Wikipedia talk:Notability

WP:N and WP:IINFO

Hi, WT:N watchers! I'd be glad of your input here. In an AfD, I have just said: A topic gets more notable when a selective source has noted it. When an indiscriminate source has noted it, that source doesn't count towards WP:N. User:BeanieFan11 doubts me on that point, so let's check. Am I right?—S Marshall T/C 23:40, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• Yes. Indiscriminate coverage might be useful for writing an article, but it doesn't tell us anything about whether the topic is encyclopedic. BilledMammal (talk) 23:41, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
• More context here: Olympedia has listings on every Olympian of all-time. A mid-to-small portion of those have decent-sized biographies attached, including this one. Should that source be disqualified from counting as SIGCOV for being "indiscriminate" (something that I don't see applying at all)? BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:44, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

  See WP:RSPBTVA for a similar example. BilledMammal (talk) 23:49, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

  I have no idea what "Behindthevoiceactors.com" is - but looking at the first citation to it using a wikipedia search (on Shaquille O'Neal) - it doesn't seem to be that in-depth, where as in some cases (like this one) Olympedia is. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:53, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

  I have no idea what "Behindthevoiceactors.com" is Olympedia if Olympedia was interested in voice actors rather than Olympians. BilledMammal (talk) 23:55, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

  If it's not an open wiki, it doesn't really matter. Either what it has is SIGCOV for the particular topic in question, or it's not... right? Jclemens (talk) 00:45, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  I think that at a Wiki-philosophical level, a comprehensive database can't ever be SIGCOV. We prefer academic or news media articles as evidence of notability, because if a topic has been the focus of a study or news media article, then a professional has selected that topic as an important or interesting one. Appearing in a comprehensive database is like appearing in the telephone directory. I mean, personally, I've written a book. It has an ISBN and a publisher, and it appears in comprehensive databases of books -- but that doesn't mean my book gets its own Wikipedia article. It would need reviews etc. before it becomes notable, right? And even more so for Olympians, who are so often living people so we need to be extra-careful about sourcing.—S Marshall T/C 10:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  IMO there are at least two different questions blended together there:

  • Does being an indiscriminate/comprehensive database categorically rule it out as counting towards wp:notability? For example, if even it has substantial coverage in a prominent such db? IMHO no.
  • Is being an indiscriminate/comprehensive database a minus when considering it's contribution towards establishing wp:notability? IMHO yes

  North8000 (talk) 12:42, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• I think that S Marshall's point has some validity....there are many wp:notability areas where the nature of the source figures into the equation, including how meaningful it was that the source chose the article subject, and the source being indiscriminate takes that away. But I don't think that the point is strong enough to exclude the source from the notability equation based solely on that point. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 02:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
• I like to think of it in the context of significant sources and supplementary sources. Short bios on databases or general passing mentions are nice supplementary sources to help fill out an article, but typically don't constitute sigcov on their own. Curbon7 (talk) 02:11, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
• While the general question is important looking further into this specific case it isn't relevant here; Olympedia is owned by the International Olympic Committee, and thus isn't independent and can't contribute to notability. BilledMammal (talk) 02:12, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
  • Though, this says that it is "not an official IOC product" and is "a product solely of the OlyMADMen" (a group of Olympic historians including Bill Mallon). Wondering if that's sufficient to count as independent. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:11, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
    • Well, Olympedia is certainly independent of Gyula Iványi, so I'm sure it could contribute to his notability if it wasn't indiscriminate.—S Marshall T/C 15:34, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

      It isn't independent. It's the Olympic Games and writers retained by them documenting everyone who's competed in the Olympic Games. Largoplazo (talk) 16:20, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

      I agree with Largoplazo; an organization writing about people affiliated with their organization because they are affiliated with their organization isn't providing independent coverage. Another example of this is the NFL writing about NFL players; we've agreed that such coverage is usually reliable, but not independent. BilledMammal (talk) 22:19, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

      That reasoning can be taken to too much of an extreme: newspapers of [country X] writing about [person from country X who did something in country Y] because they are from [country X] would certainly count as independent, despite both belonging to a common organization (the country in which they are citizens or incorporated). The same might be said to be true for very large but subnational organizations that have independent media within them; a story in one of the US Army publications, about a member of the US Army, might reasonably be interpreted as being independent enough, as might an in-depth profile of an alum in a university alumni magazine. That said, I agree that a project of the Olympic Committee documenting all Olympians does not count as independent. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

      Subnational examples like most of the US Army publications and definitely university alumni magazines have long been considered non-independent in this context (for identical reasons to why we consider an employer to be a non-independent source on an employee even if there is no possible way the employee could influence the employer's statements). If substantial profiles by orgs a subject belongs to are deemed independent then please go ahead and undelete the thousands of articles on internet-era fourth-tier footballers and cricketers I've seen deleted at AfD due to only being covered by such hype sources. JoelleJay (talk) 00:39, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

      You left out the part about the "common organization" writing about all of its members because they're members. That was the point re Olympedia. The national equivalent is the phone book. At least in a small country. (Thinking of Steve Martin's character in The Jerk finding his name in the phone book and exulting, "I'm somebody now!") Largoplazo (talk) 01:42, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

      @S Marshall: re: Gyula Iványi and others (I appreciate this is a month ago...) - the extent of the prose content is what I would look at. Certainly nowhere near evert athlete has any significant prose, certainly not any that covers their wider life. If it does then that prose is coming from sources - they're not making it up! Those sources exist - the researchers who wrote the Olympia article found them (in the case of Gyula Iványi, there absolutely must be sources that deal with the Italian bit, the Great Silver Cup, his work life etc...). The question is, how in depth is the coverage in the Olympedia article and what does that tell us about the sources that have been used.

      In the case of Douglas Godfree (Olympedia article) I was able to find the original sources - almost certainly the same ones that were used by the Olympedia author(s). It's absolutely clearcut that if the Olympedia article goes in to some depth about the person's life that those sources will be there. The question we need to ask is, at what point do we make that decision. Godfree's Olympedia article is 252 words long; I think only 24 of those deal with his Olympic career. Gyula Iványi's Olympedia article is 87 words; 13 deal with he Olympics. In the case of Godfree I really don't think there's a doubt that the Olympedia article has enough in it to be a reasonable source - in looking at a few hundred Olymedia articles, not many have that many words in or deal with the subject in such a broad fashion; the way that Godfree is dealt with within the database is unusually detailed; maybe only 10% of entries have this level of detail? I don't know, but it's not many.

      At this point the indiscriminate nature of things doesn't fly for me. Gyula Iványi is more difficult because we're looking at someone where most of the sources won't be written in English. There's some detail, but I'm not sure I'd be happy to flat out say that there's enough there by itself to suggest that there's easily going to be enough to be able to write an article - of course, in this case the article written by Szabo Gabor clearly adds enough anyway, but if we just had Olympedia I'd be circumspect. I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but I'd probably want a bit more myself. In the case of, say, Adolf Schmal, Jr, which is much more basic prose, there's - in my view - clearly not enough detail. Here we're becoming more indiscriminate, and once you get to Albert Johnstone or Aleksandr Akhyun we're clearly at the indiscriminate database only level.

      If there's enough detail then the sources are there. Should we have to find them - as I did with Godfree - or can we accept that time limitations mean that we should just go with Olymedia? And at what level do we make that call? Blue Square Thing (talk) 18:28, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

    That article says Bill Mallon worked for the IOC and has apparently served as the "unofficial historian for the USOC since 2010". His group also worked directly for the Olympics from 2018 on. Plus some of the older entries at olympics.com link to "our description [...] at olympedia.org". That makes them even more non-independent than I realized. JoelleJay (talk) 01:30, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

• Isn't this already covered by the first footnote? databases, [...] may not actually support notability when examined. If a sports database provides WP:SIGCOV (i.e. a few hundred words), then it should be fine. Otherwise, doesn't count towards notability. Using "indiscriminateness" as a factor seems redundant (and fuzzier). DFlhb (talk) 12:55, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  The first footnote doesn't say the database needs to provide a few hundred words before it's SIGCOV. Sadly, it's much vaguer than that.—S Marshall T/C 13:29, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  That's fair to say. Frankly I don't know what that footnote was intended to mean; that's the only way I can make sense of it. DFlhb (talk) 14:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  That's very old wording. "Directories and databases" was inserted on 3 Nov 2007 in this edit by User:UnitedStatesian, and it doesn't seem to have changed much since.—S Marshall T/C 15:46, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• This is one that has to be decided on a case by case basis. Some of the articles seem to provide SIGCOV, but others definitely do not. The site combines database with more in-depth coverage. Blueboar (talk) 15:41, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
• This is my understanding of it as well. WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:INDISCRIMINATE go hand in hand. I have often been tempted to change the section to "not a database" for clarity (but the current title isn't broken). Shooterwalker (talk) 02:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
• Drat, I'm not really seeing a consensus here.—S Marshall T/C 08:16, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  @S Marshall: IMO your point is good in the sense that it should weigh heavily in wp:notability discussions. And it touches on an often unacknowledged point in how the fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem operates. But you have proposed it as a categorical rule /exclusion which sort of conflicts with how the system operates. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:36, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

• Mostly, yeah. It's significant when a publisher treads outside of their normal wheelhouse to touch something adjacent, because it affects their normal subjects and readers ought to be informed on it. Writing about everything in a group, even if one is well researched and strongly reliable, still means that the subject is not special/worthy of particular interest. Applying this to the (now-withdrawn) AfD, Olympedia has the bar set at being an Olympian, not necessarily being worthy of interest, which N intends to gauge. SWinxy (talk) 15:02, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
• I think North8000 says it best - we have a fuzzy ecosystem, that works pretty well. There will always be edge cases that are difficult to adjudicate, but in general, categorical exclusions and inclusions may work better or worse in certain topic areas. One problematic aspect about Olympedia is that the editors/authors did not provide the sources they used to develop those articles. --Enos733 (talk) 16:01, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
• What about the World Athletics / IAAF website? I've created some pages that mostly use such websites and results as sources. Are these athletes notable? —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 19:21, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  I took a look at 4 or 5 of them. For those I would say these two things:

  • The sources in the articles did not establish wp:notability
  • If you searched and those are the best sources that you can find with respect to meeting GNG source criteria, then no

  Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:49, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  @North8000: Then you can nominate them for deletion. I created them going by criteria at WP:Notability (sports) due to their participation in world championship events, but the standards may have changed. I haven't been following any edits to that notability guideline, so I don't remember what it said when I made these articles. —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 21:55, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  That's not what I do unless forced into it by NPP responsibility. Here I was only trying to answer your question. You should also note the exact wording in my two items. Neither said "confirmed not notable". Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:21, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  NSPORT has always required subjects meet GNG. Did you check that they did before making the articles? JoelleJay (talk) 23:04, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Governing sporting orgs like IAAF are not independent. JoelleJay (talk) 23:05, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Without offering a view on the initial question, I have read a lot of commentary above that (as often happens in on-wiki discissions) construes WP:INDEPENDENT as establishing requirements that it actually does not. The defining element of independence in P&G text is the absence of a vested interest, defined as follows: Interest in a topic becomes vested when the source (the author, the publisher, etc.) develops any financial or legal relationship to the topic. An interest in this sense may be either positive or negative. A fan group source may be unreliable or unsuitable for use as a reference, for various reasons, but not because the authors or publishers have a POV (positive or negative) concerning the topic. When it comes to long-deceased athletes, for example, it seems EXTRAORDINARY to me that anyone would consider any 21st-century source to be non-independent, that is, to have a vested legal or financial interest in their biographies.
• If editors want INDEPENDENT to mean what they seem to think it means, that would require changes (and probably affirmative consensus) over at the explanatory essay. Newimpartial (talk) 20:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  GNG helpfully defines "independent" for us as "Independent of the subject" excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent.

