Wikipedia talk:Notability

The application of the "presumption" of notability

This is a result of a recent AFD ([1] for Chalmers Tschappat, which is presently at DRV,) but extends beyond that.

The wording of "presumed" here and in the various subject-specific notability guidelines has, as best I recalled, always meant that a fair challenge to the presumption can be made if the article cannot be expanded to otherwise meet the GNG or other policy-related issues. The present case is a football player from the 1920s who played all of 2 games at the pro level (for the time) and has since passed away. This meets the presumption given by WP:NGRIDIRON, with little question on that qualification. However, editors have looked for the existance of sources (understanding that we are talking having to search print archives and not online) and have come up empty, and the article as in its present state lacks any secondary source (* this is a possible point of contest whether some of these are really secondary sources, but for the purposes of this discussion, let's assume they are all primary). Now, obviously you can't prove the negative, that there are no sources whatsoever, but you can make the best good faith demonstration that where one should find sourcing, none exist.

In past discussions here and other places that I recall, this means that the presumption has been challenged - and thus invalidating the presumption given by NGRIDIRON - and that with the AFD, the burden shifts to those that want to keep it to show better sourcing is out there (we don't need the sources incorporated but we need them identified). However, at this AFD, people were questioning even that approach, and arguing that meeting NGRIDIRON means no contest to keep the article at all (there was even one speedy keep !vote). In my opinion, the latter thinking completely nullifies our approach to notability which has generally been non-inherited inclusion, to a position where inclusion can be inherited if the presumption given by a subject-specific notability guideline cannot be challenged at all.

Mind you, there is the issue of how well the absence of sources has been demonstrated in such cases, but this should be considered a separate argument. For example, in this specific case, an internet-only search is clearly far from an effective demonstration knowing the bulk of sources were print at the time. But we do have (AGF in its excution) a reasonably good search of local paper sources that have come up with nothing, and as this player played 90 years ago and has since passed away, the chances of new sources coming out is unlikely. To counter, if we were talking about a similar case but for a player in the 1970s, there's still a possibility that sourcing could come. The extent and approach an editor does when challenging the presumption of notability should be a consideration by !voters in such discussions to make sure that there is high confidence sources simply don't exist.

To the main point, if an editor offers "I've done all these offline searches and can't find secondary information about this topic where their active period was nearly a century ago", it should be an obvious case of where we can fairly challenge the presumption of notability, and any subject-specific notability criteria that might have allowed the article should be ignored. But this point is being challenged in the aforementioned AFD, and to be fair, our WP:N page does not really express this concept well, though elements of this point are throughout notability policy as well as at WP:BEFORE. I want to stress that this challenge must be predicated on effort by the AFD nominator to make their case that no sourcing likely exists. If someone nominated this example article saying "I found nothing in google search", that is not a sufficient case, and unless someone else fills in the gaps and does that work, I would fully expect other editors to call out that poor search and vote !keep. That is, I know some editors fear that this approach would allow mass deletion runs for articles that might meet a subject-specific notability guideline but lack significant sourcing in the article, but the importance of demonstrating the effort gone to to prove the lack of sources would limit the rate these could be effectively nominated (eg avoiding the fait accompli aspect).

As such, my question to others is if what I've described in how the presumption of notability should work represents what other editors believe and (if there is anything in practice) used in practice, and if this is the case, should we add advice on how these cases should be handled on WP:N or elsewhere?

Or the tl;dr version - does notability's "presumption" allow for challenging a topic that meets the letter of an SNG by sufficient demonstration of a lack of further GNG-type sourcing/expectation for additional sourcing to come? --MASEM (t) 01:20, 17 August 2014 (UTC) Posted invites to the talk pages of the 4 SNGs that deal with people: BIO, NSPORTS, MUSIC, and Academics. --MASEM (t) 01:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

When a rule of thumb has proven 95% accurate it's a waste of the community's time to bicker over the borderline cases in the remaining 1/20th of the pages. That's what a "presumption" of notability or non-notability lays out. Is there at least one real place where nothing of interest has ever happened? Sure. At least one secondary school that never did anything newsworthy? Probably. At least one footballer who was neither good nor bad enough to draw any particular comment in his brief career? Apparently. But it's a complete misallocation of time and energy to figure out which ones are those exceptions.

As for what to do when someone DOES decide to go against good judgment, spends a few afternoons researching the local creek, and discovers that there aren't the assumed sources, the simplest solution is to associate article sets of that sort with lists whenever possible. That way, in the rare case where we end up concluding an article is a permanent dead-end we can redirect it rather than having one missing piece in an otherwise complete set. --erachima talk 01:49, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the point is that the SNG criteria should be set that the number of false positive - topics that meet the criteria but lack any sourced to really build out an encyclopedic article - should be minimal, and the process I'm describing is the exceptional case when presumption should be considered failed. SNGs have never been outright inclusion guidelines, and the ability to challenge the presumption is the differentiation point for that. --MASEM (t) 02:17, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• Well ... when no sources are found, it's not so much that the GNG governs that as WP:V does, which is a core policy of the encyclopedia that no SNG can contravene or supercede. I don't consider applying that standard a "waste of time" -- it's my time to waste, after all, and I believe that I'll be the judge of how my time and energy is to be allocated.

  Beyond that, it's a frequent deal at AfD for Keep proponents to airily opine that sources must exist, often with some excuse attached: the subject is allegedly prominent in a non-English speaking country, the subject is from a time before Internet links, the subject pertains to a group with a distaste for having its deeds chronicled. I believe that, too, contradicts WP:V -- either sources ought to be produced (in which case an article is valid) or they are not (in which case no article can be sustained). The latter never prejudices recreation of a deleted article, if reliable sources supporting the subject's notability come to light.

  My own tl;dr -- no matter the rule of thumb, WP:V still requires that subjects be discussed in "significant detail" in reliable sources, and articles which fail of that standard should be deleted. Ravenswing 04:13, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• If there were literally no sources, it'd be definitionally impossible to have the article. (Or else it'd be some sort of weird real-life fanfiction, as occasionally shows up at AfD.) "No sources" here is referring not to an absence of sources asserting existence (in this specific example, we know there was a football player and he did two things) but to an absence of independent sources proving anyone ever cared about the topic. In other words, to pages that are permanent stubstubs. --erachima talk 04:29, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• If all we can say about a person, from third party sources, is that they existed and did something, but with no additional discussion or context, then we shouldn't have a permastub about that person. Topics in an encyclopedias should be the subject of significant discussion in secondary sources to demonstrate we're better than indiscriminate inclusion (we are not a who's who database). Now, a point here, and comes up in the above example, is whether notability per the GNG has been demonstrated once the SNG criteria has been challenged, and that's a fair debate for any such case, but it still remains that if consensus agrees that the GNG isn't met, and further sources have been found lacking, then this is where deletion should come into play. --MASEM (t) 05:18, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• As a PR note, Masem, there is no faster way to kill your own proposal than to drive away all the potential participants by filibustering it with aggressive, repeated, blank assertions of your already perfectly clear stance. --erachima talk 05:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• No, I don't think the point I made above was clear (in that there is additional determinations to be made), given your previous comment. I want to make sure it is clear that we're looking for, in general, more than just raw data about people when we are looking to consider the presumption of notability from an SNG. This is not a simple concept so I'm make sure it is clear that there's places for discussion and consensus-determination in the process. --MASEM (t) 06:00, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

If we have sources that show that a subject is significant enough for an encyclopedia entry then we should keep it, even if it remains a permastub. The SNGs are not about a presumption that the GNG can be met, they are the only part of the notability guideline that is (generally) based on common sense regarding what we should and should not include. There is nothing wrong with properly sourced stubs. We only require in-depth coverage of a subject to have an in-depth article about them here. No other encyclopedia limits content to exclude topics simply because a long and detailed article can't be written. --Michig (talk) 06:56, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The problem is this idea creates a precedent that we can have an article on a person that just contains basic data (DOB, hometown, profession, etc.) and call that good. With that thinking, I'm pretty sure we could have an article on nearly every college-educated person in North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania (at minimum) simply because these are details that you can find and source - around a billion or so persons. That's not our purposes - we're not meant to be a who's who. --MASEM (t) 13:49, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely not correct as the vast majority of those would not meet significance/importance criteria for inclusion. We do have many acceptable stubs on people who are obviously notable (prime ministers, etc.) where we only have basic information about them. What criteria do you think every other encyclopedia applies? Do you think they have some bizarre criterion like the GNG and only include people when they can find lots of independent sources that discuss the subject in detail, or do you think they have criteria more akin to out SNGs, looking simply for verifiable evidence that someone is important enough to be included? Whether or not someone is considered notable simply because they played in one or two matches is a different matter - I think many of our sports guidelines go too far in terms of inclusion, but if the guidelines work for the vast majority of cases and mean that we can avoid lengthy discussions about every case then there's some value in that. --Michig (talk) 14:07, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

If we're talking something akin to Britannica, they likely have requirements that are far stricter than our GNG, limiting the inclusions of persons to a worldwide influence, because they are limited for space. They'll have athletes, but we're talking people like Babe Ruth or Michael Jorden, and wouldn't even be thinking of including minor league/college players. I'm not saying we have to be that strict, but the inclusion approach via notability should be resulting in an article that is more than just fundamental facts. --MASEM (t) 14:20, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Britannica's inclusion criteria are likely nothing like the GNG and are probably more akin to a stricter version of our SNGs - stricter largely because they are limited on space. Wikipedia can and should have a wider scope and should also include topics that more specialist encyclopedias would include, and again go beyond that because we don't have the space limitation. It is entirely reasonable to set out criteria for when a topic is 'important enough' to be included, which is what the SNGs so. If a topic is important enough but we can't find much beyond basic information about why they are important, the WP:V dictates a short article that may appropriately be merged to an article on a wider topic. Little content isn't a good argument for deleting topics that we deem important enough for inclusion. If some of the topics we have are not important enough then we should change the applicable SNG, but be pragmatic about whether doing so would have a net positive affect. --Michig (talk) 14:38, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

NSPORTS' logic that every player that has played a pro game is presumed notable is fair, as long as we have a way to challenge that presumption. I've been in debate at NSPORTS about this before, but I agree that the logic that someone that has played pro sports has likely played earlier in their career to become pro , and thus there's a likeliness of significant coverage in sources being available at different points. This works for the majority of pro players, but we also should admit it will have false positives, such as this case. An SNG having false positives is not a bad thing, as long as the number of false positives is not high. This allows the chance for articles to be created and grow that might initially struggle until a strict GNG reading. As long as the ability to challenge an SNG's presumption is in place and decide whether the topic really merits inclusion, then there is nothing really wrong with NSPORTS. --MASEM (t) 15:44, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The SNGs and the GNG hold equal weight. This idea that SNGs are only there to show topics that can likely meet the GNG is not reflected in WP:N, and I would suggest you drop that argument. Any guideline can always be challenged, but that doesn't mean that other editors will agree with you. Most guidelines are decided on by an extremely small number of editors compared to the number that are affected by those guidelines, which is a problem in many areas, but any guideline should be treated purely as a rule of thumb and not treated like a policy. --Michig (talk) 16:01, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, we're looking for notability, meaning we have an article that meets WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and is appropriately encyclopedic (eg does not fail NOT). Notability's aspect here is to drive editors to find sources to meet those polices, which is described by having GNG-quality sources (that is, significant coverage through secondary, independent sources). An article that is only primary sources is not appropriate for WP regardless of an SNG allowing for the presumption of notability; but we do use that presumption to give editors the ability to show that there is more than just primary sources for that article. Importantly, SNGs are not outright "inclusion guidelines" (we've debated even if they can be called that). --MASEM (t) 16:09, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The sports-specific notability guidelines to which Masem is referring have explicitly taken the approach that they do not supplant the general notability guideline, and specify criteria that, if met, result in a high probability that the general notability guideline is met. Other subject-specific notability guidelines, of course, may shape their guidance in other ways. isaacl (talk) 16:18, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

In the real world, a subject's notability is generally determined by its accomplishments or impact on the world. However, as this involves editorial judgment based on a value system, it's not something that Wikipedia's consensus based decision-making process is able to handle well. isaacl (talk) 16:22, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• (As I wrote in the DRV) the real issue, IMHO, is that sport people seem to have, in many cases, a special passport to be considered notable as WP:NSPORT has, in some of its sub-sections, the looser inclusion criteria of the whole encyclopedia. Eg how the hell a footballer who played ten minutes in the Albanian First Division or a footballer who played a season in the Italian fourth division should be presumed notable individuals is still a mystery. Compared to other categories of people some NSPORT criteria, presumably written by fans of the relevant sports, turn into a complete joke. My "commonsenserule" for most of the WP topics which apparently fail GNG is "Is there a chance a printed encyclopedia (even a very specific encyclopedia about a relevant niche field) would take a record of this subject?", in many cases of NSPORT-related people the answer is an obvious no. The whole concept of "presumption a source exist" is IMHO correct, I regularly work on subjects whose sources are offline, the real problem here is that some criteria presume certain categories of people are notable when actually most of them are non notable and notability in their cases is an exception, not the rule. Cavarrone 07:02, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

  Beats me -- you could, with just as much accuracy, ask how the hell some obscure scientist no one knows anything about should be presumed notable just because he invented something. This is the sort of argument we chide inexperienced editors for making, because they are substituting their own preconception of "notability" (e.g., "I think it's important") for Wikipedia's.

  A common gripe, raised on this talk page, is the disproportionate amount of press sports figures -- even those some of us think ought to be deemed unimportant -- receive in our culture. Yet, frankly, celebrities and sports figures are people our culture considers noteworthy, however much that might bother us. Since Wikipedia bases the concept of notability around subjects being discussed in multiple reliable sources, then it is indeed far more likely that a 4th tier footballer meets that standard than a more obscure academic. There's no other standard that's anything but completely subjective: how do you measure, exactly, how much more important Biochemist X is than Footballer Y? By what standard do you gauge how much more important to the world biochemistry is vs. football ... a presumption that, I wager, the great majority of the world's population would dispute. Ravenswing 07:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• No, my point is NOT that "celebrities and sports figures are people our culture considers not noteworthy", my point is that many sport people that our WP criteria consider notable have no reason to be considered notable. Your example is misleading and significant at the same time, as we don't have any criterium which considers a scientist who invented something automatically notable (he/she is asked to pass GNG), while we have a criterium which consider a ten-minutes-minor-league-footballer automatically notable. A joke! And even assuming such above criterium would exist, the "category" scientists who invented something ordinarily have reliable coverage to support the claim of notability, even if a few of them could apparently fail (probably as they invented something which is actually non-notable itself). The "category" 4th tier footballers ordinarily do NOT receive significant coverage and they remain low-profile individuals, even if a few of them is an exception. Cavarrone 07:50, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• Want to dial down the hyperbole there? Foaming at the mouth about "4th tier footballers" being generally notable is all well and good, but that's a joke. Of all the nations which play soccer, the only one where the Football WikiProject considers 4th tier notable is soccer-mad England, where I would be astonished to find a 4th tier player without significant coverage. (If you can find any yourself, please feel free to nominate him for AfD, let me know, and I'll be happy to toss in a Delete vote.) That being said, the list of "fully professional leagues" NFOOTY maintains is an essay which neither shackles AfD nor overrides the GNG.

