English but not other languages still is considered notable for en.wiki. --MASEM (t) 14:06, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I think OP is talking about comparing different Wikipedia's guidelines, not source use. @Mhhossein: is that right? The English Wikipedia has its set of notability criteria which apply to sources and topics of all languages. The Spanish Wikipedia (es.wikipedia.org) has its own notability criteria. The basic idea is that each Wikipedia is a community, and each community comes up with its own rules and norms. The rules aren't put in place by, say, the Wikimedia Foundation. It could indeed be frustrating for someone who speaks multiple languages to see an article in one place but not allowed in another, but I guess the only recourse for that person would be to identify the aspect of that Wikipedia's notability guideline responsible for the discrepancy and work to change it? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:18, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

If this is the reading, then yes, each project does have its own definition of notability that are not always cross compatible, and there may be article topics that can be included on one language wiki version but not another. --MASEM (t) 14:34, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Reading again, I may be wrong. In which case I'll just say notability is intended to be a quasi-objective way to determine, roughly, "importance", based on the extent to which things are covered in reliable sources, and as Masem said those sources can be in any language. Notability isn't about actual importance -- just importance via coverage in sources. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:20, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes you're right Rhododendrites, I meant to compare different Wikipedia's guidelines and you answered me best when you said: "The basic idea is that each Wikipedia is a community, and each community comes up with its own rules and norms." But then 'reliability' has also different meanings in different projects? Thank you Masem, you're explanation made me understand the answer easier. Mhhossein (talk) 15:23, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, each project could also come up with its own definitions for what constitutes a reliable source. The only global requirements for all Wikipedias, that I know of anyway, are NPOV, BLP, and free content requirements. Even then, there are differences in how the various language projects handle and enforce those requirements; for example, each project is allowed to come up with circumstances under which it will accept some nonfree content. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:54, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I've always felt that the English Wikipedia notability guidelines are biased toward a Western definition of reliable sources, thus contributing to the project's systemic bias. For example it would make sense to cover all kind of actors and movies from the Bollywood system, but these get routinely deleted as the verifiable sources that document them aren't subject to the level of scrutiny of Western mass media that have been selected as the criteria for Reliable Sources in the English project. This could be true of any other topics for which the available neutral information is registered in formats that our English standard deem unnoteworthy. Diego (talk) 17:33, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

@Diego Moya:, can you cite a case where this happened? Non-English sources are acceptable as long as they meet the requirements for reliability. No source is acceptable which does not, but well, that's a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't be writing articles based upon unreliable reference material. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:04, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Um ... I don't think so. The English-language press in India is gigantic and vibrant, and Bollywood is a popular field. My observation is that successful AfDs on Bollywood subjects are much more the product of editors not bothering to do the work to save the articles (because Internet-happy India also puts these sources online, in shipload lots) than out of any sense that we don't believe the The Times of India or the Hindustan Times aren't valid. Ravenswing 18:24, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

That's what I mean. To have articles at en.wiki you don't just need reliable information, it needs to come from multiple, independent in-depth sources. Those standards come from the amount of coverage that popular and high culture get in Western topics, but those strict criteria don't give us a consistent level of coverage from sources in other parts of the world. Wikipedia could work as a reliable catalog of primary information for topics important to other cultures, but our Notability policy of "everything must be certified important to have an article" doesn't allow such compilations. I've already mentioned one topic where this happens, popular entertainers in non-western industries often get the AfD treatment. Diego (talk) 22:23, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that's an issue that stems from WP:RS, not so much notability. We're looking to the quality of sources, and there's already a systematic bias that there's probably a disproportionately larger number of sources (reliable or not) in Western topics than in other areas due to several reasons. Further, the language barrier can make it difficult to properly judge some of these non-Western sources as reliable or not. I would not be surprised to find cases of two effectively equivalent sources in considering all aspects of defining an RS, differing only by Western/non-Western nature, and finding that we at WP consider the non-Western one an unallowable RS while we readily use the Western one, simply because there's a language barrier to understand how the non-Western one meets RS requirements. And as long as RS is based on policy, WP:N will have to follow in its footprints. Which means we are going to reflect a Western bias on topic coverage. --MASEM (t) 23:03, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: and @Masem: Yes and yes, we're saying the same things; yet I think I'm not expressing clearly where I'm getting at. Those criteria (reliability, independence, neutrality, depth of coverage) are choices that we have made because they make the most sense for an encyclopedia written in English and covering knowledge from a Western academic perspective. But from time to time we should reflect on what are their limits and what price we pay for them; in this case, I think its main consequence is embracing the systemic bias as a by-product of our core policies. (There are others, such as making our project sturdy, and therefore hard to change and resistant to major evolution).

As the topic of this thread is about how other projects may define their inclusion criteria, my point is that there are other paths that could have been chosen and which might be more appropriate for different cultures. For example, they might embrace original research and primary sources and let the reader the responsibility of their own fact-checking; or they could ignore NPOV and let articles be owned by a few authors (maybe by having several competing versions of each topic, written by different groups).

Unthinkable as it might seem to us now, embracing a wholly different set of values might still produce a viable project with a useful compilation of knowledge; I'm thinking of examples like BBC's H2G2 or the original C2 wiki. It is quite likely that such approaches might produce a better result for cultures with a smaller corpus of reliable sources than our own. None of our core policies were written in stone at the beginning of the project, and our current balance is a consequence of our community adapting to the cultural conditions on which we operate, not the other way around (i.e. we didn't start by thinking what principles would produce the most accurate corpus of knowledge and then looking for the content that could be written from them; on the contrary, we started with "anything goes" and only then we started making cleanup work). Diego (talk) 09:04, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Could we change our core policies if we want to? Sure. Are we likely to do so? Nope. There is a strong consensus that benefits of our current policies outweigh any downside. Blueboar (talk) 13:52, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

It's not so much that we change our policies as it is that new projects adopt a significantly different set. Diego (talk) 15:56, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

My own take is this: yes, I agree that there are going to be systemic biases in favor of topics likely to be covered in the western, English-language press. That is the price of doing business. One of my catchphrases at AfD is that while there is a notion held by a number of editors that if there is (or someone can imagine there is) some excuse for a person/entity/organization not to have received the "significant coverage" required to sustain an article the provisions of WP:V and WP:GNG are suspended in their favor, this curious belief has no basis in Wikipedia policy or guideline. I'm OK with that, because one result of a system where obscure subjects in Malawi or Kiribati have trouble generating reliable sources is that we're also not swamped by NFT editors claiming that cites to Myspace pages and high school newspapers validate articles on their garage bands.
Could, in its infancy, Wikipedia have gone different ways? Allowed OR and primary sources? Ignored NPOV and allowed editors to "own" articles or post competing ones? Of course. And we wouldn't be having this conversation, because Wikipedia would've been another one of those unreliable jokes like Conservapedia or the Urban Dictionary. Why would anyone trust an encyclopedia that enshrined polemics and bias? Why would anyone consult one for facts? Ravenswing 18:18, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Does a list of "notable x" in an article require each item in that list to have an article?

I have a strong feeling that this is well-trod territory so if regulars can point me to previous discussions or specific parts of policy and practice then I'd be very appreciative!

