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Wikipedia:Notability (books)

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Notability
General notability guideline
Subject-specific guidelines
See also

This page gives some rough guidelines[1] intended to be used by Wikipedia editors to decide whether a book should or should not have an article on Wikipedia. Note that failing to satisfy these notability guidelines is not a criterion for speedy deletion.

Many Wikipedians are wholly averse to the use of Wikipedia for advertising and promotion of non-notable material, and that Wikipedia articles must not be vehicles for advertisement is an official policy of long standing. A number of other relevant policies which all articles must comport with are: verifiability; no original research; Wikipedia is not a soapbox; Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information; and Wikipedia is not a crystal ball.[2] Where articles fail to encompass these policy considerations and others, they may be proposed for deletion or may be more formally listed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where Wikipedia editors apply the criteria outlined at Wikipedia:Notability to come to consensus. This guideline is a part of that notability standard.

Please note that the failure to meet any of these criteria does not mean an article must be deleted; likewise, the meeting of any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept. These are merely rules of thumb which some editors choose to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to keep an article that is listed on articles for deletion. Note also that not only must articles adhere to Wikipedia's policy on verifiability, but this naturally apply to claims of notability; it is not enough to simply assert that a book meets a criterion without substantiating that claim with reliable sources.

Finally, note that a book's notability is not a reflection on its worth. A book may be brilliantly-written, fascinating and topical while still not being notable enough for inclusion in an encyclopedia.

Coverage notes

Though "book" may be widely defined, this guideline does not presently provide notability criteria (though it may be instructive by analogy) for the following types of publications: comic books; magazines; reference works such as dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, atlases and almanacs; music-specific publications such as instruction and notation books and librettos; and instruction manuals and exam prep books.

The criteria set forth below also apply to books in electronic form (or e-books). However, the notability of e-books should also be evaluated using the notability criteria for web-specific content, as well as a determination of whether the book is covered by Project Gutenberg or an analogous project.

Criteria

A book is generally notable if it verifiably meets one or more of the following criteria:

  1. The book's author meets Wikipedia's notability criteria for people, based on his/her work as a writer.
  2. The book has been made or adapted with attribution into a motion picture that was released into multiple commercial theatres.
  3. The book has won a non-trivial literary award.
  4. The book is taught at multiple grade schools, high schools, universities or post-graduate programs in any particular country.
  5. The book has been the subject[3] of multiple, independent, non-trivial[4] reviews in works meeting our standards for reliable sources. Reviews in periodicals that review thousands of books a year with little regard for notability, such as Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews do not meet this criterion.
  6. The book has been the subject[3] of multiple, non-trivial[4] published works whose sources are independent of the book itself, with at least some of these works serving a general audience. This includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, other books, television documentaries and reviews.
    • The immediately preceding criterion excludes media re-prints of press releases, flapcopy, or other publications where the author, its publisher, agent, or other self-interested parties advertise or speak about the book[5]

Other considerations

Threshold standards

Books should have at a minimum an ISBN number (for books published after 1966), be available at a dozen or more libraries and be catalogued by its country of origin's official or de facto national library. For example, in the United States books are catalogued by the Library of Congress; United Kingdom at the British Library; Australia at the National Library of Australia; Canada at the Library and Archives Canada; France at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, China at the National Library Board; Argentina at Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina; and in India at the National Library of India. For a complete list, see List of national libraries.

However, these are exclusionary criteria rather than inclusionary; meeting these threshold standards does not imply that a book is notable, whereas a book which does not meet them, most likely is not.

Self-publication

In this regard, it should be especially noted that self-publication and/or publication by a vanity press is indicative, but not determinative of non-notability. Exceptions do exist such as Robert Gunther's Early Science in Oxford or Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane. Note however that both of these books would be considered notable by virtue (for instance) of criterion 1.

Taking the preceding threshold section into account, it should be noted that many vanity press books are both assigned ISBN numbers and may be listed in a national library such as the Library of Congress, as well as are amenable to being found through a Google book search.

By the same token, it should always weigh against an article's inclusion if the author or other interested party is the creator of the Wikipedia article. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Autobiography for more information.