  Per this definition, Olympedia is not independent. BilledMammal (talk) 19:09, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

  According to this maximalist interpretation of "someone affiliated with it", where Olympedia is somehow counted as non-independent because it is produced by people interested in the Olympics (but not by the IOC), only the sources that are completely disconnected from a subject would be allowed to be considered independent of it. Major national newspapers could not be used for news about events in their country, because they are in the same country. Research journals dedicated to scientific fields could not be used for articles in those fields, because they are affiliated with the same field. This is, to put it bluntly, nuts. The only reason for taking this point of view is to warp our notability standards beyond recognition in order to delete everything. It has no legitimate basis in quality control of our content. The real problem with all of these Olympic competitor databases has nothing to do with their independence nor their reliability: it is that they provide too little depth of coverage of most Olympians. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:30, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

  Olympedia is owned by the IOC. BilledMammal (talk) 20:11, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

  If we are talking about a long dead athlete, it is independent of the subject. The subject is the person not the IOC. --Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:46, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

  The subject is an Olympian and they are being covered solely because they are an Olympian, by an entity owned by the IOC. That’s why it’s not independent, just as IBM writing about its early executives wouldn’t be an independent source. BilledMammal (talk) 20:56, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

  The idea that an entity owned by the IOC therefore has a potential for personal, financial, or political gain in the biographies of long-dead athletes does not appear to be supported by enwiki P&G text - or at least not by WP:INDEPENDENT, which has been the principle invoked in this discussion. Newimpartial (talk) 23:46, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

  Seems rather obvious to me that the IOC would want to make sure all Olympians, living or dead, would want to be well documented, and thus cannot be considered independent. It would be different if an entity with maybe a connection to one sport (say, the NFL) did the same thing but for any professional athlete regardless of sport, in which case the gain that entity would having in promoting their own players is significantly weakened.

  An equivalent scenario would be a university keeping short bios on all its Ph.D. alumni, past and present. Masem (t) 00:07, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Seems rather obvious to me that the IOC would want to make sure all Olympians, living or dead, would want to be well documented, and thus cannot be considered independent. Particularly since the prominence of the Olympics compared to other sporting events comes from its history; promoting that history is essential to maintaining the prominence of the games. BilledMammal (talk) 00:41, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  The history point doesn't make a lot of sense from where I'm sat. See also FA Cup, The Ashes, Six Nations, World Series, Stanley Cup, the Brier, Grand Final, Grey Cup etc... Blue Square Thing (talk) 07:16, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  I don't understand the point you are trying to make; can you clarify?

  What I am saying is that to maintain and enhance the Olympic brand the IOC has an interest in promoting the history of the games, a history which extends to the competitors. BilledMammal (talk) 07:40, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Lots of organisations and events have long histories. It's not unique to the Olympics.

  I think you're conflating owned by with have a practical influence on. I don't think I've seen anything on Olympedia that could be considered to be a puff piece; the writing seems factual and impartial to me. On the other hand, there is a set of lists that deal with doping irregularities, for example. Further to that, it seems to cover controversial stuff impartially as far as I can tell - Ernest Lee Jahncke (Wikipedia article) for example. That's about as factual as you could get there isn't it? Toni Merkens seems to be covered factually as well, as is Michael Phelps. In neither case is their either outrage or bluster. The entries on Helene Mayer (covered despite never competing I note), Gretel Bergmann, Elfriede Kaun and Dora Ratjen seem to written from an NPOV and in an academic style. They're almost exemplary in terms of the sort of coverage we should be looking for. All could have been written to express a POV. Tommie Smith and John Carlos are written about in the same, NPOV style, as are Boris Onishchenko, Władysław Kozakiewicz and Marion Jones. Honestly, find me the puffery; this stuff is well written and neutral; we should be embracing it, not rejecting it. Blue Square Thing (talk) 10:08, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Lots of organisations and events have long histories. It's not unique to the Olympics. I still don't understand the point you are making? If the The Football Association publishes works about the history of the FA Cup then those works also lack independence - and the same is true with all of the other events you mentioned.

  we should be embracing it, not rejecting it - No one is saying we shouldn't use it, just that it isn't independent and thus doesn't count towards notability. BilledMammal (talk) 10:22, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  The Olympedia article for Douglas Godfree is clearly based on sources that I was able to find the originals of. If there's prose, it's because sources exist to provide it. If there's enough prose, I think we can suggest very strongly that NEXIST comes into play Blue Square Thing (talk) 21:43, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  And we need to identify those sources to ensure they comply with our policies - that they are reliable, secondary, independent, and contain significant coverage of the subject. Further, failing to identify them can result in NPOV issues, as due to its lack of independence Olympedia provides a focus on an individuals sporting achievements that can be undue. BilledMammal (talk) 23:00, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  The point isn't (only) that Olympedia is "influenced by" its competitors and therefore might provide unduly positive profiles on them (but of course that is true as well, because the infamy of an Olympian does reflect on and affect the status of the Olympics itself). It's (also) that the existence and amount of attention given to the subject by the Olympics is not a faithful representation of the subject's real-world renown--both because the Olympics is dedicated to hyping every Olympian, and because it is tied to its own self-promotion. An alumni magazine will spotlight an alumnus in great detail not because the subject is independently a noteworthy topic, but because the magazine has a direct interest in covering the achievements of alumni. JoelleJay (talk) 17:32, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  I provided 11 examples of athletes where there is clearly objective coverage of potentially controversial careers. Could you show me some where you think that Olympedia is in any way skewed to be overly positive or excluded key negatives? Any at all? I'm yet to find a profile that isn't simply factual in the way it presents information about an athlete. Blue Square Thing (talk) 21:43, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  See my second point. JoelleJay (talk) 23:34, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  WP:INDEPENDENT is an essay. For the purposes of notability, the meaning of independence is the one defined at WP:GNG. BilledMammal (talk) 00:37, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  My understanding is that WP:INDEPENDENT is intensed to offer a definition of what counts as a strong connection to a subject, defining that as a financual or legal relationship. While many explanatory essays on WP are controversial in the clarifications they offer, I am not aware of any such controversy about INDEPENDENT. Newimpartial (talk) 09:03, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  My reading of GNG suggests that it is very clear on what constitutes independence and we don't need an essay that has not been thoroughly vetted by the community to clarify it. If you want to use a different definition of independent then I suggest you get a consensus to modify GNG. BilledMammal (talk) 10:25, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  If you believe that affiliated with ... the article's subject has a very clear meaning that invalidates the source in question from being considered independent of long-dead athletes, I suggest that you obtain consensus for your reading of GNG in an appropriate forum. That isn't the way I read the paragraph in question, nor am I seeing consensus for your reading in the discussion here. Newimpartial (talk) 16:25, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  Olympedia has a financial and legal relationship with the Olympics. JoelleJay (talk) 17:34, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  But I don't think anyone has proposed that Olympedia is an independent source about the Olympics. The question under discussion in this subthread is whether it is an independent source for biographical information about people who are long-dead. And I for one don't see any financial or legal relationship between Olympedia and such topics. Newimpartial (talk) 16:30, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  I've only popped in here sporadically, so, is that really what this subthread is about? If so, it seems like it should be suspended, because that means it's become a discussion of WP:V, whereas this page is for discussing WP:N. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Largoplazo (talk • contribs) 16:45, 29 June 2023 (UTC) 16:45, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  The Olympics has a financial and legal relationship with Olympians, and is financially interested in promoting coverage of itself and particularly its own history. JoelleJay (talk) 22:40, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  The idea that the Olympics has a financial and legal relationship with long-dead athletes reads to me like an EXTRAORDINARY claim. And this discussion is not about the Olympics having an interest in its own history but rather in the biographies of deceased people. If it were found that Olympedia published puffery or bias in their biographies, then I could see that their RS status could be questioned, but I haven't seen that alleged.

  At the moment, the argument I have heard would imply that any of a national granting agency provided financial support for a biographical project (such as the Dictionary of Canadian Biography), that the resulting biographical entries were not independent because they covered (long deceased) citizens or residents of the nation in question. This doesn't seem to be a criterion that we have used to evaluate independence of sources on WP. Newimpartial (talk) 17:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Significant coverage of an organization's history written by the organization itself is merely an indication that the organization finds that information noteworthy, not that people independent of it do. A neutral and comprehensive biography of someone by their child does not contribute to notability even if it has no written puffery or bias. The choice of the subject itself is where the bias exists; it does not represent the real-world degree of interest in the subject. Providing a source of funding is very different from overseeing a project. JoelleJay (talk) 18:26, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  I don't think you could make a very plausible argument that "the Olympics" (which is a rather nebulous concept) oversees Olympedia in a notably stronger sense than Heritage Canada and its predecessors have "overseen" (through the outcomes specified in various funding arrangements) the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. And there is no more bias in writing about Olympians than there is in writing about Canadians, or women for that matter, in terms of bias in the choice of subject.

  There are biographical projects specific to various groups, and their avowed objectives of publishing biographies, but only of lives having certain characteristics of interest, doesn't make them non-independent in any way relevant to enwiki P&Gs.

  Biographies of deceased athletes are not coverage of an organization's history any more than biographies of deceased Canadians are "coverage of an organization's history" or biographies of deceased women are "coverage of an organization's history". They are all just biographies, good or bad. I don't know how many Olympics participants you have known, but the one's I've known have simply been on their own life trajectories which intersected at one or two points with an Olympic Games. Writing about their life as a whole isn't COI, and this should be clear to everyone in the case of those who are long dead. Newimpartial (talk) 18:50, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  An organization writing about its own members, past or present, is distinct from a government funding an org that writes biographies of the country's citizens. Most organization websites contain a detailed history of themselves that may go into much greater detail on the founders etc. than just their time at the company. That obviously doesn't make such profiles independent coverage. JoelleJay (talk) 20:00, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  To add: when the choice of which profiles to write is directly and inextricably tied to coverage of the org itself, the coverage is not independent. JoelleJay (talk) 20:04, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  You are writing about "the Olympics" as though it were a membership organization. To the best of my knowledge, there is no reason to interpret the situation in this way. Treating long-dead athletes who competed in the Olympics more than a century ago as though they were akin to the founders of Ford Motor Company or the NAACP seems to be based on a misreading of how the modern Olympics were actually founded and how they are actually run. I would most certainly oppose treating "Olympics"-supported publications as independent sources for members of the International Olympic Committee, but that is the farthest thing from what we are actually discussing here.

  Also, when you state that the choice of which profiles to write is directly and inextricably tied to coverage of the org itself, you seem to be assuming the thing to be proved. As I have said, I don't see any difference between Olympedia and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in this respect, and we currently mandate official national biographies as presumptive of notability, rather than treating them as suspect or COI because each one has a mandate to promote a nation's own citizens and residents. Newimpartial (talk) 19:02, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  "Membership" does not have to mean "due-paying member".

  It's coverage of the participants of an event, by the event organizers. That has long been considered non-independent. And "the country of Canada" is not an organization, nor is a national biography entry on a person who is Canadian directly and inextricably tied to coverage of Canada or the Canadian government or whoever commissioned the piece. A profile of an Olympian from Olympedia will always, inevitably contain direct coverage of the Olympics. JoelleJay (talk) 02:14, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, such a biographical entry will contain mention of the Olympics, but that isn't the use of the source under discussion here (it is not independent for discusion of the Olympics, but any source is reliable or not only in the context of specific statements). Such a source is independent for the parts of the biogrpahy that aren't about the Olympics - most of the biography, and the use under discussion here. "The Olympics" has no legal or pecuniary interest in the rest of these people's lives, or the rest of their biographies. You can claim that "the Olympics" claims long-dead athletes as "members" and is not independent of their lives aa a whole, but I haven't seen any evidence for that EXTRAORDINARY interpretation. These are not "founders", and I have seen no evidence of bias in the biographies - only bare assertions of the thing to be demonstrated. Newimpartial (talk) 03:48, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

  Such a source is independent for the parts of the biogrpahy that aren't about the Olympics - most of the biography, and the use under discussion here. That's like saying that IBM, when writing about its early executives solely because they are its early executives are independent for the parts of the biography that aren't about IBM - it's nonsense.

