Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 57

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Reasonably Detailed expectation on top of notability.

Propose in WP:NSONG it states. "Notability aside, a standalone article is only appropriate when there is enough material to warrant a reasonably detailed' article; articles unlikely ever to grow beyond stubs should be merged to articles about an artist or album." I believe that this is a healthy addition to the policy. Articles should be notable, and verifiable. but they should also be significant enough to merit a reasonably detailed article. I propose that this advice is added to the general notability guideline. Bryce Carmony (talk) 22:28, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Rather vague about size. How short would be too short? What happens with articles are short but have nowhere to merge them to? Dream Focus 23:24, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
from WP:STUB "A stub is an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject.". Per WP:5 Wikipedia is an encyclopedia the only reason we don't delete every stub for being unencylopedic by nature is that WP:DINC deletion isn't cleanup, there are stubs that could be more than a stub and just haven't been developed. but if only a stub amount of information exists than it is not able to be covered by an encyclopedia. that is why the wording "Articles unlikely to every grow beyond stubs should be merged" is worth adding to the notability guideline. It isn't subjective its just following policy Bryce Carmony (talk) 13:51, 8 May 2015 (UTC) Proposal withdrawn.Bryce Carmony (talk) 17:16, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I don't think this would be helpful. "Reasonable" is too subjective and too likely to turn on whether you like it or not. Anyway, WP:GNG already demands "significant coverage" that "addresses the topic directly and in detail". I think that's clear enough as it stands. Msnicki (talk) 23:49, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Reasonably isn't any more subjective than "Significant" but the two together create a clearer picture. And how long an article can be written isn't dependent on if you like it or not so I find the link to I like it tenuous at best. Bryce Carmony (talk) 13:45, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
You have your opinion, I have mine. The point is, I don't agree with yours and I've given my reason. Msnicki (talk) 14:04, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose only because WP:PERMASTUB covers this better. This also extends from the idea of "presumption" of notability - it means we allow articles, even stubs, if there is sourcing that meets GNG or a SNG, but it is not required that we keep that article if nothing more can come for it. --MASEM (t) 14:01, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Question: I am confused by the proposal. Are your suggesting this be added to the Notability Guideline or the Notability Guideline (Music) which you link to above?--Mike Cline (talk) 14:03, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Answer this guideline is already in Notability Music guideline. What I am proposing is because of its effectiveness there adding it here.Bryce Carmony (User talk:Bryce Carmonytalk) 14:30, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose: Bruce, thanks. The concept of "reasonably detailed" has very little meaning as it is too subjective given the total depth and breath of topics contained in WP. What is reasonably detailed for one topic area might be completely inadequate in another. The hurdle of GNG and notability is already difficult to explain to new contributors and gets interpreted inconsistently by experienced editors on a regular basis. If our goal is to build the encyclopedia, then adding another vague hurdle to inclusion serves no purpose. --Mike Cline (talk) 16:25, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • People keep saying that "reasonably detailed" has no meaning when it does. it's defined as "articles unlikely ever to grow beyond stubs" So the more we define the nature of a stub the more meaning reasonable detail will have.
  • I don't think the proposed addition is needed. This guideline already notes (in several places) that merger is an option. Why say it again? Blueboar (talk) 16:37, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Because notability is the sole criteria for if a topic should have an article. and in GNG we currently offer a useless totology. A noteworthy article is Significant. what is the definition of significant? oh right, it's something that is noteworthy.... insignificant is defined as being small so let's use a metric of size (in this case something more than a stub) to mean significant. The criteria is too low which is why websites can easly pay editors to write articles for money for people. Bryce Carmony (talk) 17:05, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Change "Extract the content" to "write an article with the content"

Proposal change "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content." to read "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to write an article with the content.

