Wikipedia:Notability: Difference between revisions
Chris is me (talk | contribs) {{proposal}} say it ain't so! No straw poll, nothing, and it's a guideline??? Let's actually gather consensus first. |
We don't vote on proposals. A description of actual practice is a guideline. |
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Revision as of 13:33, 27 September 2006
 | This page documents an English Wikipedia [[:Category:Wikipedia WP:N WP:NNs|WP:N WP:NN]]. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
[[Category:Wikipedia wp:n
wp:nns|Notability]]
- For the essay on evaluating notability, see Wikipedia:Notability/Arguments.
Based on several sections in the policy on what Wikipedia is not, it is generally agreed that topics in most areas must exceed a certain threshhold of notability in order to have an article in Wikipedia. The terms "importance" and "significance" are also in use, and for practical purposes on Wikipedia they are similar.
Several guidelines, shown in the table on the right, have been created, or are under discussion, to define more precisely what these thresholds should be. They generally assert that a minimum standard for any given topic is that it has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works, where the source is independent of the topic itself.
Articles on subjects with borderline notability are frequently merged into list articles (e.g. List of esoteric programming languages), or into an article on a related subject (e.g. articles about not-well-known relatives of a famous person tend to be merged into the article on the person itself).
Articles on non-notable subjects are nominated for Proposed Deletion and Articles for Deletion, and the article's merits are discussed, as can be seen through precedents. An article on the topic of a person, a group of people, a band, or a club that does not even assert the notability of that topic can be deleted without argument.
Rationale
- In order to have a verifiable article, a topic must be notable enough that it will be described by multiple independent sources.
- In order to have a neutral article with minimal errors, a topic must be notable enough that there will be non-partisan editors interested in editing it.
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. As such, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate directory of businesses, websites, persons, etc.
See also
This page documents the status quo. There are (and have been) several proposals to alter the status quo, such as:
- Wikipedia:Non-notability, an active proposal to use only verifiability in regard to whether "non-notable" subjects should be included in Wikipedia.