  The IOC isn't writing about Olympians for altruistic reasons; they're writing about them to promote and maintain the Olympic brand. Arguably, they're less independent than IBM in my example because IBM's early executives don't contribute to the current IBM brand; the early Olympians do contribute to the current Olympian brand.

  This is a long-settled question and I don't know why we are re-discussing it; for example, Manchester United writing about early Manchester United players has never been considered an independent source, and the IOC is no different. BilledMammal (talk) 04:07, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

  In practical terms it's independent; certainly the authors seem to be. There are times when you have to be pragmatic about this sort of thing. Blue Square Thing (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

• On the original question: @S Marshall, I don't think you're correct. I think it's more of a Bathtub curve: both completely indiscriminate and extremely selective sources are less than ideal. Indiscriminate sources don't give you the sense that the subject was deliberately covered by the source, but extremely selective sources are not evidence of "attention by the world at large". The best sources are the ones in the middle: inclusive enough that they cover many things, but exclusive enough that they don't cover everything. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:56, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  I absolutely agree, and after this discussion I now feel that I gave insufficient thought to defining my terms. I meant to say that coverage in a source that covers only selected Olympians should counts more than coverage in a source that covers all of them; but, for example, a source that covers only Olympians who participated in the 1936 Olympics----while admittedly "selective"----isn't as helpful towards notability as a source that covers only Olympic gold medallists and record breakers.—S Marshall T/C 21:05, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  There is absolutely no justification in GNG for treating sources differently depending on how thoroughly they cover other related topics. A series of biographical books on US presidents does not become less independent or less deep in its coverage merely because it includes all the US presidents, and not merely a selected subset of them. For the same reason, a source that covers all Olympic athletes does not become less independent or less deep merely because it covers all Olympic athletes rather than only some of them. What needs to be evaluated is the depth of coverage of the source, the reliability of the source, and the extent to which the source is connected to the individual subject. That is all.

  To put it another way: using the selectivity of a source to evaluate the significance of a subject is the sort of thing you would do under a significance-based notability criterion, one that evaluates subjects based on what they have done rather than on their depth of coverage. We have some criteria like that: WP:NPOL is an example, where national parliaments are judged as significant enough but city councils are generally not, for instance. But that is not how GNG works. If you want to evaluate athletes by their significance, you need to go back to the old evaluation criteria that said that certain kinds of athletes are notable (people who have walked onto the field in a top-level professional game or played in the Olympics) while others are not. We used to do it that way, but it was rejected by a broad consensus. Now we evaluate athletes by publicity, like most other biographies. An athlete is notable when their team's publicist has convinced enough magazines and newspapers to write in-depth profiles of them, producing sources that count as in-depth, reliable, and independent; otherwise they are not. If the IOC has succeeded in convincing enough people to provide in-depth reliable independent coverage of all Olympic athletes, then by that definition they are all notable. Don't twist GNG to be something it is not. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:33, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  As I showed above, the Olympedia article for Douglas Godfree s clearly based on sources that I was able to find the originals of. If there's prose written it's because there are sources to back up that prose - the authors of the Olympedia article found them and used them. Do we really have to find them again to justify an article? Blue Square Thing (talk) 21:43, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Where the Olympian is a living person, yes you definitely do: policy lets us insist. The rule is Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—must be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion. We know that every article started by Lugnuts is contentious, and unless RSN decides otherwise, Olympedia isn't a RS. Where the Olympian is deceased, as far as I can tell from policy the articles ought to be better sourced but (a) AfD isn't for cleanup and (b) there's no other venue with a deadline, so in practice you're allowed to defer any request for better sources indefinitely, and that seems to mean, forever.—S Marshall T/C 22:35, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  The sources that back up that prose could just as readily be from non-independent sources, so yes, we absolutely do need to find the originals. JoelleJay (talk) 23:38, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  @David Eppstein, about there being no justification in GNG for treating sources differently depending on how thoroughly they cover other related topics: Some small-town newspapers review every single restaurant in town, just because they're there, and they can. I have twice lived in towns small enough that the weekly newspaper could review every single restaurant twice a year, with extra weeks leftover to cover the concession stands for each sport. Big city newspapers can't do this because of the number of restaurants in the city substantially exceeds the number of publication days. We're kind of stuck with either saying small-town restaurants are more notable than big city ones – because they get reviewed twice a year by their indiscriminate but independent newspaper – or that we should treat sources differently depending on how they choose to cover some subject areas. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:24, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing: you write like you really want to be using a significance-based notability standard instead of the publicity-based standard that we have in GNG, but can't quite bring yourself to say so explicitly. If you really had faith in GNG's promise that we can have an article whenever we have adequate sources for an article, you would not see a problem in having articles about all small-town restaurants with enough local newspapers to provide two independent sources, while not being able to cover big-city restaurants or one-newspaper-town restaurants. Those are the ones we have adequate sourcing for, and we can only follow what the sourcing gives us, not try to make our own separate standards. If, on the other hand, you want a restaurant to be somehow important or significant, beyond merely being multiply-reviewed, in order to justify having a Wikipedia article on it, then what you want is not GNG, which is not based on importance, but some other standard.

  Don't try to make GNG what it is not. Trying to do so only ends up warping GNG out of recognition, confusing editors who think it should mean what it says, failing to adequately provide the significance-based test that you want, and instead pushing the encyclopedia even farther in the direction of being based on publicity rather than significance. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  I believe there is widespread support for something that leans towards a significance-based standard, rather than a purely we-can-source-it standard. This support appears in the form of complaints that "WhatamIdoing's Gas Station" is a violation of WP:IINFO, or in the form of proposals to merge (e.g.,) small-town businesses into the article about the town (per "Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article" at the top of WP:N). WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:43, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

• This is sprawling, but to the original point: I don't think you're wrong, but what defines a selective/indiscriminate source? There's an example above of an Olympics Encyclopedia. It is arguably selective in that it doesn't include any non-Olympians and arguably indiscriminate because it includes all Olympians. Is a source which includes every US President or every species of bird indiscriminate, or just a specialty source? If an Olympics encyclopedia is considered reliable, that's what matters. Is appearing on the cover of Time magazine better than a profile in a specialty publication? Sure, but at that point we're talking about extra notability. If it's in-depth coverage in a reliable source and independent of the source, it helps towards GNG. Doesn't really matter how selective it is. If its lack of selectivity hurts the extent to which it's reliable, that's fine, but then that's an RS issue rather than a WP:N issue. The only real exception to this that I can think of is like WP:CORPDEPTH, where there's less consideration of industry publications. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:15, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  Unfortunately, I think the real answer to your question is just a variation on ILIKEIT. If a source reports on 100% of _____, and I think _____ is a worthy subject for an encyclopedia, then it's "not indiscriminate". But if I don't think _____ is a worthy subject for an encyclopedia, then it's "indiscriminate" and any other smear words I can think of.

  If you wanted a "real" answer, then one approach is to consider whether a similar type of publication (e.g., newspaper) in a different circumstance (e.g., a much larger city) would have done the same thing. All local news outlets cover the mayor; not all local news outlets cover the 100% of the restaurants in town. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:47, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  To answer I think that you need to acknowledge the notability ecosystem does some screening beyond just determining if there is enough material in RS's to build an article from. And, where applicable, the fact that a source has decided to cover them in particular in depth, and the prominence of the source enter into that evaluation. And, in that context and the OP question, "indiscriminate" means that no such particular decision has been made (other than meeting the general criteria that applies for the entire list/set) by the source. North8000 (talk) 18:12, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  OK, this is one of these things that really confuses me: the notability ecosystem does some screening beyond just determining if there is enough material in RS's to build an article from. Sure, the creeping tendency towards exclusion and hierarchy is always with us and frequently takes advantage of the surface ambiguity of the term "notability" to sneak some sort of significance criterion into conversations where it should be categorically disallowed. But the unfortunate fact that this happens doesn't make it any less contrary to the purposes of notability in particular and Wikipedia in general -- or any less harmful. The logical jump from "members of the community sometimes make this mistake" to "therefore it is not a mistake" is IMO a very hazardous one. -- Visviva (talk) 15:10, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• Late coming in here, but I'm just going to lay down a marker that I do think the proposition advanced is wrong, on at least two levels. First, it is no coincidence that IINFO is not a source evaluation guideline. Trying to retcon some sort of consistency between two unrelated rules can be fun as an intellectual exercise, but has no place in a serious debate with serious consequences like AFD. Second, this proposition relies on improperly equating notability and significance. To the extent a notability inquiry is valid, it basically follows three steps: (1) is there a decent amount of solid material for an article here; (2) if not, is there some agreed criterion by which we should either assume that sources are very likely to exist, or recognize that the reader will be well-served by an article on the subject regardless; (3) if not, is there a decent merge target for any encyclopedic content. Bringing the "indiscriminacy" of a source into the step 1 inquiry conflates steps 1 and 2; but if we have adequate material for a solid article we have no reason to consider step 2 at all. -- Visviva (talk) 15:10, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

RfC regarding individual area codes

You are invited to the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Telecommunications/Area codes RfC regarding the notability of articles about individual area codes. BilledMammal (talk) 18:51, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Minimum Number of Secondary Sources

The current policy only states that 'multiple sources are generally expected'; this means that anything mentioned twice in published sources technically meets notability guidelines. This standard is so low that many things that generally are not worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia (i.e. local politicians, petty criminals, small businesses, etc.) would likely meet notability guidelines. Because of the wording of the policy, literalists will argue that such a subject meets WP:GNG and should, therefore, have a Wikipedia page. This results in low-quality articles that cannot be improved due to lack of sources. A higher minimum number of secondary sources doesn't necessarily have to be mandated, but if it was at least suggested or expected (changing the phrasing to something like 'at least five secondary sources are generally expected'), it would reduce the number of subpar articles created on the basis of being covered in only two sources. I would recommend five as the minimum, as five quality sources should provide plenty of material for a decent article. JMB1980 (talk) 19:03, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

No. Just no. We have been over this over and over and over again. It depends enormously on the quality of the sources. One source can sometimes be enough (even though it clearly is not multiple), when it is of sufficient quality (Dictionary of National Biography, for instance). Five sources might not be enough, when they are of low quality. Stating a number encourages editors to work towards that number instead of towards the high-quality sourcing that we actually want. The problem with not-really-notable topics, and especially in attempts at getting them approved from drafts to articles, is usually not the number of sources, because our reviewers tell the drafters over and over "we need more sources". This ends up packing the drafts with many many poor sources. We should be telling editors to use fewer sources, only the high-quality ones, so we can tell which ones those are. Your suggestion goes in the wrong direction, towards quantity over quality. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:07, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that quality should be emphasized over quantity. The problem is that the current phrasing of notability ability guidelines allows literalists to claim any subject that has been covered in any two sources has achieved notability. Perhaps, as an alternative, is there a way 'quality sources' could be more clearly defined? JMB1980 (talk) 21:28, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Notability is not based on the number of sources but the amount of significant coverage to the specific topic that the offered sources provide. As David says, one source may be sufficient to show that, while in other cases one might need ten or more. We.dont count sourcing because this is easily gamed. Masem (t) 19:56, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that insisting on some specific number of sources is the wrong approach. Even for the most mundane topics, it's usually possible to dig up 5, 10, or more really crappy sources. Quality of sources and WP:SIGCOV is much more important than quantity of sources, and we're just doing authors a disservice by implying that if they find N sources they'll be good. RoySmith (talk) 20:23, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree in principle that specifying a number of sources is wrong; however, the problem is that based on current policy it's possible for authors to dig up two really crappy sources and think that they'll be good if they find that many. JMB1980 (talk) 21:24, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