Reasoning

Original research in extracting content is fine, what isn't fine is using original research in the writing of an article. I think this minor rewrite is more inline with the purpose and use of the guideline. what "extracting content" is, I do not know, but every editor knows what writing an article is. Bryce Carmony (talk) 17:23, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

  • Oppose. Completely unnecessary. The problem isn't that WP:GNG isn't already pretty crystal clear about what's required and why, it's that people don't read it or insist their favorite topic is important and merits an exception. The proposed language also seems to introduce some unnecessary confusion. We need reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability, but this language ambiguously suggests that that's all that can be used to write the article. That's not true. Once notability has been established, it's perfectly legitimate to use primary sources in limited ways, e.g., to establish routine facts. For example, we've dated when Bash (Unix shell) was released by the author's Usenet newsgroup post announcing it, even though that's clearly a primary source. What we try hard (not always successfully) to avoid is for WP:BARELY notable topics to become excuses for WP:WEBHOSTING and WP:SPAM. Again, I think the guidelines are fine, if only everyone read them and was willing to cooperate. I don't see how this proposed change helps. Msnicki (talk) 17:55, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • "pretty clear" is not crystal clear. could you explain what "extract the content" is and why it is more clear than any other words in the human language? Bryce Carmony (talk) 18:02, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Allow me to correct my choice of words. Msnicki (talk) 18:07, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Because the guideline is crystal clear, can you explain to me (or any other editor) what the hell "Extract the content" means.Bryce Carmony (talk) 18:08, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
It means summarize the information and write the article. Msnicki (talk) 14:48, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
  • What's motivating two proposals within a day to make very specific changes to the language of WP:N? Absent some indication that there is widespread confusion over what this language means (not just the proposer's confusion), I don't see that there's any problem that needs fixing. postdlf (talk) 18:10, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Would you explain what "extract the content" means. There isn't any problems so it should be easy enough for you to do. Bryce Carmony (talk) 18:16, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • An example would be using the Daily Show's news reports as a "reliable" source. They present news stories in full on satire mode and not a direct manner. Without knowledge of what are news and what are jokes, it would be impossible to extract the factual aspects of Daily Show coverage for use on WP. Obviously we'd could use other sources to help figure out the line between fact and humor to do that, but why not use those sources then? --MASEM (t) 18:31, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Conflating significance and reliable? There's only 5 criteria laid out for "meriting an article" and you want to make 2 of them more or less the same thing? The problem is this, The guideline is too low, so AFD is overloaded, because AFD is overloaded paid editors can write with an agenda for money. now, you might say that you continue to not see a problem. but I do. Notability is the sole criteria for an article. We should consider all coverage, and then consider the makeup of that coverage between primary and secondary sources, having 2 criteria is better than having 1 criteria. We take it step by step and work our way towards a guideline that resembles notability for a encyclopedia, then we can delete articles easier, then it's easier to stop paid editors. Significant coverage should deal with avoiding original research and synthases not overlapping reliability. Bryce Carmony (talk) 18:44, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
  • You asked what "extract the info" means, I gave an example. If a source obfuscates its information that requires more than standard reading skills to use, it is not a good source per notability guidelines. --MASEM (t) 00:22, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
  • To add: I never said The Daily Show was unreliable. They have people researching the news, and I would probably defend them purely on reliability for them if there was an argument about their fact-checking/editorial ability. But what they also have are good writers to take the fact, add in colorful humor, and thus make a popular show. It makes it very hard to pull out the truth from the humor (even when half the time the humor is clearly delineated from fact), and thus making the source not usable under policy. --MASEM (t) 14:02, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose Its clear how its written now. Dream Focus 02:21, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Let me try to explain in a different way... The fact that X is the subject of a joke on the Daily Show actually might go towards establishing notability (the fact that X is the subject of a joke on such a popular TV comedy show would mean that lots and lots of people know of X). However (and this is important), in order to state this notability in an article, and avoid Original Research, you need sources other than the Daily Show itself to note and comment upon the fact that the Daily Show made fun of X.
to put it another way... It would be Original Research for you or me to watch the Daily Show and extract the fact that X has been satirized on the Daily Show, and then use this fact to establish notability in an article by writing "X has been satirized on the Daily Show". On the other hand, if a reliable major entertainment magazine such as Rolling Stone notes that X has been made fun of on the Daily Show, then we can write "X has been satirized on the Daily Show: and cite Rolling Stone for that fact... and this would probably be enough to establish the notability of X. That does not mean we must have an article on X... but it means we can have one. Blueboar (talk) 15:05, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
A joke on the Daily Show is not "significant coverage". So that's not a problem at all. A brief mention about it elsewhere wouldn't count towards the notability of the article's subject. "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it need not be the main topic of the source material.[1] As for what is in the article itself, you can easily find either a reliable source saying the person was satired on the show, or the primary source of the show itself is acceptable if there is no reason to doubt it. They mention what they've done on their website, or even having the transcripts online for people to reference, or list the information on a DVD collection of that season's episodes. If the episode or a video clip showing this is available online, then you can link to that as evidence. Dream Focus 19:28, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
A (single) joke on the Daily Show isn't significant coverage... but an ongoing, recurring series of jokes (a "gag") can be. How do we know if we have crossed the threshold from insignificant to significant?... the "gag" gets mentioned by other sources. Blueboar (talk) 19:42, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Is this a real concern? By the time it makes it into a long Daily Show episode, don't you suppose it'll be all over the legitimate press? Is it really likely there could be an occasion where you'd need to use the Daily Show to establish notability? Msnicki (talk) 19:48, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
While a joke on the Daily Show might not be significant, something like John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" , which is done in a similar vein but stays on one topic for 20-some minutes would definitely count as significant coverage, save for the fact its humor obfuscates the content. --MASEM (t) 19:52, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