  Secondly, I've no idea from where your implication that scientists have no governing SNG, and that they must rely solely on the GNG, comes, but I recommend you look up WP:SCHOLAR, which list nine such criteria, heavily footnoted. Ravenswing 11:29, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• User:Ravenswing, please point me where WP:SCHOLAR has a criterium which says scientists who invented something are automatically notable as you said above, otherwise you are joking. I NEVER said that scientists have no governing SNG, on the contrary I said "WP:NSPORT has, in some of its sub-sections, the looser inclusion criteria of the whole encyclopedia", ie compared to any other SNG. Stop assuming that if someone dares question the legitimacy of NSPORT criteria should question the whole SNG concept. As I said above, I am not agaist SNGs in general, I am agaist several loose criteria which NSPORT has. And you are also patiently wrong about NFOOTY, Lega Pro Seconda Divisione footballers (the example I made above) are 4th tier footballers, they ordinarily do NOT receive significant coverage and they remain low-profile individuals. My best, Cavarrone 12:22, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• I personally think we should mainly reserve the presumption for offline/historical subjects and lists of characters/episodes. (The latter mainly as a formatting measure: a show article with reception + a clean list pretty much always reads better than attempting to incorporate it season-by-season on the list pages or having a merged list.) --erachima talk 07:40, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
• Only Source for Article in Question: here. This is what we are arguing about. This player's "profile" from a sports statistic website is the only source that supports this subject's claim to notability.

I did not nominate this AfD, but I believed that it presented an excellent test case of a sports notability issue that has troubled me for some time, and I tried to focus the AfD discussion on the core issue presented:

Whether an American football player who played in two AFPA/NFL regular season games in 1921, a fact supported only by a sports statistics website (see pro-football-reference.com) and by no significant coverage in any other independent, reliable sources, could rely solely on the one-game presumption of notability per NGRIDIRON as an absolute, or whether in the absence of any other significant coverage regarding the subject's pro playing career such presumption of notability could be rebutted.

If not, then the word "presumption" does not have its usual and ordinary meaning in the English language, and NGRIDIRON does not extend a presumption of notability, but instead creates an absolute grant of notability regardless of what reliable sources are or are not available. This is an open issue generally, it was at the heart of the disputed AfD, and it is the core issue to be discussed here. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 09:50, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• There've been many sports-related AfDs that has been closed as Delete for failure to provide sources, no matter what the particular SNG holds. There is indeed, I believe, a majority of people over at NSPORTS (where this argument has been recently beaten into dead horse land) who firmly believe that the SNGs do not override the GNG. Waving this particular AfD as a bloody flag doesn't mean that the GNG is broken, doesn't mean that the SNGs are broken and doesn't mean that WP:V or WP:N are broken. It means that (as sometimes happens at AfD) three people shoved through a bad decision, and that the closing admin (as often happens at AfD) didn't have the balls to rule for policy over a head count.

  The problem here isn't that there's something wrong with the SNGs. The problem is that the AfD process has broken down, and so few editors participate in it now that a well-organized claque of just a handful of editors can pretty much prevent any deletion. Ravenswing 11:17, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

"There is no deadline" applies to cleaning out articles we shouldn't have, just as much as creating articles we should have. There is no real harm in keeping a perma-stub for a few more months, and then filing a second AfD, noting that there have been continued attempts to find more in the way of sourcing, and that these attempts continue to be fruitless. Indeed, it can often takes several discussions to overcome the initial "presumpton" of notability. Blueboar (talk) 12:40, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

One question I asked initially is if we need language in guideline (WP:N, most likely) that explains how presumption works, so that there is actually a shortcut people can point to at AFD so that editors/closers are aware of this established precedent. The concept is there, but you have to read between the lines to extract it presently. --MASEM (t) 14:06, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• The basic criteria at WP:SPORTCRIT are
  "A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has been the subject of multiple published non-trivial secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject. The guidelines on this page are intended to reflect the fact that sports figures are likely to meet Wikipedia's basic standards of inclusion if they have, for example, participated in a major international amateur or professional competition at the highest level (such as the Olympics)."
  The second sentence enables the presumptions for individual sports, such as WP:NGRIDIRON, which say that subjects are presumed notable, not likely to be notable. Relying on those presumptions are hundreds (thousands?) of short "articles" on sportspersons whose sole evidence of existence is a listing on one or two directory sites (random example: Gerry Sherry). Stanning (talk) 14:49, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

A key point is that to challenge that presumption, the person that aimed to seek their deletion needs to do a reasonably deep, likely offline, search of that person to be able to demonstrate that no sourcing likely exist. I could not, for example, take Sherry's article to AFD challenging the presumption without having to searching of local papers in the Louisville locale (as well as higher levels) to prove no in-depth coverage exists; if all I did as the AFD nominator was to say "I did a Google search found nothing", I should be expected that closed as a speedy keep for failing to follow BEFORE in light that they pass NGRIDIRON. There is an inordinate amount of work that would be needed to challenge those hundreds/thousands of articles, so while they may be on the cusp in terms of being potential deletion targets, I don't see anything that would even approach fait accompli-levels of AFDs for them. --MASEM (t) 15:34, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• Yes, Stanning, Gerry Sherry is another example of the NGRIDIRON presumption of notability in action. He appeared in one NFL game in 1926 at a time when the NFL was not the Big Deal of professional sports leagues which it later became. The article is supported by links to four different sports statistics/directory sites, all of which are derived from a single source: NFL.com. There is no full name, birth date, birth place, college -- nada, zip, nothing -- to even begin a semi-respectable stub article. A simple Google search reveals no significant coverage of the subject online; in fact, the only hits are those for the four sports stats sites and several Wikipedia mirror articles. It is possible that there are hard-copy sources, or on-line newspaper sources buried behind paywalls, but the question is put: by what objective standard is Gerry Sherry "notable?" Or stated another way, what about Gerry Sherry is "encyclopedic?" What makes Gerry Sherry worth remembering? Would it not be better to create an NFL Kentucky Colonels roster list, for which a better argument could be made for the team's notability per WP:NORG? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:39, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
• To be clear, I'm not pointing at NFL only; Gerry Sherry is just, as I said, a random example. The same applies to most team sports. Stanning (talk) 08:58, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• Understood and agreed. Another editor, Jogurney, makes the same point regarding association football/soccer below. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 11:21, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• It is laughable that Ravenswing could comment that I "didn't have the balls to rule for policy over a head count". The close has been taken to DRV on the very basis that a head count should have resulted in "no consensus". Indeed it should, so clearly I didn't do a headcount. On the very same page at DRV there are two other closes of mine being challenged that a raw headcount would have come to a different conclusion. I commonly take on closes of difficult AfDs that no one else seems willing to touch and I believe I have more balls to return an unpopular policy based close than most.

Masem's fundamental argument here is that when an article based on an SNG is challenged at AfD the measure of notability should then be the GNG. I have to ask, if that is the case, what are the SNG for? We may as well say more simply that the criterion is GNG and forget about everything else. Masem makes a great deal of the phrase "presumtion of notability" in the guidelines and seems to believe that that the meaning of that is it is presumed the article will meet GNG if researched. However, that is not what WP:N actually says. It applies the term (in the lede) to both the GNG and SNG, and to WP:NOT to boot. It links the phrase to the article rebuttable presumption. My reading of that is that it is intended that any inclusion guideline can be rebutted on the grounds that the article is not, in fact, notable despite meeting the criteria.

Whatever criteria are used to establish notability, it is still necessary to meet WP:V. This is a matter of policy and it supercedes all guidelines. However, WP:V does not say, as Ravenswing seems to think, that sources with "significant detail" are required. The phrase, or equivalent, does not appear anywhere. WP:V only requires that the material in the article is verifiable. No in-depth coverage is needed anywhere, everything can be verified from passing mentions. That would not be enough to establish notability unless it met at least one notability guideline as well, but if it does so meet one, then notability is indicated.

We could dump the SNG altogether, or, as Masem suggests, relegate them to a secondary role of merely indicating that the GNG might be met. However, I do not think that would be a good idea. Relying solely on the GNG puts us at the mercy of the vagaries of what the press choose to cover and the popularity of the latest fashion in whatever. A printed encyclopaedia would never work that way. It would instead decide, for instance, to include an article on every order of birds, or every important 20th century philosopher. Wikipedia does not, and cannot, work this way because we do not have a chief editor who can arbitrate on what is, and what is not, important to include. Nevertheless, the SNG partially fulfill this role and we should keep them where useful.

That's not to say that I think that the SNG are all wonderful. Some are horribly liberal in what they allow, particularly WP:MUSIC for instance. Some could certainly do with a major overhaul, but that is no reason to abolish them or to make them completely ineffective by subordinating them to GNG. SpinningSpark 15:37, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• The WP:N argument is a red herring. WP:V demands that we base articles on content from third-party sources independent of the subject. You can't meet that demand without sources.—Kww(talk) 16:08, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Who said you can? SpinningSpark 16:20, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
  • I will agree with you to the extent I think arguments about which notability "law" trumps the other here distracted from more fundamental quality issues with the current state of the article (without saying whether those quality issues undermine the article's very claim to existence). I'm really bothered by the article's direct citation to census records. I know from my own family research that those tend to be rife with errors, both because of incorrect self-reporting and because of transcription errors by the census taker, and then there's the problem of being confident that a record is even about the same person... postdlf (talk) 16:39, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
• The premise the OP seems to hold is that the SNGs are never more than placeholders pending confirmation of whether GNG is satisfied. This is not an uncommon view, but it has never been enshrined by consensus, and it strikes me as coming from a wikilegislator approach to guidelines rather than describing community practice, which is far more flexible, as is appropriate for guidelines. There have been numerous AFDs closed with clear consensus that a subject should be kept purely for meeting a SNG. These have not typically expressed that there was anything tentative about the decision, such as "keep for now per SNG, provided GNG is later demonstrated." I think many editors believe the SNGs reflect judgments as far as what subjects the encyclopedia should cover. On the other hand, there have also been numerous AFDs closed with clear consensus that, while a SNG may be met in that particular instance, GNG is not and in that particular instance deletion is therefore appropriate. The former is probably more common than the latter. Regardless, given that these are guidelines, it's up to the AFD participants to determine which guidelines to apply to a particular article and whether to apply it. I have seen few AFDs bogged down in interminable arguments between whether SNGs or GNG should hold sway in a particular case, though obviously there are disagreements, but it's not particularly fruitful to frame them as legalistic ones over whether "GNG is necessary but not sufficient" or "satisfying an SNG is always sufficient but not necessary." I simply don't see the need for more guidance in this area.

  For those who still feel compelled to introduce new rules, I think it would be good to have a rule against initiating policy discussions or proposals on the basis of one XFD you don't like. postdlf (talk) 16:18, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

  • What we are looking for at the end of the day are encyclopedic articles. These are articles that go beyond primary sources to explain why a topic is worthy of inclusion in WP. This is what our presumption of notability should be checked against, though that concept is captured by the GNG's requirement of significant coverage by independent secondary sources, and certainly not through primary-only sources. Also to add a key factor here is that while I am sure there are plenty of AFDs where an article was kept against a claim that the GNG was not met is that someone actually went to the effort to show there's very likely no additional sourcing to ever meet the goal of an encyclopedic article. This is a difference in most of those cases that you're likely including above, and if someone nom's an article claiming "no GNG sourcing" but hasn't done any appropriate legwork to fix that, a "keep" result is completely reasonable. --MASEM (t) 16:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
    • I'm already aware you think this because you've said it already, largely in your OP. Nothing's accomplished by repeating yourself. postdlf (talk) 16:39, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• We can often verify the encyclopedic relevance of a subject without finding sources that offer detailed coverage. The only thing that significant coverage in reliable sources gives us compared to less significant coverage in reliable sources is the ability to create a more detailed article. This is why the GNG when used alone as an argument for excluding topics is fundamentally flawed and why we need SNGs to provide some balance. --Michig (talk) 16:47, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

SNGs were not meant to be, in the long-term, balancers for content. WP reflects what sources covers, and if a topic is not covered in detail by sources, we shouldn't have an article on it (WP:V). SNGs do not create an exception for this. They do create an exception in the concept of having no deadlines and that many sources for older topics, as to give time and allowance to expand topics that appear likely to be the subject of sourced coverage. But they are not permanent exceptions - "presumption" was specifically chosen in the language of notability to reflect this. SNGs are not automatic inclusion guidelines. --MASEM (t) 17:14, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

We know your opinion is that SNGs are only there as an indication that GNG can be met, but WP:N does not state that and it is not a position that the community has agreed with. WP:V contains not a single reference to 'significant coverage' - significant coverage is not required for verifiability, just reliable sources. --Michig (talk) 17:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

First there is consensus that the SNGs are there for the GNG to be met, per this RFC. More specifically, SNGs cannot override the GNG. Second, WP:V does point out that if no reliable third-party sources exist for a topic we should not have an article about it; yes, third party is not secondary sources, but that's also a concept captured by WP:NOR, as well as WP:NOT. An article demonstrated to only have primary sourcing (as the current state of the example article) is a problem per policy, and why we have the GNG. --MASEM (t) 17:48, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

"is" is a strange word to use to refer to a six-year old discussion. Particularly one that was apparently never even closed beyond a raw headcount, and where the very first comment regarding it in the link you provided is a longstanding editor saying "I see no consensus at all on anything." You're really clutching at straws to show that the community has somehow already committed itself with the force of law to your preferred position. You should take a break from this thread and let others comment rather than try to get the last word with everyone. postdlf (talk) 18:36, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

If you want to use "how long since there was debate on a policy/guideline to determine if we should keep it", we might as well ignore most of the main policies and guidelines which predate that discussion. The problem is an article like Chalmers Tschappat is in no way encyclopedic, per our policies. It's a great entry for some type of "Who's Who" directory, but we are not that. We have editors that have tried to expand it past that but found no sources to be able to do so. As such, our policies say to delete it, but there are editors that say "No, you can't" despite every policy pointing in that direction. We have to be realistic that we need to have the means to challenge presumption, a point that has been established repeated over the years in various locations. --MASEM (t) 18:47, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

I would be interested to here which proposal exactly in that very long and complex RfC is supposed to support the notion that "there is consensus that the SNGs are there for the GNG to be met". I'm not seeing it myself. If it did say that, it is strange that policy was not updated to reflect it rather than relying on us trawling through ancient history to find it. SpinningSpark 19:44, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Once again we have a claim in this debate (this time from Masem "if a topic is not covered in detail by sources, we shouldn't have an article on it") that WP:V says something that it does not. What it actually says is "[i]f no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." That is not the same thing at all. SpinningSpark 18:30, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