It's possible for authors to dig up ten really crappy sources and then not understand why reviewers keep telling them that better sources are needed. The problem is not that there are only two; the problem is that the sources are crap. Telling them to find more sources won't fix it. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:37, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

With rare exceptions, it should be easy to find five quality sources for a subject that is truly notable; I've created several articles and have never had difficulty finding at least five quality sources. If a subject truly isn't notable, it should be difficult to find five sources of any quality; I've encountered many subpar articles that cite exactly two sources. There is no perfect solution to this problem, but expecting (without requiring) a minimum of five sources would significantly reduce the number of low-quality articles while good articles would be unaffected in every or nearly every case. JMB1980 (talk) 00:49, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

It would expand the current emphasis on hype and publicity over substance and accomplishments. It would work fine for movie stars and footballers, not so much for other topics. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:26, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

In my experience, footballers and other ”pop culture” topics are far more likely to be included based on scraping by notability criteria than less popular topics. BilledMammal (talk) 05:41, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Ideally, notability would be determined by the quality and substance of sources rather than strict adherence to a number of sources specified in a guideline. Unfortunately, my experience is that the majority on Wikipedia focus on quantity over quality. There are a myriad of low-quality articles with only two or three sources that can't be improve because of the poor quality of sources, and usually can't be deleted because they technically meet minimum GNG guidelines. Setting an expectation of at least five sources would prevent many of the worst articles from being created and allow for the deletion of many of those already created, as most of the ones I've seen have fewer than five secondary sources. It wouldn't solve every problem, but it would be an improvement. JMB1980 (talk) 06:13, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Well...on the other hand, the current guidance already essentially sets the number at 2, with no entreaties for quality or amount of SIGCOV. We even have the option for some subjects to get by with zero SIGCOV sources and just a few scattered mentions that are "more than a directory listing" and "don't require OR to describe". JoelleJay (talk) 00:58, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

In fact, I believe that the notability standards should be further expanded: If something is found to have enough coverage to be a GA--and stay a GA even after a GAR if challenged--then whether it meets the GNG or any SNG is not the point: it's a decent encyclopedia article, so citing some arbitrary guideline (that is, intended to be flexible) to delete a good article is pedantic and Procrustean, rather than serving to help us develop the best possible online encyclopedia. Jclemens (talk) 21:27, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

The inverse of that is citing some arbitrary guideline to create or keep a bad article; this also is pedantic and not conducive to creating a good encyclopedia. Expecting (but not requiring) more sources should help to reduce the number of bad articles while retaining flexibility. JMB1980 (talk) 00:39, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Bad articles can be improved much more easily than missing articles can be added, especially now that some of our tools go back and automagically remove red links. Jclemens (talk) 03:40, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

[Citation needed]. My research suggests the opposite is true; if the creator of an article doesn’t expand it, no body will. BilledMammal (talk) 05:35, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Absolutely not. The GA criteria do not require independent or secondary coverage. A "good article" could be written almost entirely from the subject's own professional profiles, interviews, press releases from affiliated orgs, statistical data, etc. Moreover, GAs only need one reviewer to pass, which can easily lead to special interest wikiprojects nominating and reviewing articles that would not be accepted outside their walled garden. JoelleJay (talk) 00:48, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

GA requires V sources. I proactively addressed your objection by noting GAR exists to correct inappropriate GA passes. Jclemens (talk) 03:39, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I can assure you that people would be able to write a high-quality (GA) article sans secondary sourcing such as with fictional characters or works, which no, we have moved way past that. That's why WP:V requires third-party sourcing for any topic, and N/GNG emphasizes that this should be significant coverage from secondary sources. There are reasonable exceptions to this (hence why WP:N is a guideline) but its needed to meet WP:V and WP:NOT#IINFO. Masem (t) 00:55, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Much like JoelleJay, you're assuming non-RS, which is fair enough since I didn't specify. But what I'm actually talking about is non-SIGCOV independent RS'es that, in sum, can provide enough V content, in aggregate, to write a legitimately good article. Jclemens (talk) 03:39, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

The community has rejected the idea that a bunch of sources that only name-drop a topic or that may have a whole sentence or two about it (aka "listicles") do not contribute to determining notability. We need sources that have in-depth sigcov to have a hope of writing a cohesive article in the first place. Masem (t) 03:57, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, pretty much anyone involved in sports or living in a rural community in America could cobble together an article from non-SIGCOV IRS sources. If someone is actually notable, their significance will have been discussed substantially--otherwise how do we know that what they did is significant? JoelleJay (talk) 07:54, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me that the best response to this issue would be to strengthen our expectations at enwiki that each article should have a credible claim to significance, rather than making WP:N/SIGCOV (which is essentially a sourcing standard) do work that it is neither designed nor optimally positioned to do. Newimpartial (talk) 15:33, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't say exactly that, but I have said something similar. XOR'easter (talk) 01:51, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I’m not overly convinced that providing a set number of sources would help - instead, I think we need to be firmer about those sources being high quality and actually containing usable significant coverage.

For example, see this ongoing discussion at NBOOKS, where I am proposing we require that the sources actually contain sufficient information to write an article that goes beyond a plot summary.

However, changing “multiple” to a slightly better defined word like “several” may be a good idea; as JoelleJay points out, “multiple” is almost always interpreted as a flat two, which I think was neither its intent nor a good idea. BilledMammal (talk) 05:38, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Clarifying terms like 'significant coverage' would help a lot. The reason I proposed an expectation of five sources is because there's an excess of arguments stating that any subject covered in two sources is notable because GNG only states 'multiple sources' are needed and two sources are technically multiple sources. Much of the language is too vague and subjective, which is a problem when so many interpret Wikipedia policy in the most literal sense, which I don't believe was the intent of the authors. JMB1980 (talk) 06:33, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I think sometimes we have to stop and remind ourselves that we're talking about classifying the sum of human knowledge here. A certain about of vagueness and subjectivity is unavoidable. – Joe (talk) 06:37, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

That’s true, but we also need guide rails to ensure that the topics we cover are sufficiently encyclopaedic and covered to comply with our key policies such as NPOV, BLP, and NOT.

Here we are seeing that a little more direction would be beneficial; that’s part of the reason I would prefer changing “multiple” to “several” rather than providing an explicit number. BilledMammal (talk) 06:54, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

To me multiple and several mean the same thing in quantitive terms. Maybe it's a dialect thing? – Joe (talk) 07:02, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

To me, multiple means anything over two; several is generally between three and five. Personally, I think a band like this will be beneficial and better suited to adapting the number of sources to the quality of the sources than the current “multiple” which is virtually without exception interpreted as “two”. BilledMammal (talk) 07:16, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, to me "multiple" just means "more than one", whereas "several" is somewhere above "a few". JoelleJay (talk) 07:41, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

"A little more direction would be beneficial" is a completely vacuous justification for such a major change. Beneficial to what purpose? In what way do you envision that changing the wording to something that implies a greater number of sources cause our coverage to be more "encyclopedic", whatever you mean by that, rather than more strongly affected by hype? Because to me, the ability to get coverage of a topic is largely driven by hype and publicity. More successful hypesters get more sources written about them. We want an encyclopedia, not merely a mirror of pop culture. To get that, we need to focus on the quality of sources, not their quantity. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:38, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

If you want to reduce our emphasis on pop culture the answer is to tighten notability standards; pop culture topics are far more likely to be marginally notable than non-pop culture topics. BilledMammal (talk) 08:11, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

"Tightening notability standards" is too vague to be helpful. Tightening them in ways that continue to allow reference-bombing of pop-culture subjects while erecting arbitrary barriers to everything else is not helpful. That's my opinion of what you would get by asking for more references but not asking about the quality of the references. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:16, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

So make notability require meeting some subject-specific criterion that you approve of and SIGCOV in several IRS sources. There, problem solved. A random third-tier English footballer fails due to only having coverage of transactions/press releases/match recaps, and Irene Heim gets in basically through citations to her dissertation alone; everyone with an article actually deserves it. JoelleJay (talk) 08:14, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Why do citations to a dissertation count for you as SIGCOV of the dissertation's author? This sounds like special pleading to make it look as though NPROF were somehow an interpretive guide to the GNG, when in reality it is much more a parallel to NAUTHOR. If citations to a dissertation were interpreted as GNG notability for a (scholarly) author, why wouldn't book reviews (typically offering much more depth than a bare citation in scholarship) also contribute to a (non-scholarly) author's notability?

It seems much more plausible to me that we have carved out NPROF, NAUTHOR (which is much more restrictive than NPROF, in general) and so on based on intuitions about what topics deserve coverage in an encyclopaedia, and that pretending that these are all based on SIGCOV- (or SIRS)- type principles is simply a kind of retrospective rationalization at best. Newimpartial (talk) 15:42, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

NAUTHOR (which is much more restrictive than NPROF, in general)? I've seen NAUTHOR #3 interpreted as meaning an author who has created a notable work is notable. Of course, this is against WP:NOTINHERITED, but it does result in an SNG that is less strict than NPROF. BilledMammal (talk) 15:56, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

NAUTHOR is not comparable to PROF; they use different criteria. As typically applied, NAUTHOR is GNG-based: it says that in-depth reliable independent sources about the work an author has done (that is, reviews of their books) count as in-depth reliable independent sources about what the author has done, as long as they are spread among multiple books and not merely multiple reviews. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Can someone be highly cited and widely regarded as influential without being discussed substantially? Are there people with thousands of citations for important work widely attributed to them but for whom every single citation is a mere numerical reference, with little more prose description than a passing "due to X"? JoelleJay (talk) 22:18, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Can a Wikipedia make a meaningful contribution to a discussion by asking vacuous rhetorical questions about oxymoronic scenarios? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:03, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

What the fuck, David. This was a sincere question regarding my expectation that influential researchers will have their work described in significant detail somewhere within their citations. I don't see how that deserved such an aggressively uncivil ABF response. JoelleJay (talk) 17:53, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's actually pretty common to be highly cited and considered influential but not discussed, at least not in widely-available and easily-accessible media. Many full professors at US research universities probably fall into that category. Valereee (talk) 13:39, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I assume from the indentation that this question is directed at me. NAUTHOR #3, in a plain reading, requires that the work in question be "significant" as well as that it be subject of independent coverage in multiple RS. In fact, each of the NAUTHOR criteria requires that the creator, their work, or their original theories or methods be regarded as "significant" by others, and expects independent sourcing.

By contrast, NPROF 1 can be met simply from citation counts (a kind of "imputed significance"), and NPROF 5, 6 and 8 are met by occupying a specified type of position (akin to "presumed notability"). Any of these criteria can be met without any independent, reliable sources discussing the academic or their work even to a minimal extent - which is rather the point of NPROF. So within a GNG-oriented frame, I regard NPROF to be significantly more permissive than NAUTHOR - which doesn't imply an objection to either guideline. Newimpartial (talk) 16:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

While notability is not broadly inherited, we do acknowledge, like with NAUTHOR that a notable work will likely like to the author being notable. This ultimatel still needs to be shown via significant coverage of the author, but per presumption of notability, we'd allow the notability if the book to work for the author until it can be proven otherwise no significant sourcing if the author exists. --Masem (t) 18:22, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

1) You missed the (very subtle and obscure) joke. 2) The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases has been cited 6700 times.

