Wikipedia:Notability

This page describes a concept which topics usually must satisfy in order to be included on Wikipedia. It is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and carefully applied to particular cases, with consideration of exceptions to it. Some editors disagree with this concept as a criterion for inclusion on Wikipedia. When editing it, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. Please join the discussion regarding the status of this page.

For the essay on evaluating notability, see Wikipedia:Notability/Arguments.

Topics in most areas must meet a minimum threshold of notability in order for an article on that topic to remain on Wikipedia. This is a necessary result of Wikipedia being a neutral, verifiable encyclopedia. The terms "importance" and "significance" are also in use, and for practical purposes on Wikipedia they are similar.

The guidelines shown in the table on the right have been created, or are under discussion, to set out 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.