I've participated in many AfDs on sports figures (primarily footballers), and I share the concern expressed here about many editors aherence to SNGs at AfD. There was a growing concensus that artlcies about footballers which very narrowly pass the SNG (e.g., one who played 1 or 2 matches in a "fully-pro" league) ought not be kept if sources establishing compliance with the GNG could not found after a sufficient period of time (usually a year or more). However, more recently, I've noted that many editors are claiming even the narrowest step over the bright line of the SNG is enough (e.g., one substitute's appearance). I believe that the majority of biographies on sportspeople can pass the GNG, but very many do not yet, and I worry that plenty of them can not because the SNG threshold is simply set too low (e.g., I've tried to seach online foreign-language sources for footballers in second and third tier leagues in many countries outsidee of the major ones with little success yet they are still listed as "fully-pro" because sources have been found claiming those leagues are fully-pro). Jogurney (talk) 18:39, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• Jogurney, you have encapsulated my concern in a nutshell with your comment immediately above. I wish several of the administrators commenting above would make some attempt to address your concern in the context of the present guidelines, instead of trying to out-duel each other rhetorically. We have a practical problem that needs to be addressed, and I hope that's what Masem was trying to do by starting this discussion. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 18:45, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• If the issue here really is that some of the sports guidelines set the bar too low (which I tend to agree with) then the talk pages of those guidelines would be the place to take this up. They are not going to get changed by editors going round in circles here on the relationship between the GNG and SNGs. --Michig (talk) 19:03, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• I was about to say something similar. I have always thought that the fully professional criterion of NFOOTY is dubious at best, but that does not mean that the whole concept of SNG is flawed as a principle. Baby, bathwater? SpinningSpark 19:07, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

If the issue is specifically the sports-specific guidelines, as I mentioned above (and Masem has pointed out as well), they already defer to the general notability guideline, should the search for reliable, independent, non-promotional sources fail. (In accordance with general practice, the Wikipedia:Notability (sports)/FAQ does note that Wikipedia editors have usually been very liberal in allowing for adequate time to find sources.) isaacl (talk) 19:16, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The "problem" with that AFD in my view is that the keep !votes focused solely on WP:GRIDIRON\WP:ATHLETE, totally ignoring WP:GNG as the trump. Their reasoning seemed to be that since he passed a SNG, he was notable, per the wording on those pages.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 19:38, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The first sentence of WP:NSPORTS, the first sentence in the third paragraph of WP:NSPORTS, and the FAQ make the relationship with the general notability guideline clear. Anyone seeking to close an AFD discussion or to close a review of a closure can be directed to these statements to understand the consensus view of those who weighed in on the sports-specific guidelines regarding how they are intended to be applied. isaacl (talk) 19:48, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Isaac. The first paragraph of WP:NSPORTS states:

"This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia. The article must provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below."

The first question of the Frequently Asked Questions for WP:NSPORTS states the following:

"Q1: How is this guideline related to the general notability guideline?

"A1: The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline. They are intended only to stop an article from being quickly deleted when there is very strong reason to believe that significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from reliable sources are available, given sufficient time to locate them. Wikipedia's standard for including an article about a given person is not based on whether or not he/she has attained certain achievements, but on whether or not the person has received appropriate coverage in reliable sources, in accordance with the general notability guideline. Also refer to Wikipedia's basic guidance on the notability of people for additional information on evaluating notability."

Has anyone actually read the guideline in its entirety, and not the little bits editors like to focus on, like WP:NGRIDIRON or WP:FOOTY? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:57, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) I'm impressed that a discussion that started today is already tl;dr, and I'll apologize to everyone whose comments I barely skimmed through, but here is my attempt at a tl;dr. NSPORT and the other SNGs do not actually overrule GNG, and claims that they do should be rejected. If written properly, SNGs help to clarify how GNG applies to a subject area, often in terms of how GNG requires sourcing that is independent of the subject. ACADEMIC appears to set a high bar because some sourcing that superficially looks like it passes GNG is actually not independent, and should not be used per WP:PROMO. NSPORT is helpful in pointing out how sources about high school athletes, and local sources about other athletes, are often not independent. NSPORT has been not-so-helpful when editors take it to mean that setting foot on a playing field is always a presumption of notability. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:01, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, I assumed in good faith that editors read the guidelines before referring to them, and would follow the links I provided without my having to quote them here. I agree with Michig and Spinningspark that discussions to revise individual subject-specific notability guidelines should be taken up with each one in turn. With the wide variety of guidelines, I don't think trying to combine all of them into one discussion is fruitful.

That being said, Erachima's argument struck a chord with me as well. If there is a small expansion in the number of articles (~5% increase, in the case where a threshold properly identifies a subject meeting Wikipedia's standards of notability 95% of the time), perhaps the amount of time spent debating this isn't worth the net result. isaacl (talk) 20:14, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

(continuing my earlier comment prior to Dirtlawyer1's response) That being said, with well-chosen criteria, the presumption of notability can be very strong, and as the FAQ specifies, since Wikipedia has no deadlines, editors have been willing to be flexible on the time allowed for finding sources. For players from the distant past, editors could also examine the likelihood of contemporary coverage by comparison with similar players. isaacl (talk) 20:07, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• As one of the "Keep" voters at the Tschappat AfD, I think the position taken there by the "Keep" voters has been misrepresented. I actually agree that the WP:NFOOTBALL presumption can be rebutted in an appropriate case. In fact, I am in almost complete agreement with Masem's commment above, which I partially quote here:

  "A key point is that to challenge that presumption, the person that aimed to seek their deletion needs to do a reasonably deep, likely offline, search of that person to be able to demonstrate that no sourcing likely exist. I could not, for example, take Sherry's article to AFD challenging the presumption without having to searching of local papers in the Louisville locale (as well as higher levels) to prove no in-depth coverage exists; if all I did as the AFD nominator was to say "I did a Google search found nothing", I should be expected that closed as a speedy keep for failing to follow BEFORE in light that they pass NGRIDIRON. There is an inordinate amount of work that would be needed to challenge those hundreds/thousands of articles, so while they may be on the cusp in terms of being potential deletion targets, I don't see anything that would even approach fait accompli-levels of AFDs for them."

In the Tshcappat case, the difficulty was that the person played in the NFL in the 1920s when the relevant Ohio market newspapers are either off-line or hidden behind expensive pay walls. Clearly, neither the nominator nor any of the "Delete" voters had done the sort of "off-line" search of Ohio newspapers to see if in-depth coverage existed. I have spent most of my Wikipedia time over the past 7 years working on sports topics from the older, print journalism era. In the case of an NFL player, even ones from the 1920s, I can say from experience that the coverage is likely to be there, if someone takes the time (and spends the money) to find it. But a "Google" search is patently inadequate to root out that coverage. Unless an AfD nominator has done that type of research, the AfD really ought to be closed as a "Speedy Keep." On this, I'm surprised to learn that Masem and I actually agree. Cbl62 (talk) 22:08, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

@Cbl62: That's interesting. Are you saying that from your experience, you'd always expect to find in-depth, significant coverage of every member of a NFL team? I'm not well up on NFL, but in the sports that I do notice, typically there seems to be in-depth coverage of some key team members but only superficial mentions of others. Stanning (talk) 08:58, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

The scope of coverage of the NFL was certainly not the same in the 1920s and 1930s as it is today. Even so, when I have taken interest in players from that era and dug into regional newspaper coverage (often spending my own money to do so), I have found that there is likely to enough non-trivial coverage of the person to pass [[WP:GNG]. See, e.g., Hugh Lowery (not an all-NFL player, started only three NFL games in 1920 as a lineman [the position least likely to garner coverage], but still got coverage passing WP:GNG). In Tschappat's case, I would expect to find similar coverage if I were inclined to take the time and spend the money to conduct similar searches of regional newspapers from the Ohio area. The rub is that any rule making it too easy to challenge the presumption of notability for NFL players risks placing an undue burden on editors to spend much money and many hours defending an AfD that is ultimately unwarranted. In my opinion, such a process is a waste of time. Our time is far better spent on (a) expanding and improving Wikipedia's coverage, and (b) working to delete truly non-notable topics the presence of which make Wikipedia look foolish and not encyclopedic. Cbl62 (talk) 15:10, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

The claim that has been made to justify the "one pro game played" criteria is that a professional player could have not gotten to the pro leagues without having a successful college/amateur/minor leagues career, which should be documented as well. However, an issue this case reveals is that this is very much a time-dependent thing. For players since, say, the 1960s, I'd agree, because sports reporting became huge then with the advent of television and mass media, and following players at every level of skill was common. But in the 1920s, its a far different story. I'm not saying that the NSPORTS pro game criteria has to be changed but there has to be recongizition that the amount of media attention that a player playing their first game in 2014 is far different from a player playing their fire game in 1924, and that we have this presumption specifically to handle the rare cases where there simply isn't coverage for these players from older periods before the abundance of mass media. --MASEM (t) 13:55, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

In that AFD one of the !delete voters said they also did a newspapers.com registered user search, which should have brought up at least the identification of in-depth coverage. There certainly might be some local paper that goes into Tshcappat's career, but if that's the only place we're going to find "significant coverage", that's basically local sources which NSPORTS says shouldn't be appropriate either. Note that finding the holes and arguing the inefficiencies of the search method used by nom's/others in an AFD of this nature should be done and part of the consideration "did the nom adequetely demonstrate the lack of sources by their search results" - again, if someone only did a google search for a 1920s player, that's laughably bad, but more was done in this case. --MASEM (t) 13:55, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I checked, and the newspapers for the area where Tschappat played are not on-line. If they were on-line, I would have searched them. So, no, a newspapers.com search would not find them. There was no indication whatsoever in connection with the Tschappat AfD that anyone did the sort of "reasonably deep, likely offline" search into "local papers" or of the pertinent area. That was the standard for a BEFORE search that YOU suggested needed to be done for a 1920s player. That search was not done, and therefore, under your own reasoning, the Tschappat AfD should have been closed as a "speedy keep." Can we now, finally, put the Tschappat case to bed? Cbl62 (talk) 15:20, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Newspapers.com is the equivalent of a newspaper archive, having digitized papers from the 1800s onward, so its not limited to online sources; it reports 142 historical papers from the Ohio area. Now whether it will have the specific local papers, I'm not 100% sure, but at the same time, if we can only pull significant coverage from local sources, that fails NSPORTS too. That to me is a deep search (I do not newspapers.com requires a subscription but I believe dirtlawyer1 said they had one for their search). Without that newspapers.com search possibility, I agree with you completely that more work would have to be done via BEFORE, but this is not the case. --MASEM (t) 15:26, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Your assertion concerning the coverage of newspapers.com is inaccurate. The database does not include the Dayton newspapers (Tshcappat played for the Dayton NFL team). Moreover, newspapers.com does not cover 142 Ohio newspapers from the relevant time period. For example, its coverage of the Akron Daily Democrat (Akron also had an NFL team) is limited to three years (1899-1902). As you said above (but perhaps now retract?), BEFORE requires a "reasonably deep, likely offline" search into "local papers" of the pertinent area. That was not done here. Cbl62 (talk) 15:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I do have a newspapers.com account, and yes, I did do a search before venturing an opinion. The only results for the subject were last name-only mentions regarding two college games in which he was listed on the roster. And, yes, my searches included both alleged forms of the subject's name and several variations each, including last name-only plus "football". Frankly, I'm a little frustrated with the logic that "he played in two NFL games, therefore significant coverage must exist in paywall archives." It's just as likely, if not more so, that the reason we found no coverage is that there is no coverage. Most one and two-game NFL players are ultimately notable because of the coverage of their college career, not because of the one or two pro games in which they appeared, often sparingly as a scrub. And let's be blunt: the APFA/NFL did not receive anything approaching the same level of media coverage in 1921 that it has since the 1960s. America's unchallenged national pastime and overwhelmingly most popular sport in 1921 was professional baseball, not pro football. The NFL struggled throughout the 1920s, as reflected by the high percentage of failed/defunct teams from that era. Moreover, this "offline search" posited above completely flips the WP:BURDEN in XfDs, and is quite novel. Again, it's just as likely, if not more so, that the reason we found no coverage is that there is no coverage. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Dirt -- I never suggested that you did not do a newspapers.com search. I believe you did. My point is that such an on-line search is inadequate in this case. I am in complete agreement with Masem. It was he who posited that, in a case line this, BEFORE should require "reasonably deep, likely offline" search into "local papers" of the pertinent area. That was not done. Under Masem's framework, Tshappat should have been a "speedy keep" for this reason alone. Frankly, I am dumbfounded at the amount of human capital being devoted to the Tschappat discussion. I earnestly believe that there are many, many far, far more useful things for this group of very intelligent people to be spending their time on. Can't we all return to building Wikipedia and not spending more time on Mr. Tschappat? Cbl62 (talk) 17:23, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the tl:dr version. (I have been reading this though.) This sums up the whole discussion well. Aren't there better things to being doing right now. WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 17:39, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• Cbl, this was never about Tschappat; he's a nobody. If Tschappat were the only similar case, you're right: it would not be worth the effort. But Tschappat is not the only one-game nobody. This was the perfect test case for the proposition I stated above in my first comment in this thread. As for Newspapers.com, please see my comments below regarding the archival coverage available for the Dayton Triangles. Coverage for the team exists, was clearly widely covered in the Ohio newspapers of the 1920s. But for Tschappat? Nada. And that's been the point from the git-go. And having now run the Newspapers.com search for the Dayton Triangles as a team, I am convinced more than before that Tschappat got no significant coverage. Instead, he didn't even rate a mention. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
• Wikioriginal-9: standards matter. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• Do the practice squad players meet these standards, they probably pass GNG though. WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 17:53, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

