 | This is an essay on the Wikipedia:Notability guideline. 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. |
 | This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more WikiProjects on how notability may be interpreted within their area of interest. This information is not a formal Wikipedia policy or guideline, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
Notability of reliable sources is the application of Wikipedia's rules on WP:Notability to the WP:Reliable sources which Wikipedia editors cite. This document considers assigning notability to sources on the basis of their importance as citations in Wikipedia.
Consider the situation where the Wikipedia community is in agreement about the following:
- Reliable source - A source meets Wikipedia's reliable source guidelines and is appropriate to cite and summarize in Wikipedia articles
- Fails notability - This same source as a topic does not itself meet WP:General notability guideline or any specialized notability criteria, so is not eligible for a Wikipedia article
- Important in Wikipedia - Wikipedia editors are citing the source in Wikipedia articles either broadly in many articles, perhaps 1000s, or deeply in some articles, perhaps for a narrow field
This creates a situation where Wikipedia is publishing and circulating the name of a publication as authoritative, but is not also able to provide readers with additional context about that publication.
Wikipedia community members agree that filling articles with primary source material is problematic and undesirable. However, there has always been agreement that some primary information is useful so long as a topic meets notability criteria and that we combine it with information from secondary sources. If we had criteria which granted notability status to certain reliable sources, then that would permit Wikipedia to serve primary information about those sources to Wikipedia readers who wanted whatever context was available on those sources. This would encourage deeper understanding about the reliability of Wikipedia articles. It also would be the origin of new challenges which the Wikipedia community does not currently have infrastructure or planning to address.