The phrase "extract the content" relates to the requirement that coverage be "direct and in detail" in order to be significant. "Extract the content" is a helpful phrase because it implies some effort in discerning and "removing" facts (i.e., article content) from a source. Let's take a better hypothetical involving the use of news stories to establish the notability of a company. If a story does not cover Company A "in detail", it may not offer anything substantive worth writing an article about, such as the bland statement that "Company A does business in Foo City". Or it may be praiseworthy but in the form of vague generalities, such as "people in Foo City know the name 'Company A'", or "Company A has been a boon to Foo City", neither of which statement is concrete enough to extract any real article content (compare with "Company A has been the largest private employer in Foo City for two decades"). The requirement that coverage be "direct" means that it can't merely imply something about Company A (or to take the Daily Show example, can't be obscured by a satirical or humorous characterization). Say there's a news story generally about the growth of Foo City's economy, one sentence of which lists Company A and a few other companies operating in Foo City. As the story has not expressly attributed economic growth to Company A, it would be OR to extract anything from that story about Company A beyond "it operates in Foo City", as direct coverage would be a mere mention.

Given how many language-altering proposals the OP has made recently on this page and others (all apparently based on nothing more than personal confusion or preference, rather than any experience of problems in the community at large), I think they should in the future post open-ended questions about how to better understand the language and ask if anyone else also has an issue with it. Formal proposals are a bad way to go about this as they presuppose there is a problem that needs solving and then attempt to limit discussion to yea or nay on a particular solution. And if you don't understand what something means then you can't reasonably know how it should be changed. postdlf (talk) 20:10, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

  • Truncate to "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed. because the final clause is superfluous. The key point here is that we want detail about the topic. The stuff about OR is a rationale or justification and doesn't require elaboration. See WP:CREEP. Andrew D. (talk) 20:42, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
    • I agree with this suggestion of removing the final clause. "Extract the content" is jargon at best—I've never heard anyone in the real world say something like, "You can learn more about the UK election by extracting the content from the BBC's special section on its website." But the meaning is wrong, too: original research is not a way to gather information from a source. isaacl (talk) 21:58, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Support in principle. The existing language does confuse people. In fact, I'd be happy with removing all reference to NOR. The only (dubious) explanation I've ever heard was that it was meant to stop people from collating tweets to come up with statements that aren't "directly" in any of them—and that's already covered by "directly" (and, incidentally, prohibited by NOR). It adds nothing that we wouldn't have anyway. But if we can't shorten it, then I favor dumping the "extract the content" language and adding something like "so that it is possible to write more than a doomed permastub about the subject without violating either WP:V or WP:NOR, and without using any self-published or non-independent sources" (because if the only way to write more than three sentences is to rely on the BLP's or company website, then you have given UNDUE weight to the subject's POV, no matter how neutral-sounding it is). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:49, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Is there a standard to determine "credible and authoritative books"