"...this "offline search" posited above completely flips the WP:BURDEN". I agree with that assessment. Per Section D, paragraph 1 of WP:BEFORE, I performed the minimum research required. It doesn't mention performing offline searches before nominating. Therefore I feel that I am being taken to task because I didn't do any offline searching, something that the current guideline doesn't seem to require.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 15:57, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Nobody is taking you to task, ArcAngel. You nominated the article in good faith, and the article was a bare stub when you did so. The fact that you expressed second thoughts about the nomination simply goes to show that you continued to act in good faith rather than stubbornly sticking to your position. I would never suggest that an off-line search should be standard before starting an AfD. But ... when the AfD seeks to overturn a presumption established by an SNG, and when the subject is one who was prominent in the long-ago, pre-internet era, then, yes, I think Masem's framework is entirely logical and appropriate. Cbl62 (talk) 17:31, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• Being stubborn is not one of my traits. I don't consider myself a deletionist, and I never considered looking at offline sources for something that far back. Based on how I interpreted some of the comments above, it just felt like others didn't agree with the nomination. But I do wish that more would have participated in the discussion as quite possibly the consensus would have been clearer one way or another. I don't like closes where there really is no "outright" consensus (as there was with this one).   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 21:49, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
• BTW, I cannot prove the negative, but I can alter the experiment. I just ran a Newspapers.com search for "Dayton Triangles," and got 647 articles. When I narrowed the search to 1920 and 1921, I got 62 articles, including newspapers in (1) Cincinnati, (2) Coshocton, (3) East Liverpool, (4) Hamilton, (5) Lima, (6) Portsmouth, (7) Sandusky, and (8) Wilmington, Ohio, as well as multiple papers in Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania. It appears that the Dayton Triangles got plenty of coverage as a team, and that coverage is well represented in the Newspapers.com archives, but Mr. Tschappat, whose first name may or may not even really be Chalmers, got zip. Again, for somebody who played in two APFA/NFL games in 1921, that's not really that surprising. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:55, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oh, and for the record, a search of the much maligned Google News Archive returns 80 articles from a search for the "Dayton Triangles." Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:05, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Side comment - One thing that bothers me about the "played professionally" criteria is that it reflects a degree of RECENTISM. While it works in today's world (where a professional football player is quite notable)... it does not really reflect the reality back in the 1920s. In those days, the big sport covered by the media was College Football. That was huge. But Pro Football was an insignificant also-ran. Prior to WWII, it comes close to being non-notable as a professional sport. Collegiate Football players of that day were very notable... Professional Football players of the day? not so much. Blueboar (talk) 22:13, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

• That's a defensible argument, one of the few such proffered in this campaign across several different talk pages to neuter or abolish NSPORTS. It's obvious that today sports at many levels enjoy a high level of media coverage, but did sports enjoy a proportionate level of coverage a century ago? By the same token that the original WP:ATHLETE devolved to individual sports projects, on the perfectly accurate grounds that a one-size-fits-all approach just didn't work, it may be that we need to judge sports by different eras. Ravenswing 13:07, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
  • For myself, it doesn't bother me that the current NSPORTS "one pro game" presumption (distilled to different sports) exists, as long as there is this ability to challenge that presumption in a fair manner as this case tried to do. The false positive (where we've presumpted based on NSPORTS but turn out wrong) is not very high. Perhaps there's some fine tuning that could be done (like here, to separate out NFL players from APFL for NGRIDIRON), but I don't feel that's necessary, given the ability to challenge that. What does bother me is when a SNG wants to carve out a wide presumption for inclusion and then say you can never challenge that, which was the case of a few commmentors in the AFD/XFD. SNGs are not meant to be inclusion guidelines (a point established in the past) and avoid inherited notability. But most at NSPORTS seem to agree that the presumption they give with their clauses can be fairly challenged, so I don't think a massive change is necessary there. --MASEM (t) 13:21, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• Ravenswing, I don't purport to speak for anyone other than myself, but for me, this was never about a neutering or abolishing the specific notability guidelines of WP:NSPORTS. I am a regular editor of Wikipedia sports articles, and I prefer clear rules for notability. For me, this case was about testing whether the presumption of notability could actually be rebutted with evidence that a particular athlete clearly lacked any significant coverage in multiple, reliable, independent sources. In the case of this two-game wonder named Tschappat, no one ever produced a source that wasn't a sports stats site for his two-game pro career. Not one. Normally, in circumstances like these, notability is supported by coverage of the athlete's college career; in this case, the subject's college career drew no significant coverage, either. I treated this as a test case of the limits of the notability presumption because the coverage was lacking, with the results you see here. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 13:25, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggested wording addition

Going by the above and noting some of the stronger concerns , I would like to see if we can add wording to WP:N that clarifies the idea of presumption and what the process should be to challenge it.

Notability is a presumption, not a guarantee

Meeting the GNG or any of the subject-specific notability guidelines is said to create a presumption of notability, allowing for a stand-alone article to be created. This allows editors the ability to expand the article beyond these minimal requirements, giving the time necessary to find and retrieve sources (particularly for print works), or for sources to come about in the future due to some accomplishment or event, with the aim to create an encyclopedic article that relies primarily on independent, third-party and secondary sourcing to avoid issues with WP:NOT, WP:V, WP:NOR, and WP:NPOV, as well as to avoid permastubs. There is no deadline for when these sources should be added; as long as the GNG or subject-specific notability guideline are met with the needed sourcing to demonstrate this, such articles should be kept on the basis that additional sources have yet to be identified and added.

However, if an editor performs a deep, appropriate search (along the lines required by actions that should be taken before nominating an article for deletion) and can find no additional sourcing to go beyond the minimum for presumption, then deletion, redirection, or merging may be an appropriate action. One must consider that it is impossible to prove the negative, that no sourcing exists at all, since it is impossible to readily search every print source. Instead, one must demonstrate that no sourcing exists in the places where sourcing would most likely be found. This usually means that a offline search of books, magazines, and newspapers will be required instead of relying on Google searches. For example, a person who is presumed notable for their work at the time of the onset of the 20th Century will likely only be documented by newspapers no longer in publication in the region that person lived in. A good-faith, detailed search of these sources must be done and described as part of the deletion/merge/redirect nomination.

Once this search has been done and demonstrated, the burden on retaining the article falls on those that want to keep it. Ideally, identification of sources missed by the nominator should be made and added to the article. Alternatively, a discussion of whether the search sufficiently covered the expected places to find sourcing can be made. Such discussion should also consider if sourcing for the topic is likely to come in the future; for example, for a person who is presumed notable due to their career work and are still active in that career, there is a good chance that sourcing may come later, and thus should not be deleted for the lack of sourcing at the present. If those wishing to retain the article cannot locate or identify other sources, or demonstrate critical faults in the nominator's search where appropriate source would be found, then the article should be deleted, merged, or redirected.

There may be other reasons to delete articles even if they meet the presumption of notability. For example, we avoid having articles on living persons that are notable for a single event which otherwise may get wide coverage, though such people are generally included in a larger topic about the event (eg, we do not have an article on Steven Slater but do have JetBlue flight attendant incident).

Note the emphasis on the importance of the source search prior to nom. This is by far the key fact here, that you can't go around looking at the present state of the article and going "not notable". --MASEM (t) 16:26, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

• The "process to challenge it" is persuading the other participants in an AFD to !vote "delete" instead of "keep". That there's a "presumption" simply means that it's possible to do that. There's no need for more language on that point, nor consensus for any such formulas. postdlf (talk) 15:06, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Langauge is necessary because we need to explain what a proper way to counter the presumption is, and that is primarily by demonstration of the lack of any sources from a deep, likely offline search prior to making the AFD. If the nom presents the AFD says "I can't find any other sources to improve this article, and I searched here, here, and here", then !votes that say "notably by this SNG criteria" without acknowledging the lack of sources are a waste of time. The SNG criteria are not absolute, this is the method, not documented anywhere, of how you can challenge individual topics that fail sourcing. A lot of AFDs are going by where people are ignoring the lack of sourcing evidence provided by the nominator and standing by the SNG criteria assuming it absolute. --MASEM (t) 15:16, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

If what you say "is the method", then you should be able to demonstrate that it is already accepted practice before any guideline is changed to implement it. If, instead, "A lot of AFDs are going by..." that demonstrate otherwise (or at least that there's no one accepted approach), then that's community practice this guideline needs to reflect. postdlf (talk) 15:27, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

NSPORTS has used this approach (see [2]) and in particular the top of the "Not Meeting GNG" section lists several AFDs that the topic met NSPORTS but deleted on the lack of GNG sourcing. This is the approach we have used here for how "presumped" should be read as well. --MASEM (t) 15:37, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose addition. There is no pressing need for us to pre-emptively limit the criteria for inclusion to what a bunch of journalists think it is important to write about, which is what the GNG amounts to. We should leave ourselves free to craft other criteria as we see fit. The GNG are good criteria for establishing notability, but they are not the only possible criteria. WP:PROF takes a completely different stance and I am pretty sure that a huge number of articles passed under WP:MUSIC would fail the GNG test. Characterising short articles as "permastubs" is non-neutral and possibly insulting to those who took the trouble to write them. One common criterion used for removing stub templates is that the article has at least one reference. An article that meets WP:V is, by this definition, not a stub. If it also meets an SNG we should have the ability to say we want to keep it. SpinningSpark 16:44, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • "There is no pressing need for us to pre-emptively limit the criteria for inclusion to what a bunch of journalists think it is important to write about, which is what the GNG amounts to." WP summarizes what sources say, we do not create importance ourselves, and the community has rejected outright "inclusion guidelines" where every member of specific topics are included (eg no inherited notability). It's also been shown that the SNGs are shortcuts towards showing the GNG, but cannot override it in terms of finding more details sources and moving away from permastubs. --MASEM (t) 16:57, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
    • Why do you find it necessary to say in response to me that "WP summarizes what sources say, we do not create importance ourselves"? Where did I suggest that we should not summarise what sources say? You are presenting a straw man argument that has no substance. Importance is subjective. That's why we don't have criteria for importance, we have instead criteria for notability. These are based on objective criteria, but it is being exceptionally narrow-minded to maintain that the only objective criterion that can ever be is the GNG. Once again, you are claiming prior community consensus on this. In the discussion above I requested you several times to point to such a consensus but you have repeatedly ignored those requests. SpinningSpark 17:24, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
      • You said, quote "There is no pressing need for us to pre-emptively limit the criteria for inclusion to what a bunch of journalists think it is important to write about", which taken at face value, means that we should include stuff that has not been covered in sources. The GNG is the target goal for articles, with the SNG meant to be "shortcuts" to show that a topic likely can meet this even without having the necessary sourcing at the time of writing, and understanding we have no deadline to find and include those sources. This has been long-standard discussion through WT:N's history, but best highlighted by Wikipedia talk:Notability/RFC:compromise. --MASEM (t) 19:15, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
        • I have repeatedly indicated that I think that WP:V always applies. The passage you quote from me does not contradict that. It does not even imply that WP:V should be bypassed. I am beginning to suspect that you are deliberately misinterpreting me in order to help advance your straw man argument. But assuming good faith on your part, there is at least a very bad case of IDHT going on. As for the past discussion, while the proposal that SNGs override GNG failed that is far from conclusive. The proposal also would have it that an article that passed GNG, but failed SNG should be rejected. Frankly, I don't think anyone would go along with that, and certainly several of the !votes were explicitly to oppose that aspect of it. I also note some !votes against thought this contradicted WP:V, apparently the same straw man argument being peddled then as now. In any event, my views on this new proposal remain unchanged. SpinningSpark 21:15, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
          • I am trying to read what you are stating but the only obvious interpretation is "we should not limit what topics we cover to what is covered by sources", which of course flies against WP:NOT, particularly WP:IINFO and why we have notability in the first place. We need to reflect what sources report on, and if sources do not go into detail on a topic, then we shouldn't be either. The proposal from the RFC that you mentions, that meeting the GNG but failing the SNG should cause an article to fail, failed as a proposal, nor is that relevant here. --MASEM (t) 21:55, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
            • How the fuck did you manage to interpret "I think that WP:V always applies" into "we should not limit what topics we cover to what is covered by sources". I said no such thing. I meant no such thing. I do not support any such thing. I don't believe anyone supports such a thing. Is that clear enough for you? Please try reading what I actually said instead of making up something that fits your flimsy straw man argument. SpinningSpark 00:10, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
            • You keep repeating your position that "detailed coverage" (ie GNG) is required to have an article as if that was some kind of absolute which instantly refutes objections. We all understand that is your position, you don't need to keep repeating it. But it is perfectly acceptable for some of us to have a different position. As for the RFC proposal not being "relevant here" it was you who raised the RFC as being relevant as a past consensus. I have asked you repeatedly to identify which of the many proposals on that page you believed supported your case but you have so far declined to do so. I assumed that B5 was the one you thought indicated consensus for your position asa it seemed to me the most relevant. Apparently not. If you can't actually identify a consensus I think I'm entitled to believe that actually, there wasn't one. SpinningSpark 00:30, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

• • • • • • • • Fine, we agree on WP:V which has never been a problem but WP:V is only a necessary but not sufficient requirement for an article topic, to avoid indiscrminate information (eg I am confident that nearly every North American and European college student can be shown to have verified information due to what is published at college levels, but that doesn't mean every person in that group should have an article.) That's why we have notability guidelines which tell us to look to the depth at which a topic has been talked about in sources before having a standalone article. If no one can find these type of sources after a reasonable extensive search where sources should be found and no new sources are forthcoming, then the topic is actually not notable and why seeking consensus to delete is an appropriate action. On the RFC you mentioned what B.1 said (about articles having to meet both GNG and SNG) which of course failed and that's not the one I was talking about. I'm talking of B.5 that said that SNGs can override GNGs, which failed, meaning that the GNG is still the overriding guideline (This is also a point justified by B.2 in that SNGs are there to help identify appropriate sources to help meet the GNG). The point from this is still that topic should aim towards meeting the GNG, using the SNG as a "temporary" shortcut of notability to give them the time to develop an article. Sometimes the SNG won't get the topic to the GNG and that's the cases we need to be able to fairly challenge in an AFD, which some editor refuse to accept can be done. Again, "presumed" is a very specific word chosen here to show that articles can always be fairly challenged it if is lacking encyclopedic qualities as defined by the GNG. --MASEM (t) 00:35, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
                • I am not maintaining that WP:V is sufficient to justify an article, another straw man. It is the GNG that tells us to look at depth of coverage, not the notability guidelines generally. We are free, if we so choose, to use other notability criteria. You don't support that. I know you don't support that. I don't see the point of repeatedly telling me you don't support that. It makes no difference to my view, it just pointlessly creates yet another wall of text.

                I am genuinely confused by your reply about the RFC. I identified B5 as the relevant proposal and replied to that. Your came back with "failed as a proposal, nor is that relevant here". You latest response now tells me that the RFC I mentioned was B1 (not correct, again read what I wrote, not what you would like me to have written) and B5 is the relevant one, along with some of B2. That seems utterly self-contradictory to me. SpinningSpark 01:30, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Masem, if we could summarize what you wrote... and get it down to a short paragraph... I could probably support adding. But as is, no... it's definitely overly wordy. That said... what you wrote above would make the nucleus of a an excellent WP:Essay. Perhaps you should start with that, and then see if it gains legs. Blueboar (talk) 01:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I think an essay for Masem is a great idea. If others like his essay, they can cite to it in AFDs, and if they don't, they can ignore it. Definitely more constructive than continuing to dump thousands of bytes on this talk page. postdlf (talk) 14:48, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

One of the problems I see with the proposal is it shifts the issue to sterile arguments about what is truly "primary" or what is truly "independent". A person who gains prominence in a field, gains prominence in that field. Take, for example, a president of a large academic international organization, per WP:NACADEMICS. Who is going to publish a biography on that person. It is, of course, the organization that he or she is involved with, likely on the orgs website. And some will argue that that biography, although detailed and reliable, is too primary or not independent enough. This leads me to think the sports problem is a problem with that notability criteria and that is what should be changed, perhaps in the issue of depth of coverage. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 09:55, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

The key to understanding "presumption" is to accept that it is guidance... and not "the rules".