Like many (most) articles about colleges and universities, Paine College has a section labeled "Notable alumni." Until recently, there were several people listed in that section who did not have their own articles (or even redlinks - they were just text) but had supporting references. Another editor has taken exception to this material and removed it on the basis that "[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:ScrapIronIV&diff=prev&oldid=720562099 Once you define a list as one of "Notable" individuals, the list must be composed solely of notable entries. If it were an indiscriminate list, no problem. But the article has specified that there are notable alumni, and proof of that claim is determined through the existence of an article." This editor has also cited this essay in support of his or her position. This appears to contradict this policy ("The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles") so I'm turning here for additional input and guidance.

Does labeling a section of an article "Notable __" impose a requirement that all content in that section meet our notability guidelines? ElKevbo (talk) 17:30, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it does. You need to write or encourage others to write articles on your not yet notable alumni and only then can they be included in the list. -Roxy the dog™ woof 17:36, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Can you please explain your response and how it fits with this policy's clear statement that it doesn't determine article content? Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 17:41, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

You've already had that explanation. -Roxy the dog™ woof 17:43, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Then I clearly misunderstand this policy! Can we please go ahead and delete "The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles" since it doesn't accurately describe how editors interpret and carry out this guideline? ElKevbo (talk) 18:13, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

You're conflating two different issues. This isn't a commandment from on high derived directly from notability guidelines (which determine whether a subject gets an article, not whether that subject is mentioned in another article), but rather editor-determined inclusion criteria for lists of this kind. It is standard practice to limit alumni lists to only notable people regardless of what the section header is called, and I can't think of a good reason not to limit them in that way. postdlf (talk) 18:36, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

In general, yes, we would expect that every entry on a "notable people of X" list to be people that are actually notable - that have blue-linked articles that meet WP:N themselves. It is likely trivial to source any alumni of any major school with a primary/first-party source, but as we are calling the section "notable", it would be expected that we should have a secondary/third-party source to indicate why the person should be included, and that's generally going to mean that we have a blue-linked article. I can see limited exception for where we may have only one or two sources about a person towards notability that would fail the WP:N coverage but could be argued by consensus to include on the list, but this is the exception, not the rule. --MASEM (t) 17:51, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate your response but I object to the general idea that whenever we use language in an article that has a specific, technical meaning in the management of Wikipedia (e.g., notable, reliable) then we must be using that language only in that one specific sense, normal usage be damned.

In any case, I think I've found an answer to my question here. ElKevbo (talk) 18:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

The key here is that "Notable people from X", it is otherwise original research to include a name and claim that person is "notable" (as defined in English, not by en.wiki). An editor may believe a specific person is notable, but without sources to show that , it is a bad use of OR to include. Hence the need for the blue-link or an external source for proper assertion of notability to include. --MASEM (t) 18:05, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

The most important answer you will find (apart from the three editors who have all said the same thing) can be found at WP:ALMAMATER in the section "How to detect" item 1, which states that a non-notable entry "...does not have their own Wikipedia article, and thus their name is not highlighted blue. Occasionally, someone notable won't have their own Wikipedia article yet, but will be listed in their university article, but that's the exception to the rule." Scr★pIron^IV 18:09, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

But these items all had reliable sources supporting them. They were deleted only because they (a) were included in a section labeled "Notable alumni" and (b) lacked an article. ElKevbo (talk) 18:11, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

All the removed ones, looking at the sources, appear to be primary/first-party resume/CV material, which does not give any significant or notable nature about that person. If we don't remove these, anyone can get their name onto WP by posting their CV to a website and then using that as a source to include. This is why we really prefer third-party and secondary sources, so that we are getting an uninvolved person(s) of if a person is notable or not. --MASEM (t) 18:15, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm a notable alumni of my doggy training school. (and I can use a keyboard) -Roxy the dog™ woof 19:20, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

No, the content you've described should really be marked with the citation needed tag and allowed to sustain in the list per WP:NNC and WP:LISTN from the GNG. Having a Wikipedia article itself does not prove, nor infer, notability, and thousands of non-notable articles are deleted every year. Conversely, some notable persons do not want a Wikipedia article and articles (especially BLP articles) that have become WP:ATTACK pieces can be deleted as policy. So not having a Wikipedia article does not prove, nor infer, that the subject is not notable.009o9^Disclosure(Talk) 20:30, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Question about the Academy Award for Best Technical Achievement

I'm not sure if we take a blanket approach to Academy Awards or not, but this seems far enough away from the expected that I thought I would ask. This award is not an Oscar statuette, but a certificate, it appears to be given out at a different event, and the achievement doesn't have to be either singular or occur in the year of award [10]. Does receipt of this award, especially in a team format, meet GNG all by itself? MSJapan (talk) 03:41, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Adaptations of works

Are adaptations of works automatically notable? If people make a TV show or a film adapted from a popular video game, does that adaptation become notable? 173.55.97.103 (talk) 03:40, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

No, adaptions are not automatically notable. This is based on notability not being inherited. If the adaption can meet the GNG on its own (generally, having its own development and reception information) then a standalone article can be made, but otherwise information on the adaption can be described in the article of the original work. --MASEM (t) 03:47, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

However, RS'ed coverage of an independent implementation or adaptation of a work counts towards notability of the original work, if that parses correctly. Jclemens (talk) 05:41, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Adaptions are not automatically notable on their own, but they are evidence of the notatibility of the original work that got adapted.--Kmhkmh (talk) 18:30, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Marking W:N historical

Comment The threshold for inclusion on Wikipedia is verifiability. WP:Notability is a guideline in how to organize verifiable material. Do we need it? Can we make it historical? Unscintillating (talk) 08:29, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, one of the thresholds for inclusion on wikipedia is verifiability, but being verifiable is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for inclusion. WP:V explicitly says that "While information must be verifiable in order to be included in an article, this does not mean that all verifiable information must be included in an article". As for notability, it's not a guideline for how to organise material, it is a guideline for whether or not a topic deserves its own article.
But lets entertain for a moment the idea that WP:NOTE is marked as historical, and we remove all notability guidelines. What happens? How does the project benefit? The main change I can envision happening is that it becomes harder to delete things, which certainly isn't unambigously beneficial, and I can't imagine that you'd be able to find consensus for getting rid of such a longstanding guideline without making a very strong case for the benefits of doing so. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 13:46, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

As for a case, there is already a case that WP:N is broadly misunderstood, episodically applied at AfD, and admins are unable to use metrics to explain the "test" applied in determining GNG notability. Yes, deletion arguments need to be rethought, but what is essential? Perhaps we can agree that strengthening our core content policies and our WP:NOT policy is a long-term benefit to the encyclopedia. Unscintillating (talk) 16:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Ummm.... No. The threshold for the inclusion of a subject or topic is WP:N/GNG/SNGs. The threshold for inclusion of information on/about a subject or topic is WP:V plus other restrictions based on DUE, BLP, WP:NOT and a host of other things. Jbh ^Talk 14:13, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

See WP:N#Articles not satisfying the notability guidelines. Non-notable topics with merge targets are made into redirects, which I believe is still an inclusion of the topic. I've written an essay to define the concept of an insignificant topic. Unscintillating (talk) 16:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