If some books from a publisher qualify, does every single book they publish automatically qualify without question? Are is it a case by case example based on the opinions of whoever is in the AFD at the time? If a writer with no other publications publishes a book he made containing nothing but 21 interviews with various people from YouTube or elsewhere, does that count towards the notability of every single person in his book? Dream Focus 13:30, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

There's no hard or fast guideline. Books should be considered case by case, even if from a normally reputable publisher. Keep in mind that today, there are a lot of publishers that simply offer to take a manuscript, clean it up for printing, and print limited runs or even electronic copies of books, with no editorial control. So in the case of the example, an unknown author providing interviews from YouTube personalities, that might help to contribute to notability but far far from sufficient to pass notability for any of those people. But if it is augmenting a lot of other clear sources for notability, it's probably fine. --MASEM (t) 14:30, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Just one interview in a magazine, and then this book having the guy interviewed in it, is all he has. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David L. Jones Some argue that is enough. If the book isn't from a university press, but a company that exists for profit only, and it is not notable enough to have its own Wikipedia article, I don't see why it'd be used to prove someone is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article. Does anyone agree or disagree with me on that? I'd like some feedback to see if we can change the guideline page to say that or not. Dream Focus 14:35, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
It's enough to avoid immediate deletion but there absolutely needs to be more sources. Just because the book press is a commercial one does not make it a bad source, but I do worry about the press's narrow coverage of electronics and programming (eg I question a bit about its independence). But this type of case would routinely be kept per "no consensus" on the basis that more sources need to be found with reasonable time for that, or else the next challenge will likely go through. --MASEM (t) 14:51, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Ending in "no consensus" does not mean it'll be any different if it was brought up again later. I guess any YouTube person who wants their own article, can just interview other YouTube people, easily get that published since they have YouTube fans and surely a few copies would be sold, and then use that to count towards notability. Dream Focus 15:15, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, AFD is weighted towards retention of articles if there is doubt to deletion. I agree with you on the sources there not passing the usual requirements for notability we'd expect in a developed article, but they also point to the possibly more sources could exist. If after some time no new sources are found, that likely indicated the presumption was wrong and we can delete the article then. (And this should not be a hard matter of actually getting hands on sources, being a social media star purportedly) --MASEM (t) 15:29, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Someone found a source showing how popular he was. He is the 8,574th most subscribed to YouTuber, and has the 14,684th most viewed videos lately. So thousands more articles can be created for the rest I suppose. Most of those participating in the AFD are his fans, most of the KEEP votes from those who didn't give a valid reason, and said so before even the one magazine interview and the book of interviews was found. We need to just pass a rule saying as soon as you get above a certain number of YouTube subscribers you get a Wikipedia article to help promote you. Dream Focus 15:34, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
A stat saying he's 8,575th most subscribed is not significant coverage. And if there are fans that are new editors participating for this AFD only this should be noted in the AFD. --MASEM (t) 15:36, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Hmm.... Non-notable commercial publisher. Are you sure it's a real (third-party-type) publisher, and not the author's own publishing company? Starting a "publishing company" these days is (much) easier than starting a restaurant or barber shop (no licenses needed, for one thing). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:53, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Their Wikipedia article says they were started by two writers, and changed their name from Author's Press to Apress. Their official website mentions various bestsellers they have had in the educational category. [1] Anyway, how do you determine if a publisher is notable or not? Should it be based on how many of their books sell well or get reviews? Dream Focus 01:57, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
This might get to the point of your question, in that we have to consider the accumulation of all the details of sources, and not necessarily if a source is necessarily good or bad. (Clearly there are some, like SPS, that we can discount immediately). The book and the magazine, individually, aren't bad sources, but they're not strong sources. Together, they beg the question if this person is notable beyond the small niche these sources cover. --MASEM (t) 02:10, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Extradition history by countries