There are entire articles dedicated to analyzing Heim's work, with abstracts starting out like "Irene Heim's theory of presupposition—the satisfaction theory—has been highly influential and applied to a number of presuppositional phenomena." "Heim" is literally a keyword in journals alongside "presupposition" and "dynamic semantics". That is SIGCOV under any definition. JoelleJay (talk) 22:07, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Or... maybe it's not SIGCOV? Having a keyword that matches the subject would indicate importance/significance, but not necessarily coverage. A thousand words about some celebrity's wardrobe is SIGCOV; a passing mention of somethin that has enduring value is not. We sometimes struggle with SIGCOV in the "so popular that nobody goes there any more" (or "so important that no source writes about it any more") situations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 13:48, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Sorry I was ambiguous, I was not saying "being a keyword" counted as SIGCOV, but rather that the multiple articles directly describing Heim's ideas and her approaches are clearly SIGCOV, and that being a keyword was further illustrative of her impact. JoelleJay (talk) 18:13, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

My point, if that's what the above comment by JoelleJay is reacting to, was not to question whether Heim meets WP:N requirements. My point was that citation counts are at best an oblique indicator or, as I said above, that NPROF 1 shows imputed, rather than actual significance.

extended content

A scholarly citation can indeed accompany a SIGCOV or even an in-depth discussion of a precious scholar's contribution, but it can also accompany nothing of the kind - in an extreme case, it can be part of a list of in-text citations without drawing specifically on the work cited, or it might accompany a quotation paraphrasing another previous work, which is certainly not SIGCOV of the paraphrasor. In fact, statements that might accompany a citation, include ones (such as summaries or critical commentary) that would also be found in a non-scholarly book review; in the first instance, such statements are evidence of the Notability of the work rather than that of the author (and editors like BilledMammal seem inclined to reverse the plain meaning of NOTINHERITED to deny that authors of notable works are therefore presumed notable - I'm not sure whether they would extend this principle to scholars and scholarly works).

That a single sentence about Irene Heim would be obviously SIGCOV and a single sentence about, say, a footballer's contribution would not - I think that contrast makes clear that the notion of minima for sources to count as significant coverage is being deployed in this discussion to buttress arguments about whether the subject of that sentence is important, or encyclopaedic, but it really isn't a suitable tool for the job. Newimpartial (talk) 17:43, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

?? Nowhere did I claim a single sentence would be SIGCOV for anyone? Heim has literally tens of thousands of words written about her theories and how she derived them. If we were to apply my suggestion of meeting both a "significance" criterion and a "SIGCOV" criterion to the examples I provided, Heim would meet both because within the 6700 citations to her dissertation there are numerous multi-hundred-word paragraphs unambiguously and directly describing what she has done. Yes, presuming SIGCOV exists among citations is not how NPROF was intended to work and does require "imputation", but I am arguing that such a presumption probably is warranted when the subject has a very large number of citations (and is recognized as the senior author in those highly-cited publications). JoelleJay (talk) 18:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, I'm glad you recognize that what you describe isn't actually the way NPROF works at present. You may believe that the reason NPROF 1 produces appropriate outcomes is because, somewhere among the citations, at least two will discuss the author (and not just particular results they have published) in sufficient depth to meet SIGCOV. However, I haven't seen other editors propose this logic in the past, and it would be rather a departure from the current consensus around NPROF. There are certainly a large number of existing articles that pass NPROF but where no independent RS discuss the bio subject in ways that would pass GNG or NBASIC - which, as I understand it, is one reason NPROF exists. Newimpartial (talk) 18:33, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Significant coverage describing how a researcher arrived at a conclusion, the influence of their work, and what their results mean is still SIGCOV of the person, just like a critique of someone's performance in a movie is. For Heim we get a range of sources, from those briefly touching on her ideas, such as this article

What we intend by saying that Agree pointers that survive to LF are interpreted as indications of referential dependency is that they are interpreted in much the same way that coindexed DPs are interpreted in standard treatments like Heim and Kratzer (1998) and Büring (2005). We can flesh this out as follows, to give a sense of the kind of interpretation that we have in mind. First, we adopt Heim’s (1998) view that any class of DP can in principle undergo Quantifier Raising (QR) to adjoin to a higher projection (see also Heim and Kratzer 1998:210–211), and indeed that QR of names and other sorts of referential DPs has a role to play in interpreting all kinds of anaphoric relations. Heim’s statement of QR is given in (56). (56) QR: [TP... αi.... ] → [TP α λi [TP... ti... ]] To this, we add our distinctive assumption in (57), which equates co-pointing with coindexing. 28 (57) A head H bearing pointers to two DPs, α and β, is equivalent to α and β bearing the same numerical index. Now Heim (1998) assumes that all indexes must be variables, and hence a DP other than a pronoun or trace that bears an index must get rid of it by undergoing (56), thereby transferring its index to the lambda operator. This assumption, together with our (57), implies that if one of the pointed-to DPs in an SS (or OS) construction, say α, is a full DP, it must undergo QR to a higher position.

to articles entirely about her work, e.g. this article with the abstract

Irene Heim’s 1983 paper, “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” is, first, a paper about presupposition projection. But perhaps its major significance lies in its role in launching the dynamic turn in formal semantics, whose central idea is that the conventional meaning of an expression is given by a description of how that expression updates a context. The fundamental ideas of context and context change that Heim presented in this brief paper are now part of the basic toolkit of semantics. At the same time, the paper established presupposition and presupposition projection as a topic of central concern for the emerging dynamic approach. In this commentary, I briefly describe the paper’s most direct antecedents, review its central theoretical innovations, and describe some alternative approaches to the formal characterization of contexts and to the analysis of presupposition and presupposition projection.

The latter is also distinct from an NAUTHOR fiction book review, as it includes far more direct analysis of Heim's actions as opposed to the product of her actions (compare a critique of the plot of a book to a literary analysis of how the author wrote that plot). JoelleJay (talk) 19:45, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Just to be clear-I don't disagree with any of this (except that my mental representation of the "average" non-scholarly book review probably includes more coverage of the author herself than does JoelleJay's mental model, but that is neither here nor there). And my point wasn't that people who pass NPROF 1 never receive what the GNG defines as SIGCOV; my point was that they (and those who pass NAUTHOR as well, for that matter, although the latter is a higher bar) aren't required to receive SIGCOV from independent sources to have an article.

In my view, such independent tests are in the best interests of an encyclopaedia - in fact, any reasonably well-defined standards against which a "credible claim to significance" can be tested are good for an encyclopaedia, since they ensure that the encyclopaedia is more encyclopaedic. To be provocative for a second, an encyclopaedia in which I can type in the name of any species, or any female footballer with national team apprarances to her credit, or any author of an independently published (and reviewed) book, and receive at least a redirect is doing a better job of being an encyclopaedia than an encyclopaedia where I cannot do that. And the greater extent to which the category system is populated, at least by categorized redirects but even more so by even stub articles, the better. There is no reason why the species' volunteer-based compendium of verified information could not populate a full set of articles for each of the article types I mentioned above: the idea some editors have that an encyclopaedia is made better by excluding some of the entries that would be required for this, even when they are reliably (and independently) sourced, seems profoundly counterintuitive to me (and potentially out of touch with the role of an encyclopaedia in the digital age). Newimpartial (talk) 18:53, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Provocative, but I like it. XOR'easter (talk) 19:11, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I think sometimes we have to stop and remind ourselves that we're talking about classifying the sum of human knowledge here. A certain about of vagueness and subjectivity is unavoidable. Ding ding ding! There's no list of bullet points that can guarantee good outcomes over a domain that broad.

Seriously: take a step back, spend a few weeks not speaking in all-caps shortcuts, and think about questions like "Would I expect to find an article like this when I open an encyclopedia?" Or "What is fundamentally necessary for a generalist encyclopedia built by collaborative effort on a wiki platform?" XOR'easter (talk) 19:05, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

The main effect of this proposal would be to encourage further bombardment of articles with references to every time the subjects have appeared in the news. We get too much of that already. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:33, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I'd encourage users here to check out WP:SIRS. This only applies to Organizations currently, but the idea for evaluating sources for Notability is excellent:

• Contain significant coverage addressing the subject of the article directly and in depth.
• Be completely independent of the article subject.
• Meet the standard for being a reliable source.
• Be a secondary source; primary and tertiary sources do not count towards establishing notability.

I think that the above standard really should be held for anything "Recent" that can be sourced from the internet. For historical subjects - things that primarily happened or were notable before 2010, and are harder to source online, I prefer exceptions, like for people, we have WP:ANYBIO.

To me - that's the big divider. A social media account should be held to really high standards of notability. So should a college student today. Someone who died before 2010, who doesn't have a ton of in depth coverage online but clearly did things of notice, somehow - that's what we should be carving out exceptions for. Denaar (talk) 14:19, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

IMO making a criteria for a specific numbers of sources is a bad idea. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:52, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

IMO defining SIGCOV in a concrete, objective fashion would be very helpful. We've refused to do it in the past, because even if we set the bar at "Must have 10,000 words written by independent sources and an endorsement by Mother Theresa", we worry that some "unworthy" subject will actually achieve the goal. I can't make Wikipedia cover things that interest me and exclude things that I dislike unless I can claim that 300 words about my subject is "obviously SIGCOV" while 5,000 about your subject is "obviously not SIGCOV". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:30, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I think that most cases where GNG got violated at AFD are where it really wasn't in depth coverage. Probably the most prevalent example are counting reviews (e.g. of restaurants) as GNG coverage. Maybe a bit of an expansion on describing in-depth coverage? North8000 (talk) 17:50, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Every day at sportsperson AfDs we have editors argue that single sentences are SIGCOV. It's a genuine problem. JoelleJay (talk) 22:10, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I haven't encountered the "one sentence" argument in sportsperson AfDs, but if such an argument is made, I would think it's shot down pretty quickly. Do you have examples of the "one sentence" interpretation receiving support at AfDs? Cbl62 (talk) 14:04, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

It's a huge problem, and it's not just sportspeople. In every or nearly every deletion discussion in which I've participated (in a variety of topics) there is at least one editor (usually many) who tries to argue that one sentence is significant coverage. In my experience, it is almost never shot down; I've seen many terrible articles saved from deletion solely because of a couple of sources featuring a single sentence about the subject. JMB1980 (talk) 16:37, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

123

Sure they're usually shot down, but there are also 2-4 editors who will !vote "keep meets GNG" in every AfD regardless of the source quality/coverage, and if it's not well-attended their !votes will result in NC or keep. JoelleJay (talk) 17:46, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

IMO defining SIGCOV in a concrete, objective fashion would be humanly impossible. XOR'easter (talk) 18:56, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

• I'm going to collegially disagree with David Eppstein and say that one source isn't enough. The rule says sources, plural, for good reason. I think there should be at least two sources that are editorially independent from each other, so we have some grounds to think the key points have been fact-checked twice.—S Marshall T/C 20:58, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

  Most sources, including most high-quality sources, don't get fact-checked at all. But having two sources unrelated to each other would give us two unrelated people/publishing outfits that both thought the information wasn't unreasonable, and was worth their effort to publish.

  I think it might be worth exploring what we mean by "sources are expected". Do we mean "If I did some work, I could find more sources for that subject"? Or do we mean "we expect to find them already cited in the article, preferably with a link to a free online copy"?