The presumption of notability is a half-way step between demonstrating notability and not demonstrating notability. Presumption is an indication of likelihood... a warning to hesitate before nominating for deletion (because the subject/topic fits a pattern of other, similar, subjects/topics that are discussed by independent sources, and are notable). However, the presumption of notability is not a guarantee that the required sources actually do exist. The presumption of notability does not "protect" an article from deletion... the reason for this is that there are always exceptions to every "norm". On occasion, a presumption turns out to be wrong... and independent sources don't actually exist... no matter how much we think they should exist. Blueboar (talk) 13:20, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, it's not the presumption that protects articles, it is editors in thier judgment choosing to determine whether the content is appropraiate by applying the presumption -- if enough agree that the presumption carries the day, it will, that's the way it is. So, yes, it's a guideline and there are no rules, remember. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:30, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, we are still talking this is a guideline, IAR where appropriate, etc. If there's fair discussion that maybe there's still other options for sourcing, etc. that the nominator or others simply couldn't access at all that would hve a fair chance of having information, this is reasonable. What is not appropriate is that if someone present a fair challenge to the presumption by laying out evidence of the lack of sources, and the only replies that other editors come back with is "keep, meetings this SNG", as if the SNGs were absolutes. Editors, and importantly admin closures, should be aware this is part of the construction of the notability guidelines and thus discount those type of keep !votes which normally in other conditions would be kept (or at least make sure they are evaluated in the proper context). --MASEM (t) 14:38, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Alanscottwalker: I think this is basically what I was saying. "Presumption" means editors can decide not to apply it in a given case. There's no flow chart for when this should or shouldn't happen. postdlf (talk) 14:48, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I see no problem where, in the proposed situation, that discussion at the AFD is on whether sources are primary, independent, etc. That's healthy discussion, and while there are still debates about it, at least people are talking about the sources, their quality or lack thereof. What is the problem is when people refuse to discuss the sources or the nominator's demonstration of lack of sources, and instead repeat the SNG criteria without any other reasoning. (FWIW, a bio prepared by the institution a person is working for that the person only supplied basic details and someone else filters/expanded on would be more a secondary, dependent source, since it is a transformation of information). --MASEM (t) 14:12, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

FWIW... if person X has been made President of institution Y, and the only source to mention this fact is institution Y itself... I would definitely question whether X was notable... I would also question whether we are making some invalid underlying assumptions... I would raise such as: Is it really valid to assume that the position of President of Institution Y is a notable position to have? That may not be a valid assumption. I would want to look at what kind of coverage other presidents of institution Y received. I might even question the notability of institution Y itself (although that is less likely). Blueboar (talk) 14:45, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

No it will not be the only source, but it will always be the original source. That's the problem, you will get "it's too dependent". If that leads you to say that a biography of the president of an important international academic society should be deleted, then it's dumb (in the prosaic sense of unthinking) -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:51, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

But what if it is the only source? You assume other sources exist... but what if they don't?

When they don't... That says something. And no... I don't accept that every president of every large academic society in existence is automatically notable (partly because I don't accept that every large academic society is automatically notable). I accept that most presidents of large academic societies are notable. I accept that there is a very strong likelihood that any specific president might be. But I never make blanket assertions like "all presidents of large accademic institutions are automatically notable." There are always exceptions.

Indeed, in the case where the only source is a dependent one, the lack of independent sources would raise a red flag for me... I would start to think... hmmm... Usually, there are lots and lots and lots of sources that mention the presidents of large academic institutions (and in reasonable detail)... so why is this specific one different? Am I making an unwarranted assumption here? Blueboar (talk) 15:13, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

But what if? Well that's why we don't want instruction creep because every what if has a what if, which has a what if, and instructions would be endless and endless. As for the rest, Wikipedians presume these things, regardless of what you accept. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:25, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

To this point, I would rather us have SNGs that include relatively simple (and by necessity) broader criteria that might have a few more false positive hits (that it , it would allow inclusion of people that end up not being notable at the end of the day) than to have SNG criteria that are complex and narrowly defined as to avoid any false positives. That is, it is better to say "the president of any academic institution that is notable is presumed notable" than to say "the president of any academic institution that is notable with more than 10,000 students and has been established since 1950 is presumed notable". KISS principle, etc. This also gives more leeway favorably to help develop articles we might not have had before. The loose criteria should still have a low false positive rate (5% or less).

But key to that is making sure the concepts I've explained above about challenging presumptions of notability is an accepted, established, and documented process. If we cannot challenge notability that is presumed by an SNG, then the SNGs need to be laser-focused assurances with nearly no false positives to prevent them from being outright inherited notability guidelines. But I don't think we need to refocus the SNGs, just make sure that it is understand by documenting it that one can challenge an SNG claim fairly by demonstrating that there are no likely sources to expand the topic. --MASEM (t) 13:57, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I would support a wording change that made it clear that for articles that are "too short", and that if it can be demonstrated that they are likely impossible to be expanded then that is grounds for merging, or if no suitable merge target is available, deletion. I don't support this wording because it seeks to limit our ability to set whatever notability criteria we choose. SpinningSpark 15:15, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

In general, no we don't have notability guidelines that set whatever notability criteria we choose. We have a global standard for inclusion (the sourcing that the GNG provides) to prevent one area from determining their information more important than others (This is what happened with the MMA group about a year ago). There will be exceptional cases per IAR and notability being a guideline obviously, but in general, we have notability guidelines to make what is included in WP as objective as possible. --MASEM (t) 15:23, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Masem. please stop referring to your opinions as "we" as if you are the arbiter of Wikipedia policy. We can all discuss how we think policy should be shaped on this page. What is MMA? SpinningSpark 17:14, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I am using "we" as this is current clear established practice that I've seen throughout discussions, and thus the current policy/guideline that everyone is expected to follow. MMA is Mixed Martial Arts, and about a year or year-and-half ago, they attempted to declare on their own that every MMA athlete and every MMA event (hunderds each year) were notable, and it took admin action to deal with much of the walled garden (including sockpuppetry) that was trying to keep those articles even after it was shown they failed all other policies. --MASEM (t) 15:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

It still amounts to your opinion. If that's what the guidelines say already then there's no need to change anything and if they don't and your proposing a change then it is perfectly acceptable that we have an opinion on that too. SpinningSpark 22:00, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose: I view the GNG not as just another subordinate notability criterion, however much primus inter pares, but as the fundamental interpretation of WP:V. Stating that the GNG is in of itself "presumptive" is just plain cracked: that would leave us without any firm threshold for notability. Does the GNG leave us with some bad articles? Yes, it does, and I've deplored some of the results. We just can't do without some fundamental, irreducible measure. Ravenswing 16:36, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • The GNG has always been "presumed", though. There are a lot of editors that go "look, I've got 2 sources that have a couple sentences each about this topic, it's notable". Well, for one that's not significant coverage, nor showing it notable, but for the same reasons we have the SNG, having those articles would be a sufficient allowance to start allowing an article to be developed. (This happens a lot with articles on fictional characters). (This is always why we don't numerically define what "significant coverage" as it is a gamed target). If it turns out those two sources are all that exist and really show nothing else beyond that, we'll still delete the article. --MASEM (t) 16:41, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Notability of Fringe topics

Would it be possible to include WP:NFRINGE within Template:Notability guide or WP:N? This could be accomplished by moving the relevant guidance to it's own page or simply linking to that page from the main notability guidelines.

I spend a great deal of time reviewing content related to quackery, pseudoscience and fringe-theories. It's often hard for people working on such articles to find the appropriate notability policy, simply because that policy is buried within WP:FRINGE and cannot be found on the main WP:N policy page. --Salimfadhley (talk) 22:53, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I would be okay with this. The FRINGE page is one that is watched by many global editors (due to the general issue with fringe theories) so I'd assume that the notability aspects are generally agreed on criteria. --MASEM (t) 23:50, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I think a link to WP:FRINGE is definitely in order... but not much more. When two policy/guideline pages cover the same issue, there is an unfortunate tenancy for both pages to drift apart from each other (and that can eventually end up with a situation where they give conflicting advice/rules). As Masem says, the WP:FRINGE guideline is heavily watched... and definitely has wide consensus. So that is where people should be pointed to. Blueboar (talk) 00:39, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Would it be OK for me to insert links into the WP:N page and also the notability guide template? I appreciate that this is a highly sensitive page! --Salimfadhley (talk) 10:25, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I have been bold and added a link in the guideline. Don't think one is needed in the template. Blueboar (talk) 10:56, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

WP:GNG vs article standards adopted by individual WikiProject

Here is an AfD discussion that may of interest for those editors concerned with notability guidelines for sports-related articles: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2013 Maria Sharapova tennis season. WikiProject Tennis editors are asserting that an internal WikiProject "guideline" is the basis for keeping the article, not Wikipedia-wide notability guidelines. Please feel free to express your opinion in this AfD. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 10:35, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

@Dirtlawyer1:, I kindly request you to rephrase this notification. It is biased and therefore inappropriate according to canvassing guidelines (WP:CAN). These guidelines clearly state that notifications must be "neutrally worded" and that it is considered "campaigning" to post "a notification of discussion that presents the topic in a non-neutral manner" as you have done here. The first and last sentences are fine and frankly you could and should have left it at that. The rest is not only unnecessary but also subjective, contains a factual error (three editors were part of the WikiProject discussion not two) and a textbook strawman, i.e. a biased misrepresentation of an opponent's argument. Please modify.--Wolbo (talk) 15:57, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Again, while I disagree with your characterization of my notice as factually inaccurate, I have modified it nevertheless. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

You don't actually need to say anything you can just list it. The first sentence by itself would have been fine. WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 17:35, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Significant coverage question

If I have one source that significantly covers a topic, and several shorter sources that don't significantly cover it, could those several shorter sources ever constitute significant coverage? 23W 01:44, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

It might help to have a bit more context. It's possible but wouldn't say it is always the case, depending how it all works together. --MASEM (t) 01:51, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm working on a draft for Dave Hughes (a producer for Adult Swim). He received a profile and an interview in Juxtapoz regarding his series Off the Air last June, and while that can certainly be classified as sigcov, it's the only one of that stature he has had so far (besides some other mentions of his work). You can see the draft here: User:23W/Draft:Dave Hughes (producer). 23W 02:00, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

It probably could be better to meet the GNG as one basic significant source in this manner isn't enough, but you do meet the creative professional SNG at WP:BIO (he is the creator of a series with multiple reviews) and as it is still ongoing, more sources may come about, so this would be the case that you should have enough for presumption of notability now. --MASEM (t) 02:17, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good. It's still a work in progress, but since the show will be functioning as a full series (airing on the reg instead of once in a blue moon like it usually has), there will probably be more coverage out there by the time I'm done. 23W 02:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Renaming Notability

tl;dr: I propose we rename Notability to "Inclusion" without material changes to the General Notability guideline or specific notability guidelines.

How many editors reading this have found themselves writing or reading something like the following?

• "On Wikipedia the term notable means something specific..."
• ""Notable" is a term of art on wikipedia. It doesn't mean merely "worthy of note" or "important"..."
• "... it's not the same as the dictionary definition"

Raise your hand if you've seen anything like the above more than once. Keep your hand up if you've lost track of the number of times you've seen something like it in deletion debates, talk pages or noticeboards. We've had the same problem in nearly every deletion debate which hinges upon notability and we have had this problem for years (verging on a decade).

It sucks. Repeatedly redefining the term nearly every time it is noted to a new editor wastes time, complicates discussion by prompting semantic arguments and adds unnecessary boilerplate to many conversations. It especially sucks because the term "notability" itself is meant to be descriptive and informative. No other guideline or policy generates as much confusion merely by invoking a term which should ease understanding.

Take a look at the text of the notability guideline as it exists right now. What is the only word in the lede which is superfluous? Literally the only word which--if excised carefully--would not change the meaning or force of the guideline. I'll give you a hint: it's the word that does not appear in the text of the general notability guideline, which reads:

• "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list."

Both the lede and the nutshell for the notability guideline expend more than a few words to introduce the concept of notability then pull us back from the common connotation (and denotation!) to what we really mean. Normally we want to change guidelines or policies if practice drifts away from our stated description. In this case practice is unfortunately perfectly in sync with our guideline. Both the text of the notability guideline and the way it is used on Wikipedia invoke and then disclaim the term "notable" in favor of our actual guidance for inclusion, the general and specific notability guidelines.

Instead of going another decade repeatedly explaining that "notable doesn't mean "notable"" let's do something smarter. I propose we rename notability (along with all sibling and subordinate pages) to "inclusion". The meaning and purpose of all such guidelines will remain the same (and they'll still be guidelines). Notability becomes Inclusion, GNG -> GIG, etc. No other changes.

Why is this awesome?

• As I mentioned above it will greatly simplify (at a minimum) the verbiage in WP:N. Look just at the lede of that guideline and you'll see how much effort is spent working around the word notable. Let's remove all that and let the guideline say what we mean.
• It won't stop people from claiming someone should be included because they're "notable" (or some other phrase which roughly means important/significant/famous) but it will stop our guidance from setting people up to fail. Words matter. We can all tell ourselves "well, objectively it's the guideline that matters, not the word we use for it" but how convincing is that after nearly 10 years of having that guideline misinterpreted based on its title alone?
• It will move us away from the notability wars. We no longer regularly delete things which have sources but aren't "important" as we did in 2004-2007 and while the notion of "notability" was in flux for a long time we've basically settled on guidance for inclusion that does not rely on that word in any way. Look at the historical discussions in the sidebar for a sense of the mood prior to the adoption of "notability". We were basically picking between "notability", "importance", "significance" and "fame and importance". Good on us for picking the least bad term but it's time to move on.
• It gives us a vocabulary to talk about inclusion of subjects that isn't pejorative. Previous discussions have given short shrift to this, but I think it is important. I've talked to a number of people with deleted articles, people at editathons who wanted to make articles on subjects they felt were noteworthy and people who aren't editors but are otherwise interested in certain articles being included on wikipedia. In almost all cases the word "notability" is at best a stumbling block and more commonly a reason for them to reject our capacity for including or excluding an article as a whole. I'm not endorsing Timothy Noah's whole take here but read the penultimate paragraph (of the first page). This is not an uncommon sentiment. We can't stop people from feeling upset that they don't get an article but we can stop them from feeling needlessly upset that they're "not notable".

Past arguments against renaming

The list below was compiled by reading through the discussions I've linked in the sidebar. It's explicitly not comprehensive but I want to try to flesh out what I felt were the most common and well supported arguments and make the best case for them.