The extradition Treaty signed between the United States and other countries allows the United States to request from countries that have signed the Extradition Treaty to extradite persons who are wanted by the United States Security Authorities for criminal offences.

The United States have over the years exploited this treaty to request from countries it has signed this extradition treaty with to send back offenders for prosecution in the United States. A list of these countries and the number of extradition is currently not available.

Study is currently on to compile the records and feature it in this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marchooo (talk • contribs) 08:51, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Marchooo, What does this have to do with the Wikipedia guideline on Notability? DES (talk) 16:22, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Suggest WP:NSM noteworthy based on social media

Itsmeront (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

It seems that a criteria that existed in WP:IMPORTANCE was lost in WP:NOTE.

WP:NSM Noteworthy based on Social Media.

"An article is "important" enough to be included in Wikipedia if the following is true:
  • There is evidence that a reasonable number of people are, were or might be simultaneously interested in the subject (e.g. it is at least well known in a community)." WP:IMPORTANT.

The criteria for reliability should be set high. It is important that wikipedia get the facts straight. Just because a million people state that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree does not make it factual. When the reliability is not of primary concern editors CAN also consider social media and web aggregators as an indication of Notability. Editors should be careful to include sources that show actual notability. An article submitted to Slashdot IS NOT SUFFICIENT to indicate notability, whereas, an article that makes it to the front page of Slashdot, evidenced by a large community taking interest to promote the article, CAN be considered as an indication of Notability. A hashtag on twitter is not sufficient, but if millions of people are retweeting it, and it shows up as trending, it CAN be considered. The existence of a significant community around projects, such as OpenSource software development CAN also be considered when determining Notability.