While information may meet WP:V, not all of it is appropriate for inclusion in an encyclopedia, and WP:N is one guideline that helps to narrow down what information should be included. (WP:NOT and WP:NPOV are other policies that apply to mitigate content that would otherwise pass WP:V). So no, WP:N is very important to the work. --MASEM (t) 17:11, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Unscintillating - "merge targets...made into redirects" seems to be an indirect way to include a topic that cannot have its own article due to notability criteria. And of course the merged information is related to the topic of the main article. So, yours is an interesting interpretation. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 17:23, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Please note that it has been several years since WP:Verifiability has said "The threshold for inclusion is Verifiability" ... In fact it now says something quite different: "Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion." In other words, Verifiability is a minimum standard, but it may not be enough. Blueboar (talk) 17:38, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

I did a report at WT:V, as you may recall, that that phrase was used in hundreds of locations (I see 412 now) across the project, and I proposed that we keep the phrase as a footnote. The phrase remains, see link. Jbh (Jbhunley) has already given a decent exposition above, "The threshold for inclusion of information on/about a subject or topic is WP:V plus other restrictions based on DUE, BLP, WP:NOT and a host of other things." As I said in the essay WP:Inaccuracy, "Ultimately, with allowing for due weight considerations in how the material is presented, and notwithstanding copyright violations, the only reason to exclude verifiable material from the encyclopedia is because it is insignificant." Unscintillating (talk) 18:53, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Given that we're a work that is meant to summarize other works, claiming the only material that should be excluded is that that is insignificant is a poor measure. WP:NOT is an example of where information that is far from insignificant (such as, for example, WP:NOT#CATALOG, since pricing is very important and certainly not insignificant to a lot of people) should not be included. --MASEM (t) 19:01, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Actually WP:NOT is factored into what I was describing. If it is IINFO, this to us means it is insignificant material. If the material is NOTNEWSPAPER, or NOTPROMOTIONAL, this to us is insignificant material. Unscintillating (talk) 01:13, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't think we treat information that fails NOT as "insignificant", just "not encyclopedic". There are times that information that is normally excluded from NOT becomes important enough to switch into being encyclopedic, but at no time do we as editors consider that information insignificant, just not appropriate for inclusion. --MASEM (t) 01:17, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

So, instead of saying,

1. "Ultimately, with allowing for due weight considerations in how the material is presented, and notwithstanding copyright violations, the only reason to exclude verifiable material from the encyclopedia is because it is insignificant."

you want me to say,

2. "Ultimately, with allowing for due weight considerations in how the material is presented, and notwithstanding copyright violations, the only reason to exclude verifiable material from the encyclopedia is because it is not encyclopedic."

Those two sentences don't have the same meaning. "Insignificant" here has a contextual meaning. What is your point? Thanks, Unscintillating (talk) 01:45, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

No, neither approach works. There are multitudes of reasons that WP:V-qualifying material is excluded, which can also include consensus-driven decisions not documented by any policy or guideline. That itself is beyond the scope of WP:N, which only says when we have a stand-alone article on a topic. We can't rely on an essay here. --MASEM (t) 01:51, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@Unscintillating, I strongly suspect that your idea of "insignificant" and mine are quite different. There is also a vast gulf beween what we accept as information within an article and what is notable to have an article about. Notability is how we discriminate what articles to write. Marking N historical is flatly a bad idea and there is no way to substitute V as a screener for what subjects should have articles. It can be used to remove an article ie one that an SNG "presumes" to have coverage but which does not and therefore there is nothing we can write about the presumed notable topic (ex. No RS -> Nothing we write can pass V --> We should not have article.) but it does not go the other way. For instance just because we can verify lots of trivial "facts" about a subject does not mean we should have an article if those "facts" do not pass GNG. Jbh ^Talk 19:29, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

I want to think more about what you said. Meanwhile, what I'm getting out of this discussion is that we need more attention to using or shifting to WP:NOT instead of WP:DEL8. Thanks, Unscintillating (talk) 01:13, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Oppose: WP:N is still very much a policy still in use. p b p 19:53, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose, notability is an important consideration of whether a subject should have a standalone article about it. A mention in a different article, where appropriate, does not require passing notability, and that's where verifiability comes into play. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:56, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Notability presumptions

Hi, a quick note on the discussion pertaining to notability of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross recipients & WP:Soldier at:

Wikipedia talk:Notability (people)#Notability in Knight's Cross Holder Articles.

K.e.coffman (talk) 04:38, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 July 2016

This edit request to Wikipedia:Notability has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Link “general notability guideline” in the lead to the appropriate section.

67.14.236.50 (talk) 02:48, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Not done: We generally don't link to section of an article in the lead. If you need a direct link, use WP:GNG. EvergreenFir (talk) 05:16, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

RFC on creation of consensus standard

This may be of interest to folks here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Beauty Pageants#RFC on creation of consensus standard. Montanabw ^(talk) 19:07, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Waiting for a few days/contacting creator before nomination

I reverted this edit as I feel this needs a bit of discussion before adding to the guideline. There are situations where a topic is clearly not notable but not eligible for speedy (A7 or G11). I personally wouldn't like to place this on the guideline. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 13:03, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. Looks like it was also added here. "Wait a few days" is the sort of very specific "blanket recommendation" (to use a term Someguy1221 used in the first rv) that I think we typically avoid adding to policies/guidelines (responding more to the wording of the first addition than the second). We already have WP:PRESERVE, etc., but we also have basic content policies like WP:NOT, WP:V, WP:BLP, etc. There are many, many cases when it's an excellent idea to wait and see, but there are also a whole lot of times when deletion is absolutely appropriate, and even more gray area in between. This is also part of why we have the drafts namespace, which is something I think we could use more in an article's early stages, as an alternative to either deletion or waiting on a problematic article... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:26, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

I think "wait a few days before nominating for deletion" is an excellent bit of general advice (and if phrased as advice, I think it worth including in the guideline)... but it makes for a very poor rule (phrased to indicate that we should "always do this"). Whether to nominate immediately, or wait is always going to be a bit of a judgement call, one that depends on a host for factors. Yes, often it is most appropriate to wait (and we should encourage editors to do so)... but at other times it is more appropriate to nominate for deletion immediately - and we don't want language that prevents editors from doing so. If we do add something on this, it needs to be hedged with words like "consider..." or "it may be more appropriate to...". Blueboar (talk) 14:00, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Basically, while good advice, this page is the wrong place for it; that should be at WP:BEFORE. This is about the test of notability, not the process of AFD. --MASEM (t) 14:09, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

It is—BEFORE(C)(2) advises: "If the article was recently created, please consider allowing the contributors more time to develop the article." It's sound advice, especially when dealing with SPAs: after a week or so, many stop checking their "contributions," and they can be cleaned up without a big fuss. Rebb ing 15:00, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

I liked Blueboar's rewording. Lemongirl942, I did say a few (three or four) not seven (several) days. I agree seven would often be too long. Tagging with {{expert-subject}} by definition needs some time to allow a response, so why not give the creator the same allowance. Masem, the section of text is about the preliminaries for deletion so I think it is appropriate to be put here. It can also be in WP:BEFORE. Having been bitten with PRODs in prior wikilives within minutes of starting an article, I can write from experience that some people do jump far to quickly. Contacting a newbie via their talk page is much less WP:BITEY than just SPEEDing or PRODing the article. Aoziwe (talk) 14:44, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

There was a recent discussion about this at WT:NPP. PRODding in less than an hour is not only a little "bitey," but it makes no sense: the creator is likely to remove the tag, and, once removed, it can't be added again. Rebb ing 15:00, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