• "Inclusion" does not cover other requirements for inclusion, e.g. copyvio, verifiability, spam, etc. This argument has been, by far, the most commonly held position against renaming and the most vociferously argued. WP:NOT and WP:V are content policies which directly determine what is included on wikipedia. Notability is a guideline which describes roughly how we judge a subject will have a successful article. Simply, even if a subject is "worthy of note" we may not have an article on them if such an article cannot meet our core content policies. Renaming notability to inclusion may lead editors or readers astray if it suggests that meeting such a guideline means an article would be included, rather than meaning it is merely "notable".
• Renaming the guideline won't prevent wikilawyering over it. Related, fights over inclusion are often about actually being included in the encyclopedia and don't turn on the name. A person whose biography is up for deletion is unlikely to be mollified by hearing that they don't meet the guidelines for inclusion vs. "they're not notable". Their big concern is not the passing injury of being referred to as non-notable but the fact that they don't have an entry. Likewise, renaming the guideline won't stop people from making unsupported arguments for inclusion.
• We've been calling it "notability" for a while now and were referring to the general concept as "notability" before the guideline existed. Wikipedia will, by its very nature, have terms which have a specific local meaning to the community and it isn't necessarily valuable to refactor those terms so that they meet outside expectations which we cannot control. We even have an article on the subject as complaints about the term (though more commonly the general concept) have spread beyond the community.
• Describing subjects or referring to extant articles becomes more complicated with a term like "inclusion". Rather than saying "so and so is notable so they can be on this list" we need another term. Also, "notable" has the benefit of being an adverb intimately connected with the noun "notability".

I'd like to address each of these in turn.

First, while "notability" is not the only guideline or policy on what sort of articles we have it is the only inclusion guideline. In almost every discussion it was pointed out that calling it "inclusion" would somehow lead people to believe that NOT/SPAM/COPYVIO don't also determine when we have an article. I find this argument needlessly pedantic and dependent on the sort of hidebound interpretation of policy which we should discourage. Since we're being pedantic, policies such as NOT, SPAM and COPYVIO are exclusionary: they describe what Wikipedia is NOT or things wikipedia can't contain. They do not describe things wikipedia should contain--what the notability guideline does now and what a renamed (but otherwise unchanged) guideline would continue to do. Even the language of WP:V, which describes things wikipedia should include has this to say under a section on notability "If no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.". That is explicitly exclusionary. Renaming what is already our guidance for inclusion to "inclusion" doesn't step on the toes of the spirit or letter of that policy under any reasonable interpretation.

Changing the name won't stop people from arguing over the concept. That's certainly true. Names matter, but they aren't magic. It also won't stop arguments from article subjects or editors interested in a topic from claiming that a standard which doesn't look like our current notability guidelines should be used when deciding on an article's fate. However, we can do our part to not actively mislead people by using a term with a perfectly reasonably connotation in a narrow and contrary fashion. As mentioned above, nearly every explanation of "notability" to a new editor or an outsider starts with some boilerplate about how notable doesn't really mean "notable." That's not just a function of outsiders not understanding the community. It's way too common to be that. At a minimum the term itself is not helpful. I defy anyone to produce an example where someone's intuitive understanding of the word "notable" helped them to better understand our notability guidelines.

The term "notability" is pretty common on wikipedia, especially in deletion debates. Policies and guidelines should be descriptive, so that's potentially a good reason to not change the name. But I'd argue the term notability is a historical artifact from our initial discussions on the subject. Even though it's nominally a term of art, it stems from our then desire to limit articles to "important" or "significant" ones, "notable" just being the term we landed on. Once we start naming guidelines after it and it becomes a useful shorthand, the term can take on a life of its own. We're no longer certain that practice drives the name or that naming shapes practice. Arguably it's both. In my opinion that means we should be respectful of common use but not needlessly deferential. For an analogy, take a look at Wikipedia:Non-free content, which used to be called "Fair Use" (see rename discussion). It's not a perfect parallel because fair use is itself a term of art with important and germane meaning that we didn't want to convey, but we took a pretty commonly used shorthand and moved a policy page to a more clear name. For our purposes we should note that the move to "Non-free content" came well after the policy change expanding beyond fair use.

Finally, while "notable" is grammatically very convenient we should consider if that helps or hurts our attempts to be clear when discussing inclusion. "Inclusion" describes our guidance, not a specific subject. We have the current notability regime because those are our editorial practices, not as a comment on stuff that does or doesn't have an article. "So and so isn't notable" isn't a super great speech pattern to have or promote. As mentioned above, that phrase or similar ones won't melt away but we shouldn't keep a guideline name that causes problems simply because it's handy to use.

Previous discussions

Unlike many perennial proposals, relatively few discussions on renaming notability which received significant attention from the community resulted in a strong consensus either way. Most of the proposed name changes were derailed during the discussion or plagued by problems which don't relate to naming. Frustratingly, the most well attended debates were those most marred by unnecessary problems or forks. Notably (lol):

• Many of the rename attempts were sidelined by discussions over whether or not to elevate notability to a policy, dissolve it entirely or replace it with materially different proposed guidelines.
• Some discussions focused a lot on whether or not a renaming would impact the relationship between SNGs and the GNG. This mattered a lot because the actual relationship was in flux during the time period of many discussions. It is not in flux now.
• Some suggested names were lengthy and/or unwieldy such as "Article Inclusion Criteria" or "Inclusion Guideline", causing people to oppose a rename on the pretty reasonable basis that such names were a mouthful.

As with any discussion, I can't (and shouldn't) limit the scope of comments or interest but I would urge everyone involved to please consider the value or harm from only renaming the guideline and not spin this out into unrelated issues. If you are concerned that renaming notability will ipso facto materially impact policies or guidelines then a discussion of that is perfectly germane, but I would like to see a vibrant community discussion on the merits of renaming rather than a proxy fight over inclusion writ large as we have seen in the past. Protonk (talk) 14:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Comments

Supporting

• I'm the proposer, so I support this. And because this isn't a vote, I can post here! Protonk (talk) 14:44, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support: I'm all for it; I would love to get all the time back, over the years, that I've wasted in addressing bruised egos and hurt feelings over the premise that "not notable" = "You/your beloved subject is unimportant and worthless." Ravenswing 16:41, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• I think using the term "Wikipedia's standards for inclusion" or something similar would be less confusing for new editors, as in the real world, notability generally is based on specific accomplishments or impact on events. However as this requires the context of a value framework, and this is difficult to establish by consensus in a widely diverse editing community, Wikipedia instead substitutes the judgment of reliable, independent, non-promotional, third party sources with editorial control. Although I appreciate it's probably unlikely to happen at this juncture, I think the simplest way to get editors to use a term emphasizing Wikipedia's standards in contrast to the conventional definition of notability would be to rename this guideline. isaacl (talk) 17:08, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support, essentially per Ravenswing. Ironholds (talk) 20:13, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• Strong Support per WP:BITE - Protonk's analysis of how this affects newcomers is spot-on: a decision criterion responsible for deleting a large amount of the content new editors want to create, should not be named with a word that creates confusion and makes their contributions look irrelevant or unwanted. I beg all editors to take into account that the target audience for policies and guidelines are newcomers, not experienced editors who are already familiar with the basic principles; the nuances of how we want to name things should take a back seat and be secundary to how newcomers perceive them.

- Nevertheless, I see a flaw in how the RfC has been crafted - by making a concrete suggestion for Inclusion as the target name, the success of the whole proposal stands on that particular possibility, so that it will succeed or fail on the merits of that word, and not on the problems with the current name. I'm afraid that with a classic "Support/Oppose" RfC it will be impossible to gain consensus for a single given name.

- Rather, I'd want to ask those editors opposing Inclusion so far to think whether their opposition is to any name change or just to the suggested one. Please assume for a second that the guideline had a different name, and consider whether you would support the name Notability above all the other alternatives suggested at the "Other" section or if the flaws would make you think twice about adopting it.

- Maybe even if Inclusion doesn't succeed, we can open the dialog to new possibilities and find a better solution. To that end, I'd like to see this discussion scope expanded so that various alternate proposals are compiled and their relative merits weighted, in view of starting later a straw-poll to choose the preferred name, of which Notability would be just one more possibility. Maybe it could even be structured in two phases - a qualifying round to determine a set with the few options with the most support, and a final one between two or three finalists to settle the definite preferred name. Diego (talk) 21:51, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Diego Moya: I'm not opposed to a different word. Any single word that doesn't suffer from the same problems as "notability" is a step up. I wanted to put forward a specific name because many past discussions have bogged down due to multiple names being proposed and forking the dispute. Protonk (talk) 23:52, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• Support notwithstanding an alternative suggestion—The proposer's arguments are very compelling. I'm not 100% satisfied on the suggested nomenclature, though I can support it (and so I am). In my own conversations, I often find myself using the word "eligible" for "notable", ergo suggesting that people think of it as the "Eligibility" guideline. It's less judgmental, and it implies the same threshold for inclusion that may or may not be reached by a given subject in a way that "Inclusion" doesn't quite. That said, I absolutely see a conversation about "Here's how why you might not be Included" going much better with the uninitiated than the "Here's why you aren't Notable". So if there's any agreement around "Eligibility" I would be thrilled, but in the meantime "Inclusion" is an improvement on the status quo. WWB (talk) 02:23, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support: "Inclusion criteria" is a lot more clear, and makes it sound less like a super-exclusive cool kids club. You could use terms such as "General inclusion criteria" and "Inclusion criteria for [subject] articles" in documentation rather than "notability" guideline. ViperSnake151  Talk  03:41, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Added Support—I could certainly support "Inclusion criteria". Similar to how "Reliable sources" became "Identifying reliable sources" (at least as I recall it). WWB (talk) 05:15, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"Inclusion guidelines" has been rejected many times before because it sets a dangerous precedence on how new readers will interprete the SNGs as implied automatic inclusion guidelines. They are not, they are criteria that lend to allowing an article to be created so it can be expended based on the presumption of sources to be coming, but does not assure inclusion when all is said and done. --MASEM (t) 05:32, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• Support better than what we have now --Guerillero | My Talk 06:31, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support per others. I wouldn't mind "eligibility" as well, but the case made here for "inclusion" is very strong. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support I've been in support of renaming the guidelines for some time as it is far more descriptive of what these guidelines actually are. They don't determine whether something is notability (notability being a very subjective term), they provide a set of criteria on which we determine if a subject may be included in the encyclopedia and that is how we've been using the guideline for years. "Notability" has become a bit of jargon when we means "worthy of inclusion". The new terminology will also stear us away from arguements such as, "This was on a best seller, how is it not notable?" "This sold X units, it must be notable." Or, "This was in the top 5 of some popular poll, so it should be notable." —Farix (t | c) 12:31, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

  It seems that the main argument against renaming the page to use "inclusion" can be just as confusing as "notability". That isn't much of an argument in my opinion and does no address the need to use a more descriptive terminology of what these guidelines actually do. If you want a less ambiguous name than "Wikipedia:Inclusion", I would recommend "Wikipedia:Inclusion standards for stand-alone articles" with redirects WP:INCLUSION and WP:ISSA. —Farix (t | c) 14:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• Support. I do not think this will increase any tendency towards either inclusion or exclusion, or cause a change in what gets accepted--it should be neutral that way. What it will do is make it much easier to discuss it. This will be especially true with newcomers. At present, it takes a ridiculous amount of explanation at AfC or AfD or OTRS to explain to people why they can not have articles, because they naturally confuse notability with importance. It is extremely difficult to tell someone that they or their organization is not important without insulting them--I've learned how to do it most of the time, but it's often tricky. They understandably do not see why we have our own special definition of a common english word, and use it to reject them. On the other hand, they all do understand that we like any other publication or site have our own standards of what we want to include--they may be unhappy with the result, but they are likely to accept it. There is also the advantage that using the term "inclusion" links this guideline with the fundamental policy on which it is based, WP:NOT, which is often a much firmer basis for argument and discussion. DGG ( talk ) 01:31, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
• Support. Renaming is essential. Indeed, the word "notability" is sometimes misleading. For example, one may bring Barack Obama to WP:AfD and argue he's not more notable than other US Presidents. If "notability" didn't appear in the entire guideline, things would be different.--180.172.239.231 (talk) 07:20, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Opposing

• Inclusion is far too strong a concept, because that basically goes against the idea that there are cases were a topic might be notable but we don't include (see discussion in previous section about "presumption" of notability for example, and that there are more things we include that are not notable but include because they help with navigation or other facets (such as the concept that every named geographic place should have an article as so we can act as a gazetteer). Notability is a stable term that describes the process exactly. --MASEM (t) 15:35, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • In practice "inclusion" is what the notability guideline governs. There are exceptions, as with any guideline but I think the overwhelming discourse on what we should include that isn't explicitly excluded by NOT is notability. If you were asked by a new editor whether or not an article they want to write would be included in wikipedia, would you mention the exceptions you presented above without prompting? Protonk (talk) 16:05, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
    • It is that in practice and it is very easy to tell new editors that for all purposes, notability is our inclusion guideline. But there are so many little gotchas when you get into the weeds of it, and with the number of people that want to game keeping or deleting on wording and the like when it comes to AFD (this being the most often reason for AFD nominations), calling this "inclusion" would be ultimately disruptive even if the intent is otherwise to keep the practice the same. It's likely because 99% of the cases of what is determined to be notable is what ends up being included that makes it seem like these are equivalent concepts, but they aren't. --MASEM (t) 16:12, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
    • "But there are so many little gotchas when you get into the weeds of it..." I'll agree, but those gotchas exist regardless of the name of the guideline. How does the name "notability" diminish their effect but "inclusion" magnify it? Protonk (talk) 16:38, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
      • Inclusion implies an automatic criteria. "We include a topic because of *this*,", whereas notability requires more careful thought and maps to the fact we do not have inherited notability (or inclusion in this case). --MASEM (t) 16:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
        • "Inherited notability" is a terrible name for the concept it describes, BTW - it would imply that we decide whether to split a topic based on the stand-alone worthiness of each subtopic, when in fact the splits are created based on the availability of independent coverage for each part. Again, we face the problem that the way we use the word "notability" is largely unrelated to its common English meaning. Unless we find a different word to describe the way we decide that a topic is defined with enough precision for an article, we're condemned to performing mental gymnastics replacing "notable" with "covered by independent sources" each time it appears in conversation; and newcomers are condemned to misunderstand what we're talking about. Diego (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
          • Well, it's still based on the idea that we don't have stand alone articles just because they fall into a certain classification; it may be the case that obviously we will include a topic of a certain category, such as a US president, but this is not because, directly, they were the president, but because there's a gazillion sources for each of these people by the nature of being president. It is a very subtle but important thing to keep in mind. Better wording is always an improvement, but "inherit notability" does capture the concept. --MASEM (t) 22:32, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
            • There are a zillion better names that would describe that concept that don't tie it to "fame and importance", which is what "inherited notability" wrongly does. A US president without an article would not have it because no one bothered to write about his mandate, not because the "US president" position is important but that particular president was not. Diego (talk) 22:42, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