To be clear, #icewaterdumpedonmyhead does not indicate the same notability as #alsicebucketchallenge. Even before the celebrities and the media picked up the story, #alsicebucketchallenge trending by millions of people could have been used to indicate notability. This alone does not indicate that an article should be written, but when the questions of reliability are answered and the reasoning is settled that a separate article should be created, Social Media CAN be used to establish notability. Itsmeront (talk) 18:08, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Related discussion of whether Slashdot contributes to notability may be found at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2015 April 26#Nim (programming language). Msnicki (talk) 18:45, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't around at the time IMPORTANT was alive, but looking through the page history appears to me to show that though there were several efforts to promote it from a proposal to a guideline or policy (or semi-policy, whatever that was at the time), it never made it and was finally marked as a failed proposal, so nothing was lost: it was rejected. Having said that, I would also note that IMO there are few places at Wikipedia where the wiki principle plays more of a part than at AfD: IAR comes into effect there perhaps more often than anywhere else (except perhaps with BOLD edits) and articles are sometimes kept which do not meet our notability criteria. That's for a variety of reasons which might be generalized under an importance policy, but having such a policy would then become being used as a justification for such retentions and that would change those exceptions from being just IAR outliers to being mainstream. That's a bad idea. (And unless you're proposing to change the definition of reliable source to include trending on social media, merely trending on social media does not indicate reliability, much less verifiability; something that's heavily trending there is often going to be reflected in actual reliable sources and thus become verifiable and, in turn, support notability, but that's because of the secondary coverage not the social media itself.) Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 14:37, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments TransporterMan (TALK) The comment at the top of Notability lead me to believe that Importance was replaced by Notability.
  • ""WP:IMPORTANCE" redirects here. You may be looking for WP:IMPORTANT, which was replaced by this guideline."
If IMPORTANCE was rejected then I withdraw that comment. I would still encourage Wikipedia to reconsider this particular aspect of Importance relating to communities. I agree with your sentiment that in MOST cases something that is trending will then be replaced by reliable secondary coverage. The problem is that this is not always the case. I'm sure you are aware that coverage in general for things that are not political, sensational, entertainment related, or on the other end Scholarly research, or basic science, is declining and being replaced by social media (or even worse by company sponsored news content). In the specific case that I made this point, the area of new programming language development, it is unreasonable to expect that even with high trending like the front page of Slashdot, that media outlets will then pick up the story. In many cases, notability is better defined by the size of the community and the amount of interest generated on social media. This is especially true for open source projects. Open source projects, including the software that runs Wikipedia, are made up of small communities numbering in the 100's of people. The communities are comprised of experts, and these experts tend to communicate with each other using social media. This includes web aggregators (like Reddit, YCombinator, and Slashdot), IRC, Email lists and Blogs. There is already exceptions in NEWSBLOGS and BLOGS that allow, in my opinion, for the inclusion of slashdot, or expert blogs, but without something like this category that makes it more explicit, I was unable to persuade editors that Slashdot should be considered at all under any circumstances.
  • You're not sure? Here, read through WP:RS and related policy & guideline pages that link from there. Then you'll be sure what is and what is not a reliable source, and understand why slashdot and reddit do not qualify, why the Nim creator penning his own artcle do not qualify, and why a short paragraph-length blurb does not qualify. Tarc (talk) 22:14, 1 May 2015 (UTC) Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2015_April_26#Nim_.28programming_language.29
  • If you are unable to grasp the very straightforward WP:RS guideline, then I'm afraid that the Wikipedia just isn't the project for you to become involved in. The amount of people on social media who like a product is irrelevant. The number of upvotes a buddy of yours got on Slashdot is irrelevant. The Wikipedia does not accept either when discussing the notability of a topic. Tarc (talk) 23:47, 2 May 2015 (UTC) Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2015_April_26#Nim_.28programming_language.29
It seems to me that something more specific that allows citing social media, when the subject of should an article be written at all and not included within another article and is the content of the article reliable are addressed, should be added to make it easier for this argument to be made in the future. To be clear the point of creating an article and if the content of the article reliable was already settled by most editors. The outstanding question was if the subject itself was notable. I had pointed to a number expert blogs, and front page inclusion of on Slashdot, Reddit, and YCombinator, a community of 100's of users, and still was told this is not notable enough for Wikipedia. For subjects that are unlikely to gain secondary media coverage, this type of attention was quite notable, in the community of new programming language experts, and should be considered and allowed explicitly by Wikipedia editorial policy. Itsmeront (talk) 19:02, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