My point above is that BEFORE gives a lot of other things one should try to do before actually starting an AFD that are onuses on those trying to do the nomination. As such, it is better not to duplicate parts of that advice here (as should BEFORE change, we'd have to change it here). Referencing BEFORE in general is good, we just shouldn't call out a specific aspect. Additionally, where this was being added was not really about deletion, but about alerting an article creator or editors that a topic doesn't appear notable, which is not the same thing as deletion, so it still feels out of place. --MASEM (t) 15:28, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Look, this is a wiki. New articles need to be held to a lower standard than articles that have been existence for a long time. This is common sense. You give writers a chance to work. Others see what they're doing and join in. There are millions of topics in that gray area that if given enough TLC they can become beautiful articles, but it takes time. It doesn't work with deletionists running around summarily redirecting or deleting new articles before anyone gets a chance to improve them. All of this haste and impatience is damaging Wikipedia's long-term growth. This policy needs a clear-cut clause that protects content generators. Sole Flounder (talk) 00:32, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I would say WP:BEFORE is the best place for this information. That's what advises editors to do due diligence before nominating for deleletion. Notability however is not based on the content of the article: it is based on existence of sources. As for "deletionists", many of them are actually nominating articles for deletion which would otherwise reduce the encyclopaedia to a platform for promotion or a directory (which clearly goes against WP:NOTPROMO and WP:NOTDIR). The amount of non-notable articles we have are actually harming the long-term credibility of Wikipedia, a reason why people seem to feel it is a "lost cause" and don't want to contribute. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 00:42, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

The project also needs to be able to get rid of garbage without policies standing in the way. I'm all for encouraging new page patrollers to exercise caution in gray areas, but there are some articles we can know immediately will wind up deleted (such as, "John is a stupid doodoo head!", or "fiftibits is a band i just started. You can hear us play in my mom's garage"). We shouldn't slow that process down with bureaucracy, which is why I specifically took issue with the blanket nature of the suggestion. Someguy1221 (talk) 00:51, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I disagree. Wikipedia has a retention problem, true, but coddling bottom-of-the-barrel contributors is not the solution. There are plenty of other websites that have lower standards: Urban Dictionary and IMDb come to mind. Also, everything Lemongirl said is spot on.

You ought to be taking this up at WT:NPP, not here. Rebb ing 01:11, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

No improvements to an article can increase the notability of a subject. — Esquivalience (talk) 01:12, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

But it can improve the demonstration of notability to show that it should be kept (eg such as finding additional GNG-meeting references not present to start, which is often how many judge articles despite the advice BEFORE gives). --MASEM (t) 01:52, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I have tried asking article creators numerous times for more sources. It works in AfC, because it provides the strongest incentive of all: the existence of their article in mainspace. However, when they create articles directly, most just leave the site entirely, unresponsive to any inquiries I give them. — Esquivalience (talk) 02:28, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Yes, but others can improve the article too. That's why BEFORE does recommend getting talk page input to see if anyone knows how to improve the article. --MASEM (t) 03:08, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

I am considerably less interested in Wikipedia's hypothetical "growth" than I am about its quality, and there are already plenty of barriers to deletion; these days, with far fewer editors participating at AfD, just three editors is usually all it takes to block a deletion. Obviously a lot of inclusionists share Sole Flounder's POV that a rabid cadre of savage deletionists tear down perfectly good articles for no better reason than sheer malice and the joy of destruction, but IMHO, it's something of a conspiracy fantasy. In any event, Blueboar is right: there is a difference between giving good advice and enacting new rules, and I not only fail to see what's broken here that we need to do the latter, I have serious objections to Sole Flounder's attempts at making unilateral changes. Ravenswing 11:17, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Unilateral? I made two (2) edits to this policy page. One of those was a revert to someone else's version. Your objections are being taken seriously.

The reason I started with this policy page and not others is because it seems to be the one most often cited when new articles are redirected or deleted. In my opinion, it's unreasonable to expect a minutes-old article to comply with this policy, and the policy needs to be amended to reflect the reality of how most wiki articles get started. I'm open to changing the wording of course. Sole Flounder (talk) 13:13, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

The point is that this is not a "process" page about the AFD process. That page is WP:BEFORE, where the advice makes sense and likely already exists in one form or another. --MASEM (t) 14:11, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

The scope of WP:before seems a bit limited. It does not extend to (for example) reckless redirects. Pwolit iets (talk) 14:34, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

The key about BEFORE/AFD is that it requires admin actions and when the action is complete, there is a potential chance of losing all contributions, so it is a button that should be used very carefully. "Reckless" redirects are easily reverted without admin action and no contribution history is lost (and anyone can review the original content), hence there is no strong imperative to make sure that there's valid justification before creating a redirect. That said, abuse of creating redirects is disruptive and should be brought to WP:AN. BEFORE is necessary to make sure we are not wildly deleting possibly valuable contributions. --MASEM (t) 14:43, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Come on. We all know that the usual next step after a reverted redirect is to place a warning template on the content creator's talk page. That is enough to stop most of them. Sole Flounder (talk) 15:38, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Which first of all shouldn't be done (if you redirect and someone undoes that and you still disagree with the article being standalone, you start a talk page discussion on that article's talk page, you don't warn the content creator) and has little do to with notability. It's still valid advice for BEFORE, just not here. --MASEM (t) 15:49, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Systemic Bias: Proposing a separate standard of notability

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Core parts of the notability guideline, especially WP:GNG and WP:SUSTAINED are not arbitrary, but naturally entailed by WP:V and WP:WWIN. There seems to be consensus against giving ground on these core policies (and the scope of this discussion is too WP:CONLIMITED to make that decision anyway.) These are, however, just minimal notability guidelines. There are also subject area guidelines as well as advice pages by various WikiProjects, which may be more demanding than WP:N. Users alone or as part of a WikiProject could promulgate advice that no supplementary hurdles should be applied to topics related to, for example, the "global south". It would not be a separate standard of notability, but an insistence on no separate standards. Writing this advice requires no special mandate, but it would compete in the same marketplace of ideas and WP:PGLIFE as more deletionist advice. Rhoark (talk) 04:41, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Recent AfDs related to Systemic Bias:

I recently participated in the above AfDs and there seem to be 2 opposing views - 1. Notability guidelines need to be applied equally regardless and 2. In cases of systemic bias, notability guidelines need to be relaxed. I'm wondering what are the community's thoughts on this. Specifically I'm trying to find out "would the community support a relaxation of notability guidelines in cases of subjects affected by systemic bias"? --Lemongirl942 (talk) 07:36, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Support

Support and more. Notability guidelines are occasionally being badly applied all over the place to weed out content readers want. Notability was supposed to assess whether enough people would care about something to justify an independent article on it, rather than someone's inside joke or unsigned garage band, but it's become more of a tug-of-war and a pretext for deletion, rather than curation of donated content, even though we have so many more tools, like draftspace, to send NN stuff until it can be rehabilitated. Jclemens (talk) 07:37, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Comment: ~~I am opposing~~I'm changing to support, though I am not confortable with the word "relax" the form of this RfA because it is just more "let's pink it and shrink it because women are weak" in its phrasing. That said, Jclemens is dead on right in reasoning. Montanabw ^(talk) 21:50, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Support the proposal, as it actually codifies current practice; we already apply different notability standards to different topics, and that's a good thing. Topics like WP:WikiProject Video Games would be decimated if we applied the same strict standards as in WP:Wikiproject Medicine; in fact we would lose the most valuable articles about the classic original games that shaped the medium, and be left with just the modern blockbusters. And a large proportion of the small articles developed in the Wikipedia exponential growth before 2007 would have to be removed as well.
To me, it's clear that a significant part of the world's knowledge does not live to the highest quality standards that our policies want us to follow; forcing us to require excellence in every corner would be a case of "the perfect is enemy of the good".