Sales numbers

Most books which verifiably sell large numbers of copies will likely already meet a number of the foregoing criteria. Nevertheless, for the peculiar example where no other criterion is met, sales data may be relevant as evidence of notability.

Online bookstores

A book's listing at online bookstores such as BarnesAndNoble.com or Amazon.com is not by itself an indication of notability as both websites are non-exclusionary, including large numbers of vanity press publications. There is no present agreement on how high or low a book must fall on Amazon's sales rank listing (in the "product details" section for a book's listing) in order to provide evidence of its notability, vel non.

The "Google test"

A simple google (or other search engine) search may function as an essential tool for finding reliable sources, but simply citing the number of hits returned, if over a few hundred, is fraught with problems and has been deprecated as a positive notability test. For example, once the "unique" count goes over a few hundred, it becomes difficult or impossible to determine just how high it should be. If the unique count is extremely low (such as a few dozen to none), that may be a sign that there really is only a small number of listings for the subject on the Internet. Large numbers of hits are often deceptive; a single web site can account for hundreds of thousands of hits. For more information, see Wikipedia:Search engine test.

Not yet published books

Since Wikipedia is not a crystal ball articles about books that are not yet published are generally discouraged unless multiple independent sources provide strong evidence that the book is widely anticipated and unless the title of the book and its approximate date of publication have been made public.

In exceptional cases these standards may be relaxed for very highly anticipated forthcoming books. For example, in 2005, an article was created on Harry Potter book seven, which then had no confirmed title or release date scheduled. Note, though, that the Harry Potter novels are an international phenomenon, having sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, and having been translated into 63 languages as of October 2005.[6]

Non-contemporary books

From a pragmatic standpoint, the vast majority of books upon which articles are written which invite a notability judgment call, and which find their way to articles for deletion are from the modern era. Nevertheless, the notability of books written or published much earlier may occasionally be disputed and the criteria proposed above intended primarily for modern books may not be as suitable. We suggest instead a more common sense approach which considers whether the book has been widely cited or written about, whether it has been recently reprinted, the fame that the book enjoyed in the past and its place in the history of literature.

Academic books

Academic books serve a very different function and come to be published through very different processes than do books intended for the general public. They are often highly specialized, have small printing runs, and may only be available in specialized libraries and bookstores. For these reasons, the bulk of standards delineated previously for mainstream books are incompatible in the academic bailiwick. Again, common sense should prevail. In that case, notability should rely on the reputation of the academic press publishing it,[7] how widely the book is cited by other academic publications or in the media,[8] how influential the book is considered to be in its specialty area and whether it is taught or required reading in a number of reputable educational institutions.

Flexibility

As noted in the introduction, these are not intended, nor should they be used as hidebound rules which an article either fails or passes. Deletion debates may, for instance, turn up criteria not covered here which reasonable people can agree substantiate notability, or a book may not meet any single criteria, but come substantially close to meeting a number which substantiate noteworthiness in combination.

By the same token, argument based on loopholes should not be accorded any weight. For instance, it is possible to imagine an article written about a "book" packaged by a manufacturer with every sample of a particular product that is not an instruction manual but has no independent notability, despite that it could be deemed to have "sold" millions of copies. Common sense and logic should be the touchstones of a deletion discussion.

Derivative articles

It is a general consensus on Wikipedia that articles should not be split and split again into ever more minutia of detail treatment, with each split normally lowering the level of notability. What this means is that while a book may be notable, it is not normally advisable to have a separate article on a character or thing from the book, and it is often the case that despite the book being manifestly notable, a derivative article from it is not. Exceptions do, of course, exist—  see Wikipedia:Notability (fiction).

In some situations, where the book itself does not fit the established criteria for notability, or if the book is notable but the author has an article in Wikipedia, it may be better to feature material about the book in the author's article, rather than creating a separate article for that book.