I strongly disagree that we need this, because it becomes extremely subjective when that line is considered crossed as to be widely important. And while I don't know the exact history of WP:N being clear on how importance is not a factor, I would strongly object to its removal as it is clearly practice today - we don't keep articles because of page view count, etc.
In terms of social media, there are now enough developing RSes that report on trends on the Internet to establish when they believe a topic has become important for social media as for us to establish notability on those assessments of reliable sources, which falls in line with GNG principles and does not need any "new" language. --MASEM (t) 19:11, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Again to be clear the recommendation has nothing to do with reliability, it is only intended to ALLOW the consideration of Social Media when determining Notability. Since Notability itself can be used as a rationale for deleting an article, what counts as notable, for subjects that are not likely, and may never be, covered by RSes, considered Wildly important or, covered secondary sources, should be more clearly specified. Itsmeront (talk) 19:27, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
But that's still weakening RSes to allow inclusion based on popularity. If someone has a million followers on Twitter, that doesn't necessarily mean they area notable if there are no other RSes to discuss that person. We also have to be aware that social media can be gamed - if we did allow people with a high subscriber count in on just that metric alone, there would be groups that would game that system to get an article on a nobody or a false identity onto WP (it happens in other areas, so would not discount it here). I will say that the normal RS media is pretty aware of when certain topics hit a "critical mass" of social media and report on that, but that also is not a universal aspect as some cases fall to the edge, but it is still keeping with all other core policies.
I've not really seen a case where a topic is at AFD where there's some but weak RS sourcing and the swing is that "but this person is important on social media". It's the RS sourcing that makes the difference. --MASEM (t) 19:34, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree with you that social media should not be considered alone for reliability. I am only discussing the case where there are sources for reliability or a good case has been made, there is a cogent argument for the need of a separate article. Being notable in social media is not sufficient for reliability, I'm conceding that point (actually I never made that point). The issue here is what determines notability. My argument is that for certain topics the front page of news aggregators like slashdot are the pinnacle of coverage. Wikipedia editors should not confuse inclusion in slashdot, with reaching the front page. We are also not talking about criteria for adding people to Wikipedia. I would agree with you that secondary coverage is very prevalent in entertainment. There is no dearth of resources covering the next social media star. The issue here is communities of people dedicated to an important subject, where the reliability is not in question, and the argument of should there be an article is settled, social media coverage in News Aggregators, Expert Blogs, and community size should be ALLOWED to be considered. I'm also not suggesting that it MUST be included, but arguments like Slashdot will never be an indication of notability should be discouraged by Wikipedia editorial policy. Itsmeront (talk) 20:22, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
  • I am entirely comfortable with social media being no consideration whatsoever, and with the bar set to sources from the mainstream media. If a person, thing or event is important enough, the mainstream media will cover it. If it isn't, then I'm unimpressed with its ephemeral number of Facebook "likes." If the Boston Globe does an article on someone, that article will be verifiable a century from now. Given the so-far ephemeral staying power of social media, we can't guarantee that we'll be able to verify jack five years down the road. Ravenswing 21:37, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Ravenswing This has nothing to do with Jack or adding infomration about any person. It is not about verifyability. It has nothing to do with reliablity. Itsmeront (talk) 01:27, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
  • You're not making a whole lot of sense on the one hand, and you're wrong on the other. This has everything to do with reliability and notability. Ravenswing 05:22, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I would agree that I'm not a professional Wikipedia Editor. So maybe I'm missing some point here. Please feel free to explain. Notability was brought up by editors as a separate topic then Reliability. After it was agreed that the content of the article was RELIABLE, it was claimed that the subject was not notable. We were then told that notability must exclude newsblogs and expert blogs and community size. My claim here is that for open source projects like new language design, NOTABILTY is newsblogs, expert blogs and community size. So if I am wrong or not making sense please feel free to elaborate. Itsmeront (talk) 19:15, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Another Perfect example why this is needed