In short, I think the Notability and Reliable Sources policies have some built-in systemic bias itself by the way it was developed with Western academic sources in sight, even though not all knowledge has been subject to Western academic scrutiny, and Western academic enquiry sometimes can have its own blind spots as well.

I've stated this view in the past; it's nice to finally have it on-the-record where it could make a difference. So I say WP:IAR and make the project better, not worse, by trying to impose the letter of a policy in those cases when in fact it makes the encyclopedia worse. Diego (talk) 13:19, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Support Notability is not a core policy; it's not even a policy. It's a guideline and so that means it's not a rigid rule and so "exceptions may apply". We already have numerous articles which have weak notability and sourcing – athletes, footballers, villages, &c. All the examples given in the RfC indicate that the community is not willing to delete those topics either. My impression is that the community's leadership – people like Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner – are quite willing for us to accommodate such topics. So, the de facto position is that such topics are in. Andrew D. (talk) 08:31, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
I think this proposal was nearly a "false flag" effort as the case for doing this was made very poorly. There are things, like high schools in the 3rd world and the like, where there just are going to be fewer sources than in the 1st world, but they are no less important or worthy of coverage. I'm hopeful that this discussion isn't used as an argument that there isn't support for such cases. I'm not bolding support because I don't support as it stands, but I'm in this list to show support for the idea if not the way this was proposed. Hobit (talk) 01:50, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
comment - I also agree with Hobit in that the questions do not fully address the actual issues. I don't know if the problem stems from a misconception about "global requirements for notability" or if we may have lost sight of the main goal of WP being a collection of knowledge on a worldwide scale. We cannot expect a fair assessment of notability if we are judging the notability of persons in countries where the underprivileged and/or oppressed comprise the majority under the rule of restrictive governments using the same GNGs that we use to judge notability in countries that are technically advanced democracies with affluent populations like in the US, UK, etc. Notability should not be dismissed because of the differences in culture, technical advancements, religion, government rule, etc., rather notability should be judged as it applies to their notability in their respective countries with a snow-keep bonus for international reach. We certainly are lenient regarding the notability of our national sports figures with a requirement of playing in a single national game. I see some of our notability issues arising from trying to compare apples to oranges, and in doing so we're dismissing numerous oranges because they don't taste the same as apples even though they're both fruit. We're not lowering our standards, we're putting them in perspective. DGG contributed a very thought-provoking sentiment, Normally we regard notability under WP:PROF as a worldwide standard, unlike such things as politics where we [go] country by country; if we did so here, there is no question but that she would be notable. But [there] is no consensus to do so as a routine matter, and hundreds of articles have been rejected on this basis. Perhaps we should change the rule, but I doubt that we will have consensus for doing so. :What we can do is make exceptions. [11]. I will add an example using PROF, criteria #4, which states, The person's academic work has made a significant impact in the area of higher education, affecting a substantial number of academic institutions. If a country has only 11 universities, and the work of the BLP in question has influenced more than half of them, is the criteria met? What if universities in other countries have taken note of the work and mentioned it on their websites? If we don't do some pretty extensive research there's no way to know it has received international attention so the easy alternative is !vote delete in an AfD - and I didn't even touch on the issues of gender bias. ^{Atsme📞📧} 18:23, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
I made my comment in the context of a discussion of the most used WP:PROF criterion , criterion 1 "1. The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." It is difficult to apply this criterion to fields of study that are national in nature: not just such topics as the history or archeology of a particular country, but such topics as agricultural problems or public-health problems relevant only to lesser-developed countries--these are fields where the GScholar or other internationally based citation index will always show a very low count, because most of the journals that publish such work are relevant only in that area. There are nationally-based or regionally-based citation indexes, but they are not available to most of us, including myself, and I am therefore unsure how to use them for this situation). Bu when when we are talking about people notable for contribution to a science of world-wide applicability and interest, the standard should be world-wide. Some of the other criteria, such as Criterion 4 can indeed be the basis for including an article, because the notability here is very similar to the notability of an administrator or businessman or government official, and is necessarily judged on a national basis, for there is no basis for comparing different countries in this respect. This also applies to some extent for critiria 2,6, and 7, except here we sometimes judge "major" is a rather restrictive fashion. I want to thank Atsme for calling my attention to this distinction. DGG ( talk ) 22:36, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Support. I am not supporting ralaxing anything, but I am supporting false equivalency. A single academic publication for example may indicate notability within a specific academic field while multiple sources may be the necessary indicators of notability in a more popular area. For example, I am aware of an academic who with a large grant has spent most of her academic life translating from the Latin the origins of our law books. When published this work will not be a best seller but it will be an important work within an academic field. Notable and significant, yes, popular reading for the masses. No. We often seem to confuse popularity with notability -what we know about in popular press with the more obscure. It is significant that a woman or anyone for that matter in circumstances that are biased achieves a measure of notability that seems less than someone in the more popular western press. Notability is a general guide and cannot be applied across all desciplines in every part of the world in some attempt to achieve a perceived equality. Perhaps we forget that in the West we have unprecedented freedom to both publish and to make fools of ourselves by what we publish and make popular. Apologies if this is a mess; I'm on a phone. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Littleolive oil (talk • contribs)
Comment From your description, I would bet that the academic that you are mentioning will easily make GNG, once that major work is published. Something major like that will be the subject of multiple book reviews in specialist academic journals, perhaps even the more general press, so the work itself will easily make NBOOK. And as the author of such a standard work, the academic will soon also meet PROF. PROF does not require that academics have multiple publications, only that those publications have been sufficiently noted. Your example appears to be a clear meet of PROF#1. --Randykitty (talk) 17:38, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
Well yes, if we add your conjectures to my example. :0)This work will likely always be obscure in part due to the expertise required to carry out the translation at all given the inconsistencies in languages/Latin. My point is about notable and significant obscurity within our apparent need or confusion to define notability as indistinguishable from popularity.— Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])
Support in part: Changed my vote, particularly per the comments of DGG. I still don't like the word "relax" and would prefer the term "modify" because I do think present interpretation of WP:N and the SNGs focus on popularity and measurable metrics instead of actual impact. So while I still think it's horribly worded, there needs to be a discussion somehow of how to deal with systemic bias inherent in the current guidelines and interpretation of policy. Montanabw ^(talk) 21:17, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Oppose