  To use the example from @David Eppstein, if someone writes a new article and cites only the Dictionary of National Biography, then you shouldn't think "Oh, only one source is cited, and we all know that editors always cite every possible source in the entire world, so the absence of additional sources means that no other source in the whole world has talked about this subject". You should instead think something closer to "Oh, DNB, yeah, there are definitely going to be other sources available for that subject, because the only way for someone to get into DNB in the first place is for other sources to have written about them". Some of us, however, think it's unreasonable for them to be expected to know anything about the cited sources, or to look for sources themselves. They see their role as pushing other editors to do work that they refuse to do themselves. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:03, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  As far as I'm concerned, if a source isn't cited in the article, it's doesn't count for anything. It's bad enough people thing mentioning a source in an AfD but not using it is useful, but it totally drives me nuts when I see arguments like I think it’s a safe bet to say that if someone looked deeply in libraries in the Puget Sound Region they would find additional books at least lightly discussing this topic. They're not even showing sources that they're not going to bother citing, they're just guessing they exist. I mostly stay away from AfD these days because I can't deal with that kind of stuff. RoySmith (talk) 17:14, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  if a source isn't cited in the article, it's doesn't count for anything This is not how it works. As long as the source has been identified and documented such as on the talk page or at an AFD, it counts as a possible source. They still have to be checked for significant coverage, though, so simply rattling off library catalog hits without checking doesn't help. However, we do not delete articles just because numerous valid sources have been found but not incorporated into the article. Masem (t) 18:13, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  True, but then it comes to reasonable expectations in sorting it out if one such source is claimed. For example I make a claim that a book has GNG coverage for the subject of my article. If someone wants to determine if that is the case, which of these should happen?:

  1. The questioner has to read the whole book to "prove a negative" that it does not
  2. The claimer helps establish it by citing it, and citing could trigger the responsibility to provide a page number

  Number 1 is unreasonable and could burn out AFD participation. North8000 (talk) 18:24, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  At some point, there is an AGF aspect when !keep votes, supplying non-online works they claim are sig. coverage, are speaking the truth that these works have sig. coverage. That said, in terms of the AFD process, that does set an unenforceable clock in motion that these sources should be added to the article, in other words, "put up or shut up" on the source claim. Masem (t) 22:45, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  we do not delete articles just because numerous valid sources have been found but not incorporated into the article More's the pity. Our goal is to provide our readers with information that they can verify. If we don't tell them what sources we used to write the article, they can't do that. RoySmith (talk) 18:30, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Absolutely a valid concern and one that WP:V has been discussing for years (eg at what point do you require the inline cite to be present). However, for purposes here, identification of sources with sig. coverage is the baseline to start from. Masem (t) 22:39, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

• The GNG needs to be a simple test. Any reasonable person should be able to look at the sources in an article and say if it meets the GNG; because the point of the rule is to let people write articles while having reasonable confidence that their work won't be deleted at AfD. If we make the GNG complex and nuanced, then people won't feel able to write articles without going through some kind of committee process first; we'll get people starting articles, but then AfDing them before they put much effort in. I think allowing a single-sourced article to pass the GNG is too inclusive -- because we'll get people saying that if the Dictionary of National Biography is OK, then surely Olympedia is OK, right? So I think the rule that there have to be sources, plural, is a good one.—S Marshall T/C 20:59, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break re Minimum Number of Secondary Sources

• This entire discussion is elitist and more concerned with boundary-drawing to improve some authors' sense of self-importance. This is a recurring problem in Wikipedia, from POKEMON onward. This is not the same as a V or NPOV problem, this is a desire to limit topics to those for whom elite, socially acceptable articles--as in, NOT pop culture--can be written. It's a navel-gazing exercise which ignores our mission and arguably drives our editor retention issues: If you want a volunteer-driven encyclopedia, then you can expect some quality standards, but disallow editors from doing what they like, and they're gone. Jclemens (talk) 21:19, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Maybe we do have an improper bias against pop culture. But IMO the system recognizes that some vetting and sticking to the concept of being an enclyclopedia adds value. That something with such vetting with 10 million articles is more valuable than something with 10 billion less vetted resumes, business\ listings, fan pages, product pages essays, info pages. North8000 (talk) 21:45, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Please stick to the discussion--no one is arguing for resumes, business\ listings, fan pages, product pages essays, info pages. What I am specifically doing is pushing back against the notion, reasonably articulated below, that we can improve quality by erecting barriers for editors who want to work in topics that they prefer, rather than some arbitrary balanced set of encyclopedic topics. We already have a terrible time getting people to edit/improve existing articles; why worsen the problem? Jclemens (talk) 23:10, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Jclemens: I didn't intend to say that you or anyone was arguing for that. Sometimes extremes can help provide clarity in illustrating a point. And my point was that vetting increases the value. North8000 (talk) 01:08, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  Apology accepted, although I wasn't trying to force one, so much as focus the discussion--all of us here have years of experience discussing these things, and I think we all agree in broad strokes what we don't want in Wikipedia... with the occasional personal preference. No one wants to include those things you mentioned, and if our efforts to push back against more discouragement for new, hobbyist editors comes across as being in favor of any of those things, it shouldn't. But again--thanks. Jclemens (talk) 06:28, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  User:Jclemens is precisely correct. Three examples of the imbalanced approach:

  • If you write an article on a professor of linguistics who specializes in extinct languages of Oceania, and that person has authored (or even co-authored) half a dozen articles in the Journal of Endangered Languages (JofEL), and one or more those articles was then repeatedly cited in other JofEL articles, the subject would likely survive an AfD per WP:NPROF --- even though there is nothing remotely approaching WP:SIGCOV in independent sources discussing the professor in depth (as opposed to simply citing their journal articles).
  • If you write a biography of a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives, e.g., Don Thorson, who briefly represented a constituency of < 10,000 people, their notability would almost certainly be upheld under WP:NPOL. Presumably because legislators, even those representing a tiny constituency in Wyoming, are deemed inherently more important/encyclopedic than pop culture figures and athletes?
  • If you write an article about an athlete who competed at the highest level of competition in their sport (e.g., the National Football League or Major League Baseball), the subjects will almost always have received SIGCOV, but there is no presumption of notability, and, if the article is sent to AfD, you may be met with a panoply of attacks from anti-sports editors arguing that: the coverage is too local (even though it includes regional outlets and major metropolitan newspapers); the coverage is not "academic" (yes, we recently had a "delete" vote in a sport AfD on the grounds that the coverage wasn't "academic"); that the coverage is "routine" (in the view of some, all sports coverage, even feature coverage, is "routine"); the coverage is not "independent" (some argue that major metropolitan dailies aren't independent because it's supposedly the job of the sports page to promote the region's favorite teams); etc.

  I realize that "notability" has a subjective element that varies based on each person's view of what is "encyclopedic", but I do long for the day when we come closer to applying a uniform standard to linguists, legislators, and linebackers. Cbl62 (talk) 23:21, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  It is incorrect that merely writing six academic journal articles, one of which has citations, would be enough for probable survival at AfD. There is a long history of discussions in which a much higher level of citation, to multiple articles, is required for WP:PROF#C1, the academic criterion you appear to be referring to. So you are starting your argument with a false assumption.

  It is also incorrect that a published biography of Don Thorson would be necessary to provide SIGCOV for him. Politicians who have won even lower-level offices almost always have in-depth coverage of their political views in the newspaper stories about their elections. In practice, NPOL acts as a barrier to entry, by pretending that newspaper election coverage is not significant even when it is.

  It is also incorrect that "an athlete who competed at the highest level of competition in their sport" (walked onto the field once) "will almost always have received SIGCOV". The falsehood of this assertion is the main reason we have stopped letting athletes have automatic notability based only on the league they played in. By now we have many Olympians deleted for lack of SIGCOV, despite having competed at the highest levels in their sports. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:37, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Commenting on your last two points: You say that politicians who win lower level offices always have SIGCOV of their political views, elections, etc. – I'm not so sure about that. I've gone through numerous members of the Delaware House of Representatives (one of the smallest legislatures, actually – I can't imagine what the 400-member New Hampshire House of Representatives is like) from the early 1800s and I don't think I've even found SIGCOV for half of them (in fact, for some I was only able to find a single mention in John Thomas Scharf's History of Delaware where he lists all of the state's past politicians with no further details). As for athletes, the Olympics is somewhat complicated; many have been deleted for failing GNG, but the thing is many of those were 1970s athletes from the Comoros or similar, for which sources are both offline and in a foreign language and the only possible way to find if they were covered would be if you lived in Comoros and spoke their language yourself! Now, when I look at US Olympians (for which I have historical source access for), I am almost always able to find sufficient SIGCOV. And for the NFL, MLB (Cbl62's two examples), it is true that almost everyone ever to step on the field (even once!) is notable – I think the only MLB player deleted was a one-gamer from 1873, and in the NFL nobody post-1930 has ever been deemed non-notable at AFD (besides one 1987 replacement player). BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:56, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Have you searched all of the archives of all of the newspapers from the times of their election and office holding, or merely looked for online coverage? —David Eppstein (talk) 00:50, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  Normally, I look at Google, then Google Books, then J. M. Runk's Biographical and Genealogical History of the State of Delaware (vol. i and ii), then Henry C. Conrad's History of the State of Delaware and Scharf's History of Delaware: 1609-1888, and then Newspapers.com. I don't think I'm missing anything likely to have coverage of these people. I mean, can you find in-depth coverage of Burton Waples (4th Delaware General Assembly)? BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:10, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  Can I? No, because I do not have easy access to an archive of local newspapers from that time and place. It sounds like, neither do you. Without that access, you are merely looking under the streetlight, not where the coverage is likely to exist. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:16, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  Try making an argument like that about a historical sportsperson – I'd bet I'd be AFD topic-banned if I made ten "keep" votes with that rationale. BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  BeanieFan11, regarding your point on New Hampshire, I think this discussion from 8 years ago is still valuable, particularly the points from Orangemike, DGG, and Cullen, in my opinion. Curbon7 (talk) 02:44, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  Presumably because legislators, even those representing a tiny constituency in Wyoming, are deemed inherently more important/encyclopedic than pop culture figures and athletes? I would support repealing WP:NPOL as I do think it is far too inclusive - to the point where it could be used to argue that Abbot Alto von Tannstein of Saint Emmeram's Abbey is presumed notable, despite us knowing nothing about him except his name and that he was the Imperial-Abbot of Saint Emmeram's Abbey between 1358 and 1385.

  Given some of the Olympian articles I have seen where we know less about the individual than that I suspect the only reason we don't have an article is because editors care less about 14th century Imperial-Abbots than they do about Olympians.

  Plus, SNG's that presume notability without requiring significant coverage to be found encourage editors to create microstubs; given my research on this topic which suggests that such microstubs are never expanded I think this is a bad idea; we should be encourage editors to at least create articles that contain information beyond what could be fitted into a list such that readers are at least partially satisfied by the information they can gain from it.

  However, I can't work on all SNG's at the same time; my current work on dealing with the aftermath of WP:NSPORTS2022 as well slowly working to build a consensus to up-merge WP:NSPECIES articles to the genus level means that I cannot also work on WP:NPOL. However, if you are willing to do so then I will support you. BilledMammal (talk) 01:22, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  BilledMammal, regarding your abbot example: do remember that WP:NOPAGE also exists and has been applied in this context (as was the case for the article of a 13th-century English MP a few months ago). If all an article says and can ever say is for example "Billed Mammal was an English MP who represented Yorkshire in 1260", then it would simply be redirected to Yorkshire (UK Parliament constituency) without much fuss. Curbon7 (talk) 02:39, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  I used to think so, but my experience with Olympians and, to a lesser extent, species have taught me otherwise. BilledMammal (talk) 02:41, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Curbon7: Could you link the discussion where the English MP was redirected? Thanks. BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:43, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  BeanieFan11, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John ? (MP for City of York); we don't even know the guy's last name! Curbon7 (talk) 02:50, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think I made some good points here at this mirror discussion, relating to why I think the New Hampshire argument is a strawman (stating in good-faith, not directed at anyone), and why I see NPOL as significant in countering Wikipedia's systemic racism issue. Additionally, disproving the presumption of significant coverage in the case of western politicians is quite simply as easy as "I checked but could not find enough coverage", which would thus invoke WP:NOPAGE for options, like redirection. Curbon7 (talk) 06:45, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

• @David Eppstein: Thank you for your reply. I respond briefly.

