 | This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
On Wikipedia, our ultimate goal is to develop very comprehensive articles on topics that provide a high level summary on a topic, supported by sources and bibliographies for a reader to find more information if they need it. We expect all articles to meet the three core content policies, verifiability, no original research, and adhering to a neutral point of view. At the same time, we don't want to be indiscriminately including topics just because a topic's coverage happens to meet these three content policies.
Thus this is why we have notability. It's meaning is influenced but not the same as the "real world" definition, being "worthy of note", but it directs us in the same way. We want topics to show sourcing from a diverse array of sources, and put much higher weight on those that are independent of the topic, and secondary, in-depth coverage of that topic. For some topics, there is no question of their notability; topics like World War II, Mona Lisa, carbon, New York Yankees, Tom Cruise, and so-forth are topics that we would never question their notability because of the vast amount of sourcing available.
However, most articles do not start out with this level of sourcing, nor should we expect them to be. We are not on any deadline to get articles up to this quality, and we want and encourage the open wiki nature to bring in multiple editors to help build it out. We want to encourage editors to start articles on potential topics that they believe can be expanded in the future with time. However, we still need to draw a line, though, to avoid inclusion of indiscriminate information. This is of particular concern given the proliferation of individual, commercial entities and other groups to try to promote themselves by having articles on themselves in Wikipedia.
To solve this, we have developed a method of presuming an article is notable by our definition, so that editors can create a stand-alone article and be given the time to develop it without fear of being rapidly deleted. We have further established steps that should be done by one looking to delete an article to demonstrate that that presumption is wrong, putting the onus on them to refute the claim of notability. The is all intended to give topics that have a good chance of expansion into high quality articles the time and space to grow; we want to defer to the side of inclusion when there is a reasonable expectation for growth.
This leads to the two methods of demonstrate enough indication of notability to merit that presumption.
- The first is the general notability guideline (GNG), which says that we presume notability if "a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". We don't require this coverage to be as deep as a high-quality article, but enough to show that it exists. It establishes that, to a degree, there has been some note of this topic in reliable sources, and there may be a chance for more sources to come around. Since having at minimum these sources all are towards meeting the three main content policies, this is a very useful metric to presume notability and allow for a standalone article.
- The second are the subject-specific notability guideline (SNG), which is to handle field-specific situations where a topic may merit attention that is known to lead to broader coverage, but those sources may not be immediately available. These topic would fail the GNG but need the help of this presumption to help build out the article.