Oppose: WP:V is a core content policy of the encyclopedia, period. No consensus has been established for its change or removal. In my experience, "systemic bias" is all-too-readily used by those unwilling to do the legwork in finding foreign-language sources to save an article up at AfD. That being said, my rebuttal to Jclemens' assertion is that "content readers want" is a highly subjective term as often as otherwise meaning "content *I* want" -- if anyone has, in fact, polled Wikipedia's readership to verify the "content readers want," they've failed to disclose their findings. The moment we open the door to subjective POVs as to what subjects no longer need to bother with reliable sourcing, we turn Wikipedia into a joke like Conservapedia or the Urban Dictionary. Because, heck -- of course it's "systemic bias" that my inside joke (that's in Farsi) or my unsigned garage band (from Kazakhstan) don't have coverage in reliable sources. Why should that subjective POV be any less valid than yours? Ravenswing 10:31, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
The proposal is about WP:N, not WP:V. The content must still be verifiable; the relaxation would be about having articles about topics that may lack one of the "1) multiple", "2) in-depth coverage", "3) from independent reliable sources" criteria. For topics that suffer from systemic bias, I don't see the problem by creating separate articles from content that would be acceptable if included as part of a larger article, as long as WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:BLP are satisfied. Diego (talk) 13:51, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
And WP:N defines verifiable, and that goes back to WP:V. I really don't believe, and have seen no evidence to convince me otherwise, that the partisans of "systemic bias" are nonetheless championing verifiability; the raising of the term in any deletion debate I've ever seen is paired with "And systemic bias is why we should ignore that we haven't found any valid sources yet." Ravenswing 20:13, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
The way I've seen it happening in deletion debates is more often paired "we have the sources, but I don't think they confer notability because they are in a different language and I haven't heard about them before, so I'm unconvinced they pass the GNG". That's where systemic bias is often introduced - en.Wikipedia has a majority of Western English-speaking editors, and non-English or non-Western sources are less trusted by default, even if the RS policy doesn't put any different weight on that kind of sources (other than "prefer the ones in English when both kinds are available"). Diego (talk) 22:29, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
Well to me that is simply a false argument in AfDs which is not backed by policy. This is probably also of many "generalists" in the AfD judging on very specific issues/sources they are not familiar with. Such discussion probably need more listening and explaining. The generalists need to be willing to listen why things outside their comfort zone or familiarity might be notable and notability defenders need to provide convincing arguments why their foreign sources provide notability, for instance showing that the foreign sources are actually scholarly publication in the language a leading reliable news outlet for that language or similar rather than just yellow press or random website. In any case it isn't really something that requires a policy change but just proper understanding of existing policies.--Kmhkmh (talk) 11:29, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose- Experience has shown that relaxing WP:N to make exceptions for certain subject areas inevitably leads to massive WP:V nightmares as well. Reyk _YO! 11:34, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose - The notability guidelines are already pretty lax. Relaxing them for subjects which are, by definition, difficult to find sources on will lead to nightmares of both WP:V and PROMO. Once an article gets past inclusion criteria it is OK to use lower quality sources, SPS material to expand the article so we would be allowing whatever we define as "an area subject to systemic bias" to build articles based on SPS, trivial mentions etc. Not to mention the massive drama that will erupt as editors try to claim their particular article should have the "special snowflake" reduced notability requirements rather than GNG applied.
If there is not enough information to write an article then we should not host an article. Wikipedia exists to document pre-existing coverage not to correct systemic bias. The Wikipedia project is a follower not a leader. Jbh ^Talk 13:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
JBH, while I oppose the wording of this RfC, the problem is that the guidelines are inconsistent: they are notoriously lax in some areas and ridiculously strict in others. Compare WP:NPORNSTAR to WP:ACADEMIC. Call me crazy, but I think that there is a lot more to getting a PhD and becoming a University department chair than there is to winning a "NightMoves Award" in the adult film world. Montanabw ^(talk) 22:54, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I agree with you that the SNGs need rework. I think NSPORTS, NPOL, Populated Places etc etc are way to lax. I am not convinced that the solution is to relax more SNGs rather twe should tighten the over permissive ones. NACADEMIC in particular, from the AfDs I have seen, is a often more a crap shoot based on citation count - which vary wildly by discipline. My primary objection here and in the proposal below is the idea of adding a new class of subject based on something as subjective as "systemic bias". I think it will lead to far more problems than it would solve. Jbh ^Talk 23:59, 4 July 2016 (UTC) Last edited: 00:04, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Bluntly speaking, Montanabw, so what? The threshold for meeting the GNG is not how much of a good guy you are, how hard you've worked or whether you meet some subjective morality or life achievements test. It's whether the world has heard of you. Our remit at Wikipedia is not to correct society's beliefs about what it finds important. Ravenswing 05:24, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Ravenswing, the problem is that the Notability and Reliable Sources guidelines don't codify what "society finds important", but what "western cultivated society finds important". There are large swaths of topics in areas of the world affected by systemic bias where we could write reasonably neutral, verifiable small articles from the references available in foreign languages; but the core notability policies are biased towards requiring content from western mass-media publishing, excluding first party sources like governments and smaller published media like those you can find released in small communities. For those areas, I would find it reasonable to have stubs and small articles with non-controversial statements, but our current Notability would forbid them if read to its fullest strict compliance. Diego (talk) 13:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
You nailed it, Diego.
Actually he doesn't. There absolutely no requirement for sources to be part of western media mass publishing not even to be in a western language. In fact our preferred sources are reputable academic/scientific publications and reputable investigative journalistic publications, in other publications largely outside the Western mass media. There is absolutely no restriction on reputable publications in foreign languages. We do nevertheless have the described bias to degree, but that is primarily not a result or problem of our policies but of our writers. Most writers in the English WP are from a western background with western mass media often being the sources that are easiest to access for them. That creates our bias towards western topics and western mass media, but that is not a problem of our policies.--Kmhkmh (talk) 19:55, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm a bit bewildered here, Diego, because our guidelines and policies do nothing of the sort. WP:V requires citations for any material challenged or likely to be challenged, which is the polar opposite of "non-controversial." WP:V also explicitly permits non-English sources, so perhaps you can explain what prevents editors from writing articles based on the reliable foreign language sources you state (erroneously) they're enjoined from using. I think we can do without straw man arguments or just plain inventions here. Ravenswing 20:23, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
"What prevents editors from writing articles based on the reliable foreign language sources" is other editors, not the policies. The policies are OK, the problem is with those editors that insist that Wikipedia being a project written in English should be centered around English references and cover topics centered from an English-speaking-countries perspective (I encountered one of those just yesterday, and it's quite frequent to find that attitude; so far for "inventions").