• My point about the linguist wasn't about how many academic citations are required to satisfy the numerical threshhold of WP:PROF#C1. Whether the requirement is 6 or 26 or 46 is not the essence of my point. The point is that most biographic subjects require SIGCOV about the person in reliable, independent sources. Academics are exempted from that requirement -- presumably because of a subjective value judgment that they are more encyclopedic than others.
• As for the legislator, take a look at politician AfDs. They are often kept as compliant with WP:NPOL without any discussion or showing of SIGCOV in multiple, reliable, independent sources.
• As for the linebacker, I'm not concerned with the one-game player or the Olympian microstub sourced only to a database, but with athletes who have had real careers. I've followed athlete AfDs for more than a decade and vote delete more often than keep BTW, e.g. Averell Spicer (deleted despite SIGCOV where there just wasn't enough on-field notability). All that said, there's no denying that athletes are being held to a higher standard of SIGCOV than academics or legislators. Cbl62 (talk) 00:57, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

• For niche topics that are at the edges of these notability questions, there is generally a lack of volunteer efforts. EG: We need projects like Women in Red to help draw editors to improve articles on notable women in history. I'm not saying there aren't those that have dived into this deep end voluntarily to expand (I can think of one editor trying their best expand topics related to African-Americans in the late 19th/early 20th century) but we tend to draw editors that want to edit in "popular" spaces, and so notability is tuned to avoid WP from becoming Fandom wikis. Masem (t) 22:43, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  I agree, and argue that we need to get and keep a large pool of editors from which we can convert some into working on weightier things. I know that's how I was converted into Wikipedia, and yet my proudest achievements here are things I've done to improve holocaust fiction, or User:Jclemens/GA#WP:Vital Articles reviewed. Without my first stupid edit [1] to Major-General's Song Wikipedia would never have gotten either from me. Jclemens (talk) 23:10, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  There is no "subjective value judgment that they [academics] are more encyclopedic than others". They are merely held to a different standard. The standard is actually significantly higher than the one we have historically used for athletes; we do not count an academic as notable merely because they once taught a class at Harvard, but only for a sustained and recognized record of scholarly contributions. And your emphasis on only "SIGCOV about the person" and not about what the person has actually done is spectacularly obtuse. We should have coverage about what the person has done, for all topics where the person is expected to have done something to become notable. That excludes maybe celebrities and nobility, but not many other people. For athletes, we should have coverage about their athletic performances. For politicians, we should have coverage about their offices and accomplishments in those offices. For novelists, we should have coverage about their novels. Coverage about their romantic partners or peccadillos or real estate purchases or whatever else is and should be incidental, not the main basis for their notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:24, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

spectacularly obtuse You're better than that comment, David. Yes, we do and should under WP:GNG expect "SIGCOV about the person" if the article in question is a biography. An academic's major contributions and areas of study are exactly that. If there is significant coverage about the person discussing their contributions to their field of study, of course that counts as "SIGCOV about the person." Unfortunately, NPROF does not require that -- it grants notability based on mere citation metrics and other criteria such as holding a "named chair" at a major institution of higher education. Do you know how many "named chairs" there are? A "named chair" used to be a mark of true preeminence, but today universities churn out such named/endowed chairs in prodigious quantities. For example, there are over 200 at UCSD alone. See here. And even more at UCLA. See here. USC has so many it takes five web pages to list them all. See here. Cbl62 (talk) 02:07, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree that the notability system has lots of problems, and it's hard to fix them because we don't even have a definition of wp:notability or it's objectives. My approach is to try to observe how that big fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem on average works and try to derive those definitions from that. My attempt of this is at Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works . My opinion is that it weighs three factors: 1. Availability of suitable sourcing to write an article from. 2. degree of real world notability/importance / impact, with recognition be sources being a metric for this 3. Degree of enclyclopic-ness (per the metrics in wp:not). So sourcing comes into play twice, under both #1 and #2. It doesn't need to meet all three (it's more like 2 out of 3) but all three have an influence. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 01:04, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

• An academic who has only been published and cited in one journal is never going to meet NPROF, and the number of citations is supposed to be analyzed in relation to the average of the broader field, with the threshold in many research disciplines being multiple thousands.

  Further, in my experience academics that solidly meet C1 do receive IRS SIGCOV (and @Cbl62, you personally know how high a standard I have for SIGCOV of sportspeople, so believe me when I tell you that my approach to assessing citation profiles of academics is even more rigorous and exhaustive than the research I do into sportsperson sourcing, especially on the few occasions I !vote to keep an academic). Lengthy, in-depth, secondary discussion of a person's contribution to a field by people unaffiliated with them is SIGCOV of the person even if it doesn't contain broad or "biographical" information. The more citations an academic has, the more likely it is for their scholarly activity to have been the subject of far more substantive coverage than six sentences in a local newspaper announcing a transaction. For many distinguished professors, this will amount to hundreds of instances of such coverage published in far higher quality sources than newspapers. JoelleJay (talk) 01:58, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

If all academics who satisfy C1 (including those who do so based on "citation metrics") "do receive IRC SIGCOV", then why do we need the SNG at all? Why not simply require a showing of such SIGCOV as we do with other biography articles? Or at a minimum, change it so that it operates simply as guidance like other SNGs? Also, did you see my comment above about named chairs? This and some of the other prongs of NPROF seem very dubious. Do the hundreds of named/endowed chair holders at UCSD, UCLA, and USC all satisfy GNG? Such shortcuts seem totally out of step with current SNG trends. Cbl62 (talk) 02:29, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

The answer to a question like "if [false premise] then why [unrelated consequence]" is vacuous truth. I don't think it is true that all academics who satisfy C1 do receive IRC SIGCOV, at least not if you throw away all sources connected with the universities those academics worked for or studied at, or commendations for prizes given to them, as being non-independent or primary, as GNG-followers are likely to do. After you throw away all of the publishers of sources with the interest and knowledge in the subject to write about them, who is left?

To pick a random example, I think Daniel Abadi passes multiple WP:PROF criteria, including #C1, #C3, and #C5. With a named chair at a good university, a major society fellowship, and many works with four-digit citation counts, he's easily in the top ranks of academic computer scientists. But he isn't famous, or a superstar (neither are most politicians, athletes, or other subjects of our biographies), and he also appears not to be a publicity hound. I wasn't able to find reliable independent in-depth sourcing about him in a quick search. So this is an example of the sort of person who you would be throwing out of our coverage if we switched to SNG: a leading scholar at a major research university, recognized by significant accolades both by his employer and by his professional society, with literally tens of thousands of published reliable independent sources citing his work.

Maybe you could troll through the 24821 papers citing his that Google Scholar claims to list, and among them find some smaller number that constitute significant coverage of his work. Or you could roll your eyes as another AfD participant cites those 24821 citations as SIGCOV without doing the work of finding the in-depth ones. Or you could accept that different subjects demand different standards and that WP:PROF has a significance-based standard that has been working smoothly for years. Or you could argue that it's out of step with trends (as if somehow that's a bad thing) and we should just list people when they are covered by trendy 30 in 30 lists, because that's SIGCOV and having tens of thousands of citations isn't. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:24, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Properly-calibrated "significance-based standards", operating as an alternative path to notability, may well be a truer measure of actual notability, but ...

(1) NPROF appears to have some serious calibration issues. The "Average Professor Test" used in NPROF appears to say that a researcher is notable if his citation metric is simply better than the average researcher in their field of study. "Better than average" is a low bar. The "named chair" criterion is another low bar, given the proliferation of named/endowed chairs at many major universities (see links above regarding USC, UCLA, and UCSD).

(2) NPROF is currently the only SNG that provides a significance-based path to notability as an alternative to GNG. Other groups could also benefit from having an alternative path. Cbl62 (talk) 14:00, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

NPROF was written before WP:N, and came about because of the fact that compared to nearly every other professions, academics are not typically written about in reliable sources; even in academic sources, authors do not write about other academics unless they are huge figures in the field (eg Einstein). NPROF was thus established that academics are generally more notable for the results of their research rather than their personal lives or other facets.

It makes no sense to apply this to other fields where there is far more coverage of people as people and not the topics they are associated with. For example, NCREATIVE does say that you can start with critically-notable works to presume the creator is notable, but in such fields, it is learned knowledge that these conditions will lead to significant coverage of the person themselves. Masem (t) 14:56, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether anyone has said or believes the contrary of this, but just for clarity: like NPROF, NAUTHOR/CREATIVE also offers a clearly-defined significance-based path to notability. The wording of ANYBIO is a bit less clear, and the language of NACTOR is slightly weaker (but still a fairly strong presumption).

These contrast, by the way, with the current version of SPORTSPERSON, which offers a weaker presumption; this situation reflects the current state of community discussions in the one area (other than geostubs) where the inclusionist-exclusionist axis still seems to have play. (Some editors participating in NSPORTS-related discussions seem to carry a fairly strong view, perhaps ultimately based in a vestigial Mind-body dualism, that the activities for which sportspeople are discussed and documented are of less encyclopaedic interest than the activities for which other people are discussed and documented. On the other hand, the mass-creation of sports articles from database materials is another factor, since the community has had an easier time raising notability standards in areas prone to bot-like stub creation than it has in preventing or rolling back the activity of bot-like stub creation itself.) Newimpartial (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

C1 already requires the sources to be independent, so we wouldn't be considering stuff from the subject's university/colleagues/awarding orgs anyway. I'm also not only considering C1a (citation metrics): other criteria, like C1b & c, strongly imply SIGCOV. Also, when someone "passes" my Scopus analysis script, I spot-check some of the citations looking for substantive coverage by non/infrequently-collaborating coauthors, which is what leads me to believe coverage of C1 researchers does exist that would at least meet BASIC. I'm not going to cross-reference citations with Abadi's coauthors, so some of these citations might be non-independent, but with a quick search I found:

[2]

Seminal work by Abadi et al. [2] proposes a rule-based encoding selection approach that relies on the global knowledge of the dataset (e.g., is the dataset sorted) to derive a decision tree for the selection. [...] Unfortunately, these approaches all have significant limitations. Abadi’s rule-based algorithm achieves a sub-optimal compression ratio and requires multiple passes on the original dataset, which becomes prohibitively expensive when dataset size increases. [...] Abadi et al. [2] propose an encoding selection method based on a hand-crafted decision tree. They use features that are similar to what we employ in this paper, including cardinality and sortedness (although binary), and empirically setup selection rules. We refer to this decision tree approach as Abadi in experiments. [...]
Case 1: Abadi Tree for High Cardinality Abadi’s approach has the following selection path: if the number of distinct values is greater than 50000, use either LZ compression or no compression based on whether the data exhibits good locality. However, we observe that when the number of distinct values is greater than 50000, there are still over 12% of attributes for which bit-packed encoding achieves better compression than LZ. For these cases, merely removing leading zeros result in better space savings than removing repeating values. Case 2: Abadi Tree for Run-Length Another selection path in Abadi’s approach is that when average run-length is greater than 4, it uses run-length encoding. However, we found that there are over 23% of columns having an average run-length greater than 4, where dictionary encoding performs best. This difference can be a factor of encoded key size compared with the value size, local dictionaries that leverage partially sorted datasets to provide small keys, and bit-packing or run-length dictionary hybrids.

[3]

Abadi et al. [1] integrate several compression techniques into the column-oriented DBMS C-Store. Their aim is to improve the query performance by compressing every column appropriately. From their experiments, they manually derive a decision tree, which is based on certain data characteristics and on the access patterns of a column. However, they consider only a small number of compression schemes. We intend to consider a high number of techniques and automatically create a cost model.

