Wikipedia:Notability

[[Category:Wikipedia wp:n
wp:nns|Notability]]

If you are expecting to read the essay on evaluating notability, it has been moved to Wikipedia:Notability/Arguments.

Based on several sections in the policy on what Wikipedia is not, it is generally agreed that topics in most areas must exceed a certain threshhold of notability in order to have an article in Wikipedia. The term "importance" is also in use, and for practical purposes on Wikipedia the two can be considered synonymous.

Several guidelines (see table on the right) have been created, or are under discussion, to define more precisely what these thresholds should be. They generally assert that a minimum standard for any given topic is that it has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works, where the source is independent of the topic itself.

Articles on subjects with borderline notability are frequently merged into list articles (e.g. List of esoteric programming languages), or into an article on a related subject (e.g. articles about not-well-known relatives of a famous person tend to be merged into the article on the person itself).

Articles on non-notable subjects are frequently nominated for Proposed Deletion and Articles for Deletion, and the article's merits are discussed, assessed and frequently ultimately deleted via those processes, as can be seen through precedents.

Notability or lack thereof are subjective, but both are valid arguments in discussions such as on WP:AFD, as well as for the creation of subject-specific guidelines.

See also

This page documents the status quo. There are (and have been) several proposals to modify the status quo, such as:

• Wikipedia:Notability proposal, a failed proposal.
• Wikipedia:Notability/Proposal, another failed proposal.
• Wikipedia:Non-notability, an active proposal to use only verifiability in regard to whether "non-notable" subjects should be included in Wikipedia.