That's why I believe the guidelines would benefit from an explicit reminder that different topics vary wrt the way we assess the reliability of their sources, and that we don't actually enforce the same strength of verifiability in all places. Given that having a lower verifiability standard in some areas is OK for the project, always has been, and is something that we do for some well-covered "western" topics, insisting that areas with less coverage must live to the more strict sourcing criteria is unfair. Diego (talk) 22:41, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose There's a lot of minefields I can see with this idea that cross into BLP territory, much less V, RS, NPOV, and NOR territories. I would agree there may be case-by-case review of subjects in exceptional circumstances, but I don't think we should establish that this is an allowance via guidelines. --MASEM (t) 14:35, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose Creating alternate standards for notability based on "systematic bias" seems like creating a ghost that cannot be seen, but people are claiming it exists. We have to hold the line somewhere. The notability criteria, as formulated by the community, along with other the policies and guidelines, allow us to be a publically edited project with standards that readers can rely on. Without all these in place, we become a collection of anything, including a platform for promotion and for the garage band just a few houses down. I suppose the beauty of AfD is - articles show up and notability can be determined case by case, including if there is a need to chase down sources in the foreign press. We have a system that already works very well. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 17:10, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose Verifiability is important for a reason. That being said, I would agree that there are some areas where the systemic bias might prevent truth from being reflected in otherwise reliable sources. In those cases, all we can do is to acknowledge the bias, attribute disputed claims and opinions to the source, and report the events as neutral as possible. Or don't report at all, if it's poorly sourced. Also at one point there is WP:RGW Darwinian Ape^talk 17:44, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose in present form: This is a dreadfully-worded RfC and is just giving those who don't understand the issue fodder to continue to exercise bias. It is not a question of "relaxing" the guidelines, it's a question of making the guidelines fit the reality that women, ethnic minorities and people from non-western nations often are not covered in "traditional" sources and that many "traditional" sources are inaccurate and inconsistent in their portrayal of these people. Montanabw ^(talk) 21:49, 4 July 2016 (UTC) Move to support, see above. Montanabw ^(talk) 21:17, 28 July 2016 (UTC) Moved to !support. see above for rationale
Could you give me an example of the problem you are talking about and how (what sources etc) changing notability requirements could address the issue - an example of someone who "should" have an article but by GNG/SNG is prevented from having one? I am interested because possibly I do not have a good grasp of what you want to address and how you think it should be addressed without violating the requirements of RS to meet WP:V. Jbh^Talk 00:12, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
- Elisabeth Gasteiger, Elizabeth A. Spencer, Ann S. Zweig to name just a few from the Highly Cited Scientist's list found here Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Thomson-Reuters most cited scientists SusunW (talk) 22:57, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
  - If they're on a list of "most cited", they have a strong claim to WP:PROF#C1. What is preventing them from having articles? Two of them have drafts, but the drafts didn't mention this claim. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:34, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
David Eppstein Create them and see what happens. I would be surprised if the file is not AfDed immediately for lack of significant coverage, inclusion on this "list" would be called a name check to those who regularly pounce on women scientists' articles. SusunW (talk) 14:09, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. The idea of creating a separate standard for notability based on "systematic bias" is absolutely dreadful and completely contrary to the integrity of Wikipedia as encyclopedia. That's the road paved with good intentions that most definitely leads to hell and to no other destination. The correct way to confront systemic bias is to invest extra efforts in writing articles on under-represented notable subjects and in finding sources, passing rigorous WP:RS and notability standards, covering those subjects. Lowering the bar in terms of which sources are considered reliable and independent, or how many such sources are required, or making a presumption that such sources exist without actually finding them, or any other similar measure would compromise the intellectual integrity of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. Nsk92 (talk) 22:20, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
Nsk92, you make a good point, except that the present interpretation of N, V and RS happens to make it very difficult to save articles on very notable people if they happen to have independent indicia of notability that falls outside the mainstream. Montanabw ^(talk) 22:49, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
By what standards are they "very notable people" if you can't find so much as two decent newspaper articles about them? Ravenswing 05:26, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Many popular artists in Bollywood films, for example. Bollywood doesn't yet seem to have the same Vanity press industry that fuels our overweight dose of Western films and music coverage; yet those people are interesting to millions, and our coverage is routinely deleted for "lack of notability", even though those articles have verifiable sources (but not "multiple, independent in-depth coverage from sources known for issuing corrections").

And I'd bet that most pre-1990 Western music stubs and small articles would be removed if anyone cared to review them as well, but people is not paying the same attention to our pre-2007 growth as it is to new articles, so the former are summarily removed and the latter stay for years. Diego (talk) 13:36, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

P.S. See also the AfDs listed in the nomination; those are the kind of articles that would benefit from a less stringent reading of the guideline. Diego (talk) 13:59, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I don't see that all. First of all there is plenty of vanity press for Bollywood, just not in "Western Media". Secondly I don't think those articles on Bollywood actors get routinely deleted (at least they shouldn't) as long as they are properly sourced. Notability does not mean notability in (english) "western media", but a coverage in reliable non western media is good enough. Note that WP is an international encyclopedia in English and not an just an Encyclopedia for people in (English speaking) Western countries.

I don't see any good reason to remove pre-1990 movies either, they similarly just need to be sourced properly and provide more content than just an infobox. That's all that needed here.

Also notability doesn't necessarily require independent decent newspaper articles either. It does however require published, reliable & reputable material about them. Instead of newspaper that can be a chpater or some paragraphs in a (scholarly) book, journal or some other encyclopedia or reference work (say various national biography collections).--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:03, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Let's try a small empirical test. Click on the "Random article" link twelve times, and count how many of the articles include references that provide "significant coverage (more than a trivial mention) in (multiple) reliable sources that are independent of the subject", and think about what proportion of those articles would survive the Article for Creation process if they were created today in their current shape. (Your mileage may vary; I've tried it right not and got approximately 50% of articles with some independent sources at all). For extra cookies, repeat the experiment for twelve random articles taken from Category:Albums by year, where a large proportion of articles are supported by a bare link to AllMusic, and twelve from Category:Films by year where they are largely sourced to IMDB.

Please cut off the hypocrisy; most of our current article base does not live to the standards of the Notability guideline, which fails to "explain and describe current standards". Let's acknowledge this as a fact and recognize that, if we tried to rewrite Wikipedia following current policy, it would be an order of magnitude smaller; and it's therefore unfair to impose that same unabridged policy to the groups of interest that arrived to the project later than 2007. Diego (talk) 16:59, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
I have difficulties to relate your comment my posting above. I made no comment regarding the quality of average article or whether many of them fail the notability criteria or not. Instead I stated that the examples/groups (Bollywood actresses, pre 1990 western mocvies) you claim above to fail notability in fact do not. And examples in those groups are still created now as they were before 2007. Also if you look at such examples you need to distinguish between the way they are currently (insuffieciently) sourced and the way they could be sourced in principal. For many of those movie articles currently mainly relying on the IMDB there do exist independent sources, that could be used. For many subjects failing notability the problem is however, that such sources are not just currently not utilized but in all likelihood they simply don't exist.