And several briefer mentions here: [4][5][6] JoelleJay (talk) 19:54, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Ok, but if you're counting such things as SIGCOV then an enormously larger number of academics would be notable, many more than the ones who are currently considered to pass WP:PROF. In that sense, I've seen (and sometimes made) arguments that PROF is much more restrictive than GNG, because even when we have multiple sources of this nature we will often argue that they're far from demonstrating a pass of PROF. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:30, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

I suppose I should clarify that my standards for SIGCOV are much higher than what is found in any one snippet above, and I would expect far more of the example citations to demonstrate BASIC. I'm just saying that direct coverage of researchers does exist and based on my spotchecks I would expect a much more exhaustive look through all the citations to reveal enough for a comprehensive overview. JoelleJay (talk) 02:00, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Those examples are direct coverage of the research of the researcher, not the researcher themselves, which I explained above is typical of what you will find in academic writings. Direct coverage of the researcher as a human being is rare, which is why NPROF allows coverage of the research of the researcher to qualify for notability. Masem (t) 02:03, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Because it would be insane to expect people to go through tens of thousands of generally pay-walled journal articles/books looking for the ones where the subject's research is discussed significantly. JoelleJay (talk) 18:54, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I find it funny how you're arguing this, whereas if I made that argument (coverage is paywalled, offline, extremely difficult to find) on sportspeople who were among the best of their era and won Olympic medals for Lithuania in the 1920s users would probably be calling for me to be topic-banned for "ignoring consensus." BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:18, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

The main issue isn't that they are paywalled or offline, it's that there are often tens of thousands of them to check. And there's a huge difference between coverage you presume exists somewhere and coverage that has been identified as definitely existing and definitely on that individual. JoelleJay (talk) 20:01, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

And there's also often hundreds of mentions of NFL players on Newspapers.com, but if I said keep because I can't go through them all I'd get chastised. Not to mention I've seen plenty of times when we've verified athletes have been covered in a book, but then you (or BilledMamml, etc.) have said that "delete because although we know they we're covered, we don't have evidence that its in-depth coverage..." BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:07, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

And how are you certain of these tens of thousands of articles existing on these professors? BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:09, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Citation databases...

Hundreds is far more manageable than thousands. We dismiss unverified claims of athlete coverage in offline books because in the cases of the deprecated SSGs the community has explicitly rejected any presumption of SIGCOV, and in other cases we don't have a single verified piece of IRS SIGCOV to meet SPORTSBASIC 5 so we cannot use meeting an extant SSG to presume further coverage exists. We also often can't tell from newspaper hits which sources are primary or non-independent, so there is far less of a guarantee that any particular source is usable, whereas with citations we know that virtually any coverage of the subject's work will be secondary, and we can see from author lists whether it's independent.

Anyway, I'm not saying that SIGCOV in citations is actually how NPROF works or should work, I'm saying that despite it being a GNG-independent SNG several criteria also happen to correspond well with SIGCOV so it COULD function as a GNG predictor. JoelleJay (talk) 22:09, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree that the notability system has lots of problems, and it's hard to fix them because we don't even have a definition of wp:notability or it's objectives. My approach is to try to observe how that big fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem on average works and try to derive those definitions from that. My attempt of this is at Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works . My opinion is that it weighs three factors: 1. Availability of suitable sourcing to write an article from. 2. degree of real world notability/importance / impact, with recognition be sources being a metric for this 3. Degree of enclyclopic-ness (per the metrics in wp:not). So sourcing comes into play twice, under both #1 and #2. It doesn't need to meet all three (it's more like 2 out of 3) but all three have an influence. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 01:04, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Underlying this whole discussion is the assumption that coverage only counts if it is freely available online. There are many subjects for which sources undoubtedly exist, but that very many editors dismiss because they can't find them with a five-second Google search. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:50, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

And the usefulness of a Google search diminishes by the day.... XOR'easter (talk) 19:15, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@XOR'easter - Yep. A lot of sites and information can no longer be found through Google or Bing searches anymore.KatoKungLee (talk) 15:52, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

This doesn't seem a useful distinction. If there are offline sources that are used in the article, then the sources are already there. If the sources are not used and are the only sources (which is when this situation would emerge), then no sourced text can be written. CMD (talk) 01:25, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

And particularly for BLPs, sourcing is not optional. Masem (t) 04:08, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

@Phil Bridger - Sadly, offline sources are also often useless. I've been involved in an AfD or two where a book was listed as a reference, but no one in the discussion had the book. So, that source was discarded. Not only do you need to have the book, you have to make it available for others and you need to be on the site regularly for the rest of your life in case someone decides to AfD it. It's nonsense.KatoKungLee (talk) 15:57, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

The well is beyond poisoned at this point. Therapyisgood (talk) 02:41, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

A case that well illustrates that quantity of sources is far less important that quality is currently at deletion review. The argument has been made that a subject must be notable because there are 20 sources in the article. This proposal would simply lead to more such arguments being made. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:50, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

There's another one currently listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academics and educators where an argument has been made that a subject must be notable (under GNG) because there are 49 sources, despite earlier analysis showing that most of those sources are non-independent or non-in-depth. It's sadly common. Even sadder the closers often buy these arguments are use them as the basis for a no-consensus close. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:05, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

I've seen multiple AfDs where the response is to add literally dozens of mentions. We need to figure out whether 80 bare mentions equates to two or three instances of sigcov, because that's an argument I'm seeing. Valereee (talk) 04:30, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

No, a certain number of trivial mentions should not add up to significant coverage; that would only encourage the use of low-quality sources and, consequently, to create/keep low-quality articles. Any truly notable subject should have at least a few legitimate examples of significant coverage. JMB1980 (talk) 18:34, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me that when somebody introduces new sources during a deletion discussion, almost nobody actually checks these sources. I've seen many low-quality articles saved from deletion based solely on somebody finding trivial mentions and/or primary/non-independent sources, then claiming notability has been established. JMB1980 (talk) 18:38, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

North8000 describes, correctly, that Wikipedia is a bug fuzzy ecosystem. I think, in general, this description work across the many topics and participants across this project. I see debates about notability standards largely around the most difficult cases, but even as clearer standards may eliminate some discussions at AfD, new cases will crop up (especially if there is a push for quantity of sources over the quality of the source).

In many ways, we define what can be included in this project in relation to what is excluded ("if no reliable, independent sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. Wikipedia's concept of notability applies this basic standard to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics"). While a topic must be "worthy of notice", we chose a standard for separate, stand-alone pages that elevates coverage over (fame, importance, or popularity). The trade-off is that someone regularly winning the Springfield Apple Pie contest and receiving coverage for that (or someone who does one thing one time and receives widespread coverage), is more likely to pass our notability test than someone at the top ranks of their profession (or someone who news outlets might seek out for commentary about events in the news). I don't have an answer to these questions, but I am hesitant to change how our ecosystem works. --Enos733 (talk) 18:59, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Do subject-specific notability guidelines trump the general guideline?

The journal Physics Essays used to be listed in the Scopus database, which, according to Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals), implies the journal was "considered by reliable sources to be influential in its subject area" and therefore should be presumed to have been notable and – since once notable means always notable – thereby merits a standalone article. However, no reliable sources can be found that discuss the journal directly in any detail, not even to mention that it was delisted from all major citation databases, or that it started to publish crackpot articles, so there is no encyclopedic content to base an article on. The formulation in the lead paragraph of the guideline [my emphasis by underlining] that "[a] topic is presumed to merit an article if: 1. It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG) listed in the box on the right, ..." has been interpreted as implying that meeting the SNG for academic journals trumps failing the GNG, so that the result of a deletion discussion was keep. Is that interpretation of the formulation quoted above intended? If not, it should IMO be reformulated, to make clear that the SNGs do not override the GNG. (In general, the subject-specific guidelines assess the importance of the topic, but do not address the availability of significant coverage.)  --Lambiam 09:45, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

You can interpret your question in a few ways. Do SNGs trump the GNG according to written policy? Yes, as you've quoted, right now they're clearly described as alternatives to each other. Do SNGs trump the GNG in predicting what will survive an AfD? Mostly yes, I'd say. If something clearly passes a well-established SNG (BIO, PROF, NFILM, etc.), usually nobody will even bother to assess the level of coverage. However there can be exceptions with SNGs that are in disrepute (like NFOOTY was for a while) or due to particularly bloody-minded participants. Do SNGs trump the GNG in the abstract theorycrafting beloved of this talk page? I'm sure we're about to hear 30,000 words for and against...

On that specific article/AfD, I'd bear in mind that notability does not guarantee a standalone page. – Joe (talk) 11:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

As a general rule, don't create articles unless you can demonstrate they comply with GNG. They might survive an AfD now, but that is no guarantee that they will survive one in a year - just look at what happened with WP:NSPORT. BilledMammal (talk) 11:56, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Just say that you want to push editors off Wikipedia. I mean, that's how you sound. LilianaUwU ^{(talk / contributions)} 15:30, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

@LilianaUwU: Can we please keep this discussion civil? BilledMammal (talk) 17:07, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree with the last two responses. Now to note a few fine points. "GNG" is used to refer to two different things. One is the entire WP:Notability page which I think most would agree is authoritative. The other is the sourcing-GNG which constitutes the lower ~2/3 of that page. The beginning of the wp:notability page is what gives SNG's their status as a (at least temporary) "way in" without having to establish sourcing-GNG compliance. Next, regarding your "therefore should be presumed to have been notable and – since once notable means always notable" is a bit vague, and conflates actually notability with "determined to be wp:notable at a particular time". By most readings, that statement is incorrect. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:04, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

We had a major RFC about two years ago that we cannot absolutely defined the roles that the SNG can override the GNG or vice versa or other ways because of the ways some of the SNGs are written.

However, key is the word "presumed". Notability (which at the core is about significant coverage from independent sourcing) can always be challenged, and while the GNG or SNGs can be used to establish an article in main space to encourage wiki building, if no significant amount of coverage can be found, deletion may be possible. Masem (t) 13:05, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

WP:N and WP:GNG really should be split into two pages. WP:N refers to the broad concept. WP:GNG refers to one way to demonstrate a topic satisfies WP:N. Having them be a single page just leads to endless confusion. RoySmith (talk) 13:11, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

GNG applies generally as a principle of notability. It makes no sense to split that, only make it clear that GNG is not, at its core, the whole of notability. Masem (t) 13:30, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

And what better way to make that clear than to make it its own page? RoySmith (talk) 13:51, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

It is far better in overall comprehension to have them together. To separate them just to drive home the point that the GNG is not the same as WP:N would require a lot of duplication of text between the two pages and that's just a mess. Masem (t) 14:55, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

• We need to get away from the idea that there is conflict between the SNGs and the GNG. They should work in harmony. If that means tweaking the guidelines, then let’s tweak. The SNGs should not be seen as alternatives to GNG, but support for GNG. The fact is, GNG is highly likely to be met if an SNG is met. Is this always the case? No… but it is so often true that we should give SNG compliant articles the “benefit of the doubt”, and only challenge if a very thorough search can not find sources to support the article. Blueboar (talk) 17:50, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
• Badly-posed question based on a misunderstanding. Actual SNGs state clearly their relation to GNG. Some of them (like the athletic ones) give a supposition of notability that must be confirmed by referring to GNG. Some of them (like the ones for businesses) strengthen GNG by stating that only certain kinds of sources count towards notability. Some of them (like the one for professors) stands independently from GNG and provides an alternative track to notability (which I don't think is the same thing as overriding GNG; it still allows its topics to be notable through the GNG instead). But the question here seems to be triggered by Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals), which is not actually a notability guideline at all; it is an essay. It has been invoked in AfDs, but really it should be interpreted as providing a commentary on how GNG might be interpreted as applying to its topics, rather than providing a presumption of notability, modification to GNG, or alternative path, as actual SNGs do. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)