Wikipedia editors have made it perfectly clear. Slashdot and Reddit, and expert blogs are not respected. The problem here is that Wikipedia editors DO NOT READ the content before they remove references. They seem to believe they understand what is useful and what is not. The blogs, the Slashdot article on NIM (programming language) and the article on Reddit have useful information for programmers trying to dive deeper into the subject. Not only did we have to argue that Nim was notable, now we have to argue that references are relevant. This change to editorial policy is needed because News Aggregators ARE VALUABLE sources of information for open source communities. The expert blogs are also excellent sources of information.

Edits made on Nim (programming language)

  • 02:40, 4 May 2015‎ Be..anyone . . (10,732 bytes) (-272)‎ . . (slashdot reference dismissed as BAD joke, willing to report more jokes on AN/I) (undo | thank)
  • 02:11, 4 May 2015‎ Be..anyone‎ . . (10,871 bytes) (-349)‎ . . (reddit removed) (undo | thank) links to expert blogs were also removed.

It is easy to just dismiss the valuable information on these sites and my contention is that this Wikipedia editorial policy has fostered this harmful trend. While there can also be crap on Slashdot or Reddit, wholesale dismissal of a format that a very large world of Open Source developers use to communicate is harmful to Wikipedia. Not only should this policy be changed but it should be communicated to editors so that some thought replaces foolish edits like these mentioned above. I can assure you that the slashdot reference mentioned is no BAD joke. Itsmeront (talk) 03:28, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

  • I'm not sure you're understanding the point of the relevant policies. The point behind requiring that sources have a proven and verifiable record for fact checking and accuracy is so we don't impose our personal editorial judgments. Mainstream media sources have such a record. Slashdot, Reddit and blogs, all sites with user-submitted content and with no third-party editorial factchecking taking place, do not, and it is not one bit harder to link to "crap" on those sites as to any other part. I see very little use for WP:V, one of the core content policies of this encyclopedia, to be thrown out just because there are -- or you claim that there are, anyway -- computer programmers whose lives would be made easier by Wikipedia ceasing to have standards. Ravenswing 05:22, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Again you are completely missing the point. This has nothing to do with fact checking or reliability. This has only to do with notability and now usefulness (it is hard to argue that once an article has been accepted because it is both reliable and notable, that links to useful content can not be included as references, especially if they are removed without the editor even reading them). If hundreds of people upvote something and take the time to discuss and comment on it, in a community like new programming languages, how can you say it is not notable. While slashdot does accept user-generated content, as does Wikipedia, it is reviewed by experts. The upvoting and subsequent promotion to the front page, is an indication of editorial fact-checking, the editors at slashdot create summaries of useful content. If someone says that Slashdot is an indication of notability it should be ALLOWED to be considered. If someone sites articles and comments in Slashdot in references as useful, they should be considered. If someone cites slashdot as the only source for reliability or verifiability it CAN be discounted, but even then, editors should at least READ the slashdot content. Please stop confusing Reliability with Notability. Itsmeront (talk)
I have a .sig I generally use on VBulletin-type forums. It runs "It's not that I don't understand what you're saying. It's that I don't agree with what you're saying." Let me phrase this as simply as possible: I am not contesting that Slashdot and Reddit are notable websites. They obviously are, and they have Wikipedia articles with lots of qualifying sources attesting to their notability. I dispute that they meet Wikipedia standards for being reliable sources -- it seems you're the one confusing "reliability" with "notability" -- and the notion that upvotes and comment sections constitute "editorial fact-checking" is frankly laughable. With that, I don't think there's anything more useful to say on the subject other than to point out that not a single editor seems to agree with your POV. Ravenswing 19:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
You have still not provided an argument against except to say that it is laughable. Before you write this off and talk for all Wikipedia editors, I'd ask you to consider the effect the lack of this policy is having on Wikipedia. Editors are currently running roughshod over programming and seriously contributing to bit rot by deleting articles. Sources of information that were and are in my opinion quite notable are being deleted by way of a lack of understanding in this area. I've noticed a number of places where information really should be corrected but who in there right mind would go through the trouble, just to be told their understanding of a topic is laughable.
My contention is that this is extremely unfortunate. Again I would urge others to speak up because this has nothing to do with Reddit or Slashdot being notable websites. Itsmeront (talk) 19:36, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
The relevant policy is WP:RS, specifically Self-published sources. We want articles to use sourcing that has come from publications that have shown a history of fact checking and editorial control. Slashdot, reddit, etc. do not have that at all, and add to the fact these sites specifically have a voting/rating system to promote stories and content, that means they are very far from a reliable source. If the only sign of notability was through these sources, we would not be able to have any RSes for the article and as such would fail content policy. --MASEM (t) 20:13, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes we agree that Slashdot does not apply to WP:RS. Is someone arguing that a NOTABLE subject must be allowed to be published on Wikipedia? I'm not saying that, nor do I think I can be misunderstood to be saying that. We agree that WP:RS AND WP:NOTE are required before an article can survive a request for deletion. I am only discussing WP:NOTE and I'm not aware of a policy that says WP:NOTE is sufficient without WP:RS. If I am wrong here I will happily remove my request. Itsmeront (talk