As far as the policy being too strong is concerned, that might be, but it also question of how to read and use such policies. Combing through articles and tagging or deleted everything which does match the strictes literalist reading of the policy is imho a problematic and ultimately unproductive approach to begin with. The some policies are simply (somewhat overly) strong worded, to have a sharp and effective tool for keeping really unwanted material out. But such a tool shouldn't be wielded against arbitrary articles without considering context and common sense.--Kmhkmh (talk) 23:03, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Notability requirements aren't there to judge importance, but to demonstrate that there are independent, secondary and reliable sources on which to build an article. If those sources don't exist, we can't build it. The Special Notability Requirements were supposed to address the problems where sources will exist, but we haven't found them yet. So if a subject passes we can trust that there is something to use somewhere, even if we don't know it yet. That doesn't really work, as I've been reminded recently, as the requirements can be extremely lax and don't always indicate that sources exist, but I fear that relaxing the notability requirements will just create mini stubs where we can't really write anything beyond that the person exists. - Bilby (talk) 00:41, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. There are still many subjects who belong to disadvantaged groups, clearly pass our notability standards, and do not yet have articles. (E.g, I found ten notable female mathematicians to add new articles on in the last week, and there are many more where they came from.) As long as this remains true, no relaxation of our standards is needed. That is, with a little more effort on our part we don't have to pay the cost (in WP:V and WP:PROMO issues raised above) to achieve the same benefit. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose if a topic receives less coverage on Wikipedia because our editors are generally less interested in writing about them, and not because they have received less coverage in reliable sources (not necessarily in English), it actually means it would be easier for new articles to be created. Not that this is a good thing, but it is certainly no reason to relax our notability standards. SST flyer 02:35, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. We either have sufficient reliable, independent reference material to sustain a full article, or we do not. This does not mean "ref bombing" a bunch of one-liner or blurb mentions, because no number of mentions in passing or blurbs add up to notability. The coverage must be in reasonable depth, in all cases. We already have too many de facto exemptions to that, and it results in junk permastubs on sports players who played half a minute and villages of 10 people. Let's please, please not make any more, in policy or in fact, and especially not where it concerns BLPs. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 14:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. Who in the world is going to decide whether systemic bias is in play in the first place, such that special rules for cases of systemic bias should be activated? Systemic bias may explain why someone, perhaps terribly unfairly, hasn't achieved notability, as Wikipedia defines that term. It doesn't mean that somebody who hasn't achieved it actually has
Please don't mistake this as a lack of appreciation for the terrible consequences of systemic bias: People from underprivileged, under-resourced classes have less access to education, less access to highly placed contacts and influence, etc. However, I don't see "not having an article about oneself on Wikipedia" as a problem of similar weight.

I do think that we need to be conscious of the availability of corroborating sources that are from underdeveloped nations or that are in languages other in English. For example, while I often evaluate the notability of an India-based article topic if it's clear that the name in Roman letters is the name under which it's universally known, in cases where the name is also given in the local writing system, I search under that name as well; and if it isn't given, but I suspect that the name is probably frequently written in Devanagari or whatever, then I disqualify myself from considering the article. Despite all of this, however, I oppose the motion. Largoplazo (talk) 15:04, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose - This would be the end of objective standards and would essentially destroy WP:GNG and by extension WP:V, by doing precisely the opposite of its stated goal, namely introducing bias, via WP:OR and WP:SYNTH on the part of editors, into coverage, and replacing WP:VNT with each editor's individual "truth". —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. On basis of arguments of Torchiest. Standards would be impossible to verify. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:14, 6 July 2016 (UTC).
Oppose — The problem isn't the the standards are too strict. The problem is that the standards are being applied in a biased way. I've seen many cases where an editor cherry picks a notability standard that the subject doesn't meet, and !votes delete on that basis, ignoring other notability standards that the subject does meet, most especially GNG. I see that cherry picking on articles about non-white males. Relaxing the standards isn't going to help when you have editors gaming the system in ways that makes a travesty of the standards. The solution is to address the bias itself. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:32, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
I've seen a lot of this too, and addressing it would be a big first step, but 1, how? and 2, that it is a problem does not preclude the existence of other problems. I think there may additionally be some notable subjects in groups subject to bias being wrongly ruled out because of current instructions on which kind of sources we accepted (not on the reliability front, more on the importance--what counts as a national source for instance). I hope even if we succeed in addressing the former, we'll still have a conversation about how to deal with the latter (though as I say below, I don't think relaxing standards is the right approach). Innisfree987 (talk) 19:49, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose most of all because I think there's a preferable solution being discussed below under "Adding ways to assess Systemic Bias to WP:N," namely to clarify the interpretation of sources w/t/r systemic bias rather than relax standards, but I'm very appreciative to Lemongirl942} for initiating this conversation. Innisfree987 (talk) 19:49, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose: Our goal isn't to right wrongs. It's to have articles on reliably, independently-sourced subjects. p b p 18:00, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose — While nothing is going to be perfect, nor is it possible to please everyone, objective standards for WP:GNG are in place, and that along with WP:RS sources for verification is what is importmant. Now, there are examples where the standards are being applied in a biased way and that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis in the discussion of a AFD. Kierzek (talk) 19:43, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose because this would lead us into a slippery slope of spammy non-notable articles. The fact of the matter is that articles on areas/persons which may lie outside of Wikipedia's systemic bias simply need more and deeper digging for citations and coverage. There should probably be a centralized place where assistance can be requested for these sorts of articles, so that editors who are better researchers and/or who have access to subscription-only or academic sources, and/or who speak non-English languages can assist in finding/contributing sources and content. I think there's already an "Article Rescue Team" somewhere, isn't there? But there's no need to open the floodgates to non-notable topics. Softlavender (talk) 20:23, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose. The examples offered of "systematic bias" are not that at all. They're examples of non-notable individuals. "Relaxing the standards" appears to be code for no standards at all. It invites AfDs that read like 10 years ago, nothing but a bunch of WP:ILIKEIT and WP:IDONTLIKEIT !votes. As it is, we struggle at AfD with inclusionists insisting (e.g., at one of the debates listed above) that a single 236-word article should be considered significant coverage and that the subject's own bio page should count toward notability because they posted it on their university website. It is hard enough to keep out the spam and self-promotion. Let's not make it worse. Msnicki (talk) 00:08, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
Oppose - while there are areas where I believe the threshold for article inclusion ought to be relaxed, systemic bias is the wrong litmus for determining which articles are in need of the affirmative actions this proposal seeks. The concept is far too subjective to serve as the requisite criteria for eligibility.--John Cline (talk) 05:43, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

Only to add onto Montanabw's statement in that there is a problem that extends past WP:N (eg, its at a WP:V/WP:RS level) in that modern sourcing from what have been normally reliable sources in the past is losing some of their reliable nature due to shifts in journalism models over the last decade due to competition from the Internet and other faster information sources; this not only affects WP:N but other areas of WP, but that reflects we need to fix the WP:V problem that would immediately be reflected in WP:N. --MASEM (t) 22:09, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Before this gets to be tl;dr, Note that I have also filed an RfC below: #Adding_ways_to_assess_Systemic_Bias_to_WP:N. We can't create the actual wording in an RfC, but we can have a statement that it's an issue that should be addressed. Montanabw ^(talk) 22:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Question here regarding sorting via {{notability}}

Please reply at the linked section. Thanks! —swpb^T 14:56, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Proposed small change to RS

See Wikipedia_talk:Identifying_reliable_sources#Churnalism_-_bold_edit to help raise the bar for N and articles generally. Jytdog (talk) 23:14, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

[1] Martin Walker (1992-01-06). "Tough love child of Kennedy". The Guardian.

[2] Including but not limited to newspapers, books and e-books, magazines, television and radio documentaries, reports by government agencies, and academic journals. In the absence of multiple sources, it must be possible to verify that the source reflects a neutral point of view, is credible and provides sufficient detail for a comprehensive article.

[3] Lack of multiple sources suggests that the topic may be more suitable for inclusion in an article on a broader topic. It is common for multiple newspapers to publish the same story, e.g., a wire service story may be picked up and published with minor alterations or different headlines in dozens or even hundreds of media outlets, but such instances do not constitute multiple works. Similarly, a series of publications by the same author or in the same periodical is normally counted as one source.

[4] Works produced by the subject, or those with a strong connection to them, are unlikely to be strong evidence of notability. See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability#Questionable sources for handling of such situations.

[5] Moreover, not all coverage in reliable sources constitutes evidence of notability for the purposes of article creation; for example, directories, databases, advertisements, paid death notices, and wedding announcements are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as reliable sources.

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