Examples and precedents

Books meeting notability criteria

Deletion debate precedents

The following are an assortment of articles on books that went through at least one Article for Deletion debate:

  • Deleted:
(Deemed not-notable. Book published by vanity press. Most of the Google hits were to anonymous comments on blogs.)
(Deemed non-notable and published by vanity press.)
(Although the author Patrick Süskind is notable, this book is not considered so important. Mostly, the debate concerned the poor writing in the article. Note that this book would meet the above criteria.)
(Deemed non-notable and published by vanity press.)
(Yet-to-be published and not sufficiently anticipated. Author does not appear to have sufficient notability.)
(Deemed non-notable since the author is known mostly for his 9/11 conspiracy advocacy. In this case, the book was probably deleted despite meeting, although barely, some of the criteria above.)
(Note that an earlier debate had been inconclusive. The book fails the criteria cited above since it is self-published and since the reviews of the book currently cited in the article are not from sources independent of the author.)
  • Insufficient consensus (not deleted):
(In this instance, the above discussion on yet to be published books would probably weigh towards the deletion of this article as the only reference to anticipation is from a web fan-forum.)
  • Consensus to keep:
  • Note: although we can point to a number of past occurences, remember that consensus can change, and that a decision made half a year ago does not necessarily represent consensus now.

Resources

  • Clicking on any linked ISBN number on Wikipedia takes you to Special:Booksources where preformatted links for the specific book are provided, allowing access to multiple library catalogues, bookseller databases and other book resources.
  • Library of Congress Online Catalog: A searchable database useful in identifying publisher, edition, etc.
  • The British Library's online catalogue.
  • The Literary Encyclopedia: 3300 profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics and references of 18,000 works.
  • Norton anthology of world literature: Useful in the exploration of world literature.
  • Worldcat: search for a book in library catalogues. Contains 1.8 billion items in 18,000 libraries worldwide.
  • Questia Online Library allows full-text search and reading access to 64,000+ books and 1,000,000+ journal, magazine, and newspaper articles in their collection. Their strength is full text of recent academic books by major publishers such as Oxford University Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Greenwood Press, along with thousands of older academic books that are available only in larger university libraries.

Notes

  1. ^ Try not to apply guidelines reflexively; as if they are written in stone. All deletion discussions should be approached on a case-by-case basis, with an eye toward the peculiar circumstances presented. Keep in mind that subjects are not notable because they meet a particular standard, rather things are notable because of their impact, influence, fame, etc., and the standards are an attempt to catalogue what notable subjects share so that we can recognize that notability.
  2. ^ Another core policy all articles must adhere to is to be written from a Neutral point of view. However, it is general consensus that even the most blatantly "point of view" articles should not be nominated for deletion solely on this basis. Instead, they should either be rewritten to remove the bias, or tagged for cleanup to resolve the issue.
  3. ^ a b The "subject" of a work means non-trivial treatment and excludes mere mention of the book, its author or of its publication, price listings and other nonsubstantive detail treatment.
  4. ^ a b "Non-trivial" excludes personal websites, blogs, bulletin boards, Usenet posts, wikis and other media that are not themselves notable. An analysis of the manner of treatment is crucial as well; Slashdot.org for example is notable, but postings to that site by members of the public on a subject do not share the site's imprimatur. Be careful to check that the author, publisher, agent, vendor. etc. of a particular book are in no way interested in any third party source.
  5. ^ Self-promotion and product placement are not the routes to having an encyclopedia article. The published works must be someone else writing about the book. (See Wikipedia:Autobiography for the verifiability and neutrality problems that affect material where the subject of the article itself is the source of the material). The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the subject itself (or of its author, publisher, vendor or agent) have actually considered the book notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works that focus upon it.
  6. ^ BBC (2005). BBC News article: Global Potter sales top 300m mark. Retrieved July 2, 2006.
  7. ^ Publication by a prominent academic press should be accorded far more weight than the analogous benchmark defined for publication of mainstream book by well know commercial publishers, by virtue of the non-commercial nature of such presses, and the peer review process that must be passed before publication is allowed to go forward. See university book publishers for a partial list of such presses. Note that because a large portion of (en.)Wikipedia articles are written by English speaking people from English speaking nations, this list currently betrays an admittedly U.S./U.K/Canada-centric makeup.
  8. ^ A book's subject may be so specialized, such as in the esoteric math or physics spheres, that only a few hundred (or less) people in the world are situated to understand and comment on the material.

See also

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