(BTW, remember that WP:INHERITED is not policy - even if "inherited notability" would be precisely described by those words, it's not a concept sanctioned by policy and thus is not helpful as the basis for decisions of articles existence). Diego (talk) 22:45, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• We have multiple inclusion criteria including verifiability, notability and licensing. The two concepts should not be confused. I have read your counterargument but I am not convinced. Chillum 15:41, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• While I understand how the term "Notability" can occasionally cause confusion, it is less confusing than the term "Inclusion" would be. "Inclusion" involves concepts that are far beyond the scope of "Notability"... Inclusion involves concepts like relevance (Should we include a specific bit of information in a specific article... if so how?) and Due Weight (does including a specific bit of information in a specific article give it undue weight). To keep the concepts distinct, It helps to use two distinct terms... Using "Notability" when discussing whether a topic should have an article devoted to it... and using "Inclusion" when discussing whether some bit of information should be mentioned in a given context. Blueboar (talk) 17:17, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Note we already use the term WP:NOTEWORTHY and "noteworthyness" to describe whether a statement, concept, or fact is worthy of being included in the appropriate article(s). EllenCT (talk) 23:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose only this word, not the concept of a rename I believe a renaming of notability is in order, badly, but I'm not sure I'm so happy with this word. --Jayron32 23:23, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • @Jayron32: I'm not opposed to different terms, so long as we move away from notability. I proposed a single term (perhaps foolishly) because previous discussions had gotten forked quickly over calling it this that and the other thing and I wanted to establish a sense of the community on a rename. Perhaps I could've proposed a two step RfC w/ consensus for a new name as step one and choosing one as step two, but I kinda hate two step RfCs. :) Protonk (talk) 13:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose per Blueboar, since inclusion would appear to govern (but not govern) what material goes in an article. Also, we'd still have to keep explaining to newbies that their articles don't meet the inclusion standards, which I think many would find hurtful anyway. Then, what's the adjective form of inclusion – worthy of inclusion? that's quite a mouthful. Lastly, I don't really care. It's always been notability, let's keep it that way. BethNaught (talk) 07:56, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose simply "inclusion". "Inclusion" would be too easily readable as referring to content within an article. Unavoidably, we cannot expect people to even read whole sentences, such as the couple as Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_guidelines_do_not_apply_to_content_within_an_article. (I blame this dumbing down of general comprehension of project space on the proliferation of bright blue shortcuts that litter every section - people are starting to think in 1-2 word phrases). A rename is a good idea, but anything less that "Article inclusion" or "Topic inclusion" is not good enough for the reason just given and due to it being a near meaningless change at the expense of consistency-over-time. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:09, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose  Good names are foundational to clear thinking.  WP:Inclusion is a misdirected word that overlaps with the idea of the inclusion of topics in the encyclopedia.  WP:Stand-alone topics or WP:Article topics would be more precise.  An attempt to avoid deprecation is WP:N Article topics.  P.S. I support a follow-up to select a name for another RfC.  Unscintillating (talk) 13:17, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

For proof that WP:INCLUSION would be deeply confounded, I cite footnote 1 of WP:V, "the threshold for inclusion is verifiability..."  Unscintillating (talk) 15:55, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose with alternative name I propose significant coverage (adjective significantly covered). It's already used in the general notability guideline, and it illustrates the main point of the guideline more clearly to new editors. My only concern about this name is that it might not work well with subject-specific guidelines that refer to significant designations, honors, or awards. Anon126 (notify me of responses! / talk / contribs) 20:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose per Masem. There are things that we exclude despite passing N and things that we include regardless of whether they pass N. Also, changing the term of art that represents this guideline to yet another real word like "inclusion" with what would seem to be many common sense applications here would just alter the content of misunderstandings as to its usage but not reduce their frequency. postdlf (talk) 20:57, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose "Inclusion" isn't right because there are multiple requirements for inclusion; notability is only one of them. After looking at other names that have been suggested (topicality? really???), my conclusion is a paraphrase of Churchill's supposed remark about democracy: Notability is the worst possible name for this criterion, except for all the others that have been suggested. --MelanieN (talk) 22:24, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Do you have an explanation why? In this guideline, topic is used more than notable and note combined. So, something with topic in it is just more what this guideline is about. No one is insisting on that form of topic, though. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:53, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"Topic", to most people, means the subject of a discussion or essay. "Topicality", to most people, means nothing at all. --MelanieN (talk) 23:57, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

P.S. Meaning of Topicality, according to Wikipedia: "Topicality is a stock issue in policy debate which pertains to whether or not the plan affirms the resolution as worded." Everybody got that? --MelanieN (talk) 00:01, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Well here it will be topic of an article, which is in keeping with the meaning you asrcibe, and yes notability is also a word with colloquial meaning, but, here as a title, it is used as an artifice. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:12, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

WP:TOPICALITY brings to mind either WP:Recentism or WP:In the news, since the common usage of the word refers to the quality of being relevant to current events. isaacl (talk) 02:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose I agree that perhaps we should use the word notability less in favor of the word inclusion but telling a new editor their draft isn't worthy of inclusion is not so different from telling them the subject isn't notable. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:33, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose- what we currently call notability is not the only requirement for inclusion. Reyk _YO! 23:40, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose - Ultimately, we have to call it something, and it's not going to match the vernacular meaning of the word we use exactly. I remain unconvinced that "inclusion" describes this concept better. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:47, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Other

While I oppose renaming this, I can support a separate guideline or perhaps policy (have to think on that if it should be that strong) where we describe our inclusion approach. This would include that the main factor for more articles will be notability, but can also point to cases that fall outside of that (eg geographic places, navigation pages, etc.) and perhaps better describe how we can also purposely exclude material due to BLP, NOT, etc. --MASEM (t) 15:50, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• But that doesn't at all address the issue at hand: that many editors -- even a number of experienced ones -- bristle at the suggestion that their article "isn't notable." We don't need more explanations or descriptions; we already have those in profusion. Ravenswing 16:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Which is true too. Less is better sometimes. But there's a larger aspect here that's been in my head for a while and simply haven't had a way to verbalize it well, that our basic inclusion guideline for a topic is if there is demonstration that it has or will likely meet all of our main content policies - NOT, V, NOR, NPOV, BLP, and probably a few others. Meeting NOT and BLP requires different aspects, but to meet V and NOR and NPOV, this generally requires a good amount of sourcing from independent, third-party sources that present the material in secondary fashion (not just raw data or accounts, but establishing its content to the world at large). (This is a stronger statement than the GNG presently is). Sometimes that can be shown by simply looking at how the article article exists - an article dozens of independent, third-party, secondary sources that make of the majority the citations will likely never be in question of whether we should include it. But then it takes time to get all those sources, and to make WP a cooperative effort, we have allowances for articles in progress (within the scope of no deadlines), which are the GNG itself that asks if the topic has some degree of sourced notability (which can allow an article to be build even if you have a few sources) and the SNG (based on even just one primary source to prove the SNG is met). This structure better represents practice, but I am no wordsmith and it sounds a lot more complex than I have it in my head. If we had some WP-level page, "How do we decide what is included in WP", that broke out how the core policies are used, and how the GNG and the SNGs are used, and other facets, that would help establish better where notability fits in the picture and that we are really looking for sourced notability, given that sourcing is one of WP's top priorities. If that can be explained as our inclusion process, then notability is a test under it. --MASEM (t) 17:03, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• New suggestion: As it appears you are looking for one word: Topicality. Its about appropraite topics for articles right, so about topics, one word: topicality. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:42, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • This is not bad; not sure on it yet, but not a bad idea. --MASEM (t) 18:25, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• . . . or we could go with a unique word that captures the decision making process for inclusion but which is unique enough that it's not used in many different ways in colloquial in a good/bad way (like 'of note' etc.) or in wiki process (like, 'include' etc), and in that case, how about WP:CRITERION - (also checking whether this is a red link WP:TOPICALITY) Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:01, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• One other thing I will add about why "inclusion" is not good even though it is mechanically the same idea as notability: Our article evaluation process is not based on the incoming end (at creation), save for a few CSD items, but at a point afterwards - we're evaluating the suitability of the topic after the article has been created. As such all topics are "included" by default because we have no limits on article creation. But the retention of those topics is a different matter. We'd like to have editors think about the end goal of showing enough to retain an article before going off to creating it, but that's impossible to stop as long as we allow auto confirmed editors to create new articles (Please note: I am not saying we should stop this practice, just that's the way it is). So we should not have editors thinking about "inclusion" but rather how well it meets our standards for what should remain in WP if an editor evaluates an article. Hence why I'm not thrilled with the work "inclusion" because it does not reflect our article development approach. --MASEM (t) 18:25, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah... things would be a lot easier if more people took the time to question whether a topic really should have an article... before they started to write the article. (Unfortunately, human nature is such that this isn't very realistic). Blueboar (talk) 19:45, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

All the more reason to adapt the guideline to how people will find it for the first time, instead of trying to adapt people to the way the guideline is named. ;-) Diego (talk) 21:55, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• Now that we have set the tone for alternate names, I want to propose a name that highlights the outcome and the reason why the guideline exists, rather than the main decision criterion: Wikipedia:ARRANGEMENT (I would had preferred WP:STRUCTURE, but that's already taken for the internal composition of articles).

The idea is to put emphasis on the benefit provided by following this guideline - if we use this name when explaining the reasons for deleting a new article, we're not telling the newcomer that their topic is not "worthy" or "notable"; rather we explain that we think a stand-alone article is not the best way to cover that topic in the encyclopedia.

The GNG criteria thus would mean that, if a topic is covered by several independent sources, we presume it to be well-defined enough so that a neutral and well-structured article may be written. This still recognizes that content which is verifiable by RSs but doesn't meet the GNG could be covered as part of a larger topic at a different article.

I believe the section WP:PAGEDECIDE is consistent with this interpretation of the guideline, in that the ultimate reason to create an article is editors deciding that doing so is the best structure; and that we can override that decision and merge it, even if the topic is well defined by RSs as defined by the GNG.

Barring the above, my second-best name for the guideline would be Wikipedia:Stand-alone articles, as this exactly defines what the guideline is about, with no ambiguity nor possibility of confusion. Diego (talk) 21:17, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

• For that matter, if you can't find an existing word that adequately conveys your meaning, invent one. ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 21:28, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
• WP:N currently notes 105 instances of "notability" or "notable", whereas it only mentions "inclusion" four times. This leads me to believe that all of this will involve more than a simple change of the title, so I am curious to how this page might be rewritten. Location (talk) 22:43, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

If we find a single word as the name that describes the purpose of the guideline, it might be as simple as replacing each appearance of "notability" with the new word. "Topicality", as suggested by Alanscottwalker would fit very well in the current text; though I think something like "article-ability" would more precisely describe the concept that is being defined in this guideline (in fact much better than "notability", IMHO). Diego (talk) 22:56, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Diego Moya: The nutshell currently reflects our prime objective (i.e. "Wikipedia articles cover notable topics..."), so I don't think we can dispense with some reference to topics being worthy of note. As I see it, inclusion of a topic is dependent upon editors being able to show to others (WP:V) that reliable secondary sources independent of the topic (WP:RS) have found the topic worthy of note (WP:N). All points are important, but some are easier to define. -Location (talk) 00:01, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, one could rewrite your comment without 'note': The nutshell currently reflects our prime objective (i.e. "Wikipedia articles cover [] topics [] that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world"), so I don't think we can dispense with some reference to topics being worthy of attention. As I see it, inclusion of a topic is dependent upon editors being able to show to others (WP:V) that reliable secondary sources independent of the topic (WP:RS) have found the topic worthy of attention (WP:~). Now, of course no one is suggesting we eliminate 'note' and its forms altogther but it's rather easy to do. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

• • @Location: the notability guideline (and others dependent on it) would require a rewrite, but I believe it is possible (easily) to do so without altering the meaning of the guideline. In fact, as I surmise above the guideline would benefit greatly from such a rewrite. It's not as simple as a find and replace but it shouldn't be hard. I'll take a crack at rewriting it this weekend to show what I mean. Protonk (talk) 23:39, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Location, please see Protonk's analysis at the first section of the RfC proposal - the nutshell and introduction don't properly represent the actual criterion - if we abide by their actual words, we couldn't cover obscure, specialized topics like rare mathematics theorems or historical characters. "Reliable secondary sources independent of the topic", the actual criterion, is quite different than "significant attention by the world at large". I'm now realizing that the common English word that means the same as the effective criterion as written in the GNG is COVERAGE: the topics that can have articles are those covered by reliable sources, which is independent of those topics being worthy of that coverage (what notability literally means). I like it better than the current name as it avoids the implicit value judgement, being merely descriptive of a verifiable fact. Diego (talk) 00:17, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
    • Except that "coverage" alone is too loose a word in principle - eg we don't cover routine news even though it might get wide coverage. This is the problem - we've set "notability" as a specific concept on WP that no other english word simply captures without turning the concept one way or another, even if no functional change to the principle of notability is made.
    • Understanding that people are upset that they they they have a notable topic that we don't accept, it may be better to say that we do use notability but principles like WP:V and WP:NOR are overarching principles of WP, we evaluate notability based on sources instead of "apparent" notability that might exist by fame or word of mouth. --MASEM (t) 00:24, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
      • Not covering routine news doesn't have anything to do with notability - we don't cover them because of WP:NOT (created to exclude notable content that editors thought couldn't be maintained), but all sorts of routine events excluded by WP:INDISCRIMINATE or WP:EVENT could easily pass the WP:GNG and thus be considered notable; they're excluded for other reasons, not lack of coverage/notability. "Coverage" (or more precisely, "significant coverage") is exactly how "notability" is used at WP, as long as it's the right kind of coverage (in-depth and from reliable sources). Diego (talk) 00:58, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
        • No, NOT is not sufficient, which is why we have to talk about enduring coverage here. And while I will agree it is fundamentally the same, the wording is very influential to discussion - not just here but throughout other policies and guidelines. (eg "non-free" vs "fair use" at NFC for example). I'm all for finding a better word or language but we have to be careful of how it will be taken. --MASEM (t) 01:04, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
          • Another thought to consider: if there is no English word that "simply captures" the meaning, then what obstacle is there to change the word we use? We should be eager to change it to one that doesn't create the deep misunderstandings in editors reading the guideline for the first time that notability creates. I agree that the wording is very influential, but the current word is influencing it in all the wrong directions. Choosing a word directly related to the sources covering the topic, and not the inherent worthiness of such topic, can only be a step in the good direction. Diego (talk) 01:11, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
          • What Diego Moya says above is critical to me. There's no single word that's going to capture the essence of the GNG + SNGs. We've tried with "notable" and it doesn't work. It just doesn't. We can talk about potential misreading of the guideline in a narrow way should it be named something like inclusion but it's not even close to the level of misreading we get from the word notable alone. Most of the misreading exists without people reading the guideline at all, because the name either rankles or gives people the impression that it encapsulates the requirement through its vernacular meaning alone. We should obviously be wary of potentially leading people in the wrong direction but we also should be frank about just how bad the current name does on that score. Or at the very least, let's frame it this way: "inclusion" could cause someone who reads and understands the inclusion guideline to believe it is the only guidance we offer on what articles wikipedia contains. "Notability" does more damage than that without anyone reading the policy in question. Protonk (talk) 03:35, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
            • Here's the thing - the concepts of what notability is (ignoring the word, just the processes and practice) is complicated and filled with various nuances. It is not simple, and I dare think that there is a single word in the English language that captures the bulk of those concepts without stepping on the toes of other parts of the process. Editors are told to read this before creating new articles, and it's not an obscure guideline in the rundown basement somewhere. I can appreciate that we shouldn't bite new editors, but at the same time, we need to expect them to do some basic reading and understanding of how all WP policies and guidelines work, and that includes understanding what we call "notability" and how that differences from a more layman's version of the term. This will not change even with this proposal - they will still need to read and learn what ever already exists for notability. So irregardless, new editors that jump right in and create articles without reading in either situation will still have the same reaction when their article is deleted, whether we say "not notable" or "fails inclusion" or "not enough coverage". We need the word that captures the concept best, and really, this is still "notability" because while it is not the same meaning as in English, it's close enough to be accurate. --MASEM (t) 05:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
              • I disagree that the term "notability" is close enough; notability in the real world is judged differently than on Wikipedia, as I described above, and so it is confusing to use the word differently in Wikipedia discussions. In addition, the real world commonly considers some subjects inherently notable, but Wikipedia does not. (I wasn't sure if by "inherit notability", you were referring to inherent notability?) isaacl (talk) 07:01, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
                • Our use of "notability" is not that far off from the English language version of the word "the state or quality of being notable; distinction; prominence." Our application narrows it only because we put huge weight in sourcing, and thust we evaluate "the quality of being notable" by the amount of significant coverage it gets. I do recognize that some take "notability" here as linguistically synonym with "inclusion" or the like, but the right application of this guideline is our version of notability that is refined by WP policies. --MASEM (t) 14:21, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• This entire discussion is flawed by dividing the responses by the posters initial view of the proposal. All this support oppose neutral nonsense is anti consensus and instead an unfettered discussion should have informed whether to go to refined discussion around the text for an RFC. That off my chest, I have been using the term inclusion criteria for years and it works well to explain to a noob why we can't host their article. I'm therefore broadly in favour of this change. Spartaz ^Humbug! 11:55, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
• Some comments on the idea that inclusion would lead people to believe that it governs article content:
• I won't rehash my objections from the nom or elsewhere except to say that extant confusion over the guideline matters and should be weighed against possible confusion following a rewrite:
• The notability guideline as it is written right now disclaims governance over article content three times.
  • Once in the nutshell "The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles..."
  • Once in the lede "They do not limit the content of an article or list"
  • Once in a section devoted to the concept "The criteria applied to article creation/retention are not the same as those applied to article content."
• If the current name so clearly eschews this confusion, why is so much of the guideline devoted to addressing it? I realize that the argument isn't that no confusion exists about notability <-> content, but I think we can get caught up in the logic behind why a rename would increase this confusion and forget that we may be increasing it from a lot to a little more than a lot and not from zero. Protonk (talk) 17:41, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Consider another problem here. "Notability" is used for us as an adjective, a quality about the coverage a topic recieves. "Inclusion" is a verb or verb form, talking about the process of evaluating an article's appropriateness for WP. Renaming this to "inclusion" is not going to remember people using the quality of notability as a reason to delete. Eg we'd only be changed from "This article should not be included because it is not notable" ("notable" being linked) vs "This article should not be included because it is not notable" ("included" being linked), the reasoning is still the same, and you are still going to confuse new editors. If there is to be a naming change, it has to focus on an adjective that describes the quality of the topic, and not the process of evaluating a topic. --MASEM (t) 19:24, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
    • It may be the case that we have to settle on a title which can operate as an adjective and a noun (e.g. WWB's suggestion of "eligibility/eligible"). I'm not opposed to that and I'm not wedded to "inclusion". Protonk (talk) 20:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Defining criteria before deciding on a word

It occurs to me that the various proposals for alternate names are clustered around some common themes. Maybe we could explore in more depth the ramifications of each one, to see what words fit each theme and what are their undertones, before committing to any particular word?

Criteria of the proposals made so far:

• Structure of the content within the encyclopedia. It includes the proposals:
  • Inclusion (indicates whether to have an article or not)
  • Arrangement (focus on the purpose of the guideline - arranging content in articles)
  • Stand-alone articles (plain, descriptive name of what the guideline is about)

• Decision process
  • Criterion (highlights that the guideline defines a decision process)
  • Topicability (examining whether the content is a well-defined topic or not)

• Coverage in external sources
  • Notability (the current name falls under this criterion - it makes emphasis in looking at the external world to make the decision whether to have an article - by finding topics worthy of notice)
  • Coverage (emphasis on having received notice, whether they're worthy of not)

I hope this small analysis makes sense and helps us to find what several proposals have in common, so that we can discuss what criteria would make more sense and what we want to emphasize as the name of the guideline. Diego (talk) 22:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

"Topicality" is not a good choice of words to represent this guideline, as its commonly-used definition is "the quality or state of being topical", which in turn is defined as "relating to current news or events; dealing with things that are important, popular, etc., right now".

I don't feel a strong need to try to boil down the guideline to a single word. However, as an alternative to "standards for inclusion", I think "standards of significance" may be useful, as it is applicable from two directions: is a topic sufficiently significant to warrant inclusion in Wikipedia, and is there significant coverage in independent, non-promotional, reliable, third-party sources with editorial control such that a reasonably informative article can be written? isaacl (talk) 06:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Well "topic" is used 51 times on this page, so if not the other forms of that word then WP:TOPIC can be usurped. Alanscottwalker (talk) 08:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

WP:TOPIC is not a suitable title. Wikipedia editors should be expected to be able to work with meaningful titles of at least a couple of words. "Usurp" is a Wikipedia jargon word not used correctly here, and best never used. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:12, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, apart from your irrelevant commentary on "usurp", more words is just more to agree on, but in general I have no opposition to more words. However, you have not explained why "wikipedia:topic" is not a good title, other than it being only one word. If we wanted more words, we could go with, topic criteria Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:31, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Personally, I don't feel "Topic" is sufficiently descriptive as a title for this page. "Determining topic significance" or "Determining topic suitability" would be better. isaacl (talk) 11:39, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, it's not about us determining "significance" -- "suitability" is closer to what we are determining but does not significantly add, as a title, to determining topics or topic determination Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Topic" is not a good title because it is too short, is conveys insufficient information for the intended audience (new editors). Like your use of "usurp" I think it shows that you are not thinking in terms of the intended audience of new editors. "Topic criteria" is also too short. It begs "for what". "Topic inclusion criteria" might work. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:13, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

OK. But Wikipedia has a plethora of short titles, which are rather just concepts. Moreover, no matter how long we make the title, in ordinary everyday work it will be shortened. And at any rate, if someone says to a new editor or some help page has on it WP:TOPIC: guides how we choose appropriate article topics, they will certainly understand why it is called topic. (As an aside, your Article Topic suggestion is certainly better than your last suggestion) Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:28, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

(ec) You compliment "WP:Article Topic" as a title suggestion? I suggest "WP:Article inclusion criteria" or "WP:Topic inclusion criteria". The word "inclusion" is very good, just not sufficient. Article=Topic for most purposes. "Criteria" captures the content of the guideline well. (I don't get the post of isaacl, 06:51, 31 August 2014). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:43, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

You're right I mistakenly elided your suggestions. However, I would note, the guide is also about exclusion (and in fact that is how it functions in most practice because theoretically and practically any article may be included at any moment). Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:01, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

The guide is not so much about exclusion as that it is fairly comprehensive about what is included. For specific exclusions, it points to WP:NOT. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:25, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

If you can further pinpoint the area of confusion, I can try to clarify further. In general, though, I agree with you that I don't believe this guideline needs to have a single word title. I suggested "Standards for inclusion" earlier; "Standards of significance" may also be workable, since encyclopedias seek to cover significant topics. isaacl (talk) 02:10, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

One problem with the definitions... "Inclusion" means more than just whether to have an article or not... it can also refer to whether to include specific facts and opinions within an article... this latter issue is not within the scope of our current Notability guidelines. As for Smoeky's suggestion of "Topic inclusion criteria"... a topic can be included in Wikipedia without rating its own article (ie it can be discussed in some related article).
I have said this before... but I think an easy solution to what we are talking about would be to make the distinction between a topic/subject being NOTABLE and the topic/subject being NOTE WORTHY. The first is a somewhat ridged standard... it means the topic/subject rates having its own article devoted to it. The second is a much looser standard... it means the topic/subject rates being discussed somewhere in Wikipedia (but not necessarily in its own stand alone article). I tend to be boarderline deletionist when it comes to NOTABILITY... but an Inclusionist when it comes to NOTE WORTHINESS. Blueboar (talk) 12:36, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

But different forms of "note" is the problem - we would rather not make people split hairs (or skulls :) ) over such things. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:52, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

But using different forms of "note" is better than using one confusing form of "Include". This discussion started with the valid concern that people get upset and confused when they are told that their favorite topic is not NOTABLE enough for Wikipedia. However, if you explain the difference between NOTABLE and NOTE WORTHY, and tell them that their topic might well be NOTE WORTHY enough to be discussed as a section of some related article, they tend to be a lot less upset (Oh... you mean I can write about my favorite subject... I just have to do so in some related article? I can live with that.)

A better explanation of the concept of NOTE WORTHINESS would also encourage more "merge" proposals at AfD, and is in line with our WP:PRESERVE policy. Blueboar (talk) 13:03, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I have some sympathy with your first sentence, but it also supports changing the current name, that uses the confusing note forms. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:40, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't see how it's better. Like I said to Masem above, the worst case scenario is that someone reads this guideline and infers from the title that it is our only guidance for inclusion. right now, people misinterpret the guideline without reading it because the title invites them to do so. Also, the conversation disabusing someone of the hypothetical misunderstanding you propose is much easier to have than explaining that "notable" means something specific and unique to wikipedia. Everyone comes to a deletion discussion with a ready interpretation of the word "notable". How is it better to let that extant interpretation be wrong than to let a potential reading of the guideline cause them to...do what, exactly? Propose a census designated place for deletion because it doesn't meet the guideline for inclusion? And as I said in the nom, the GNG + SNGs are practically our guidance for inclusion. They offer widely used tests by which editors determine the suitability of most articles for inclusion. There are exceptions, but I think we're really overstating the potential confusion caused by this and downplaying the very real and very common confusion created by the title for the guideline as it is right now. Protonk (talk) 13:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I am sympathetic to the confusion over the various forms of "note"... but I don't think there is a better term. Certainly "inclusion" isn't better. The various forms of "Note" may not be perfect, but they work... in part because there are various forms of "note" that we can use to clarify the subtle distinctions that we are talking about. Blueboar (talk) 14:03, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

We can just as well rewrite the specific guidelines to change the word to inclusion of ... and so on. The point of this proposal is not to change policy, but to change wording to better explain policy. I agree it might be beneficial to unpack the various elements that make up the concepts of encyclopedic inclusion/notability, but I don;t think this is immediately practical. Any change here, or indeed any explicit statement of it, would change the balance of what we actually do, probably radically and unpredictably. I, like some others of us, would in fact like to change the balance of what we include, but I don't want to do it by trying to manipulate fundamental concepts in a way that I hope will have the desired effects; the only fair way of doing it is to get explicit agreement of what we actually want to change. If we wait for this before making the change of a word, we be be arguing here for a very long time. I've always disliked tinkering with the fundamentals rules in order to do something specific -- it reminds me of the introduction of "superprotection" in order to get a single particular edit to stick. DGG ( talk ) 01:46, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Is this really a problem that needs solving?

I'm not convinced that "notability" is a problem concept. IMO it comes much closer to the "significant coverage from independent reliable sources" requirement than any other term so far proposed. And I'm not convinced that explaining it to people is that hard. Personally I start my explanation with the following, which I keep handy in my sandbox for easy use: "Wikipedia is not just another website; it is an international encyclopedia. As such, it has standards for what kind of subjects can have articles here. The subjects have to be "notable", which basically means famous. And there is a very specific definition of what makes a subject "notable" enough for an article: It has to have received significant coverage from independent reliable sources." Is that so hard to understand? Is it so burdensome to have to repeat something like that, or rather copy it from wherever you have it stashed? --MelanieN (talk) 01:06, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

That was a point I made above: even if we made this "inclusion", editors will still be using "not notable, delete" language to nominate and !vote in AFDs. New users will still ignore advice to read these guidelines before creating new articles to understand the nuances of notability/"significant coverage from independent reliable sources" that we expect. It's a feel-good solution that introduces potentially different problems without affecting the main issues. And addressing those main issues is not a simple task nor something we actually can change in some cases (we can't force behavior of new users). --MASEM (t) 01:11, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

As Protonk alluded to above, the key issue is that unaware editors think they already know what is meant when someone says a given topic lacks notability, and so they don't bother to read this guideline. With a title term such as "Standards of inclusion", editors must read the guideline in order to know what it says; they can't make any assumptions solely based on the name. (Personally, I care more about what editors use to describe this guideline than the actual name, but I appreciate that the most straightforward way to get editors to use a term with more clarity is to change the name of this article.) isaacl (talk) 02:20, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Alternate proposal - Develop guideline (Policy?) on what are considered appropriate stand-out main space articles

I dare not try to name it now, but the idea based on some of the supports (that they want to be able to point a new editor where we explain what we include) would be solved better without "disrupting" (for lack of a better word) the current consensus on notability's place on WP. The idea for this would not just be about inclusion, but other factors, outlining how some topics would be immediately disallowed per NOT or NPOV or BLP, how some articles can be spun out (per summary style), how we have outlines and navigation lists, etc. and of course at the core that for most articles we are looking for topics that demonstrate notability with minimum requirements of the GNG or the SNGs. Key is to focus on the core policies that we expect all content should meet (NOT, V, NOR, NPOV) and this, by necessity, will exclude some topics. This would be like an inclusion guideline, but as I've noted before, as we assess articles for appropriateness after they are created, "inclusion" is the wrong word, but we can describe this as a process page than a qualification page (as "notability" implies).

This new page would split off a few sections from WP:N currently to help simplify it. There also might be elements of AFD and BEFORE that could be brought into that (that deletion should be last resorts), etc. Yes, this makes a new guideline, but this also seems to be the simplest solution to address the newbie biting the supporters point out without any other massive change of process. --MASEM (t) 02:00, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

To add, a few more examples of what can be included would be pointing to OUTCOMES, as well as a reminder IAR applies as well. What this does to is help establish that notability is a cog in a larger machine and not an end to itself for notability, but by far one of our larger goals. --MASEM (t) 02:06, 1 September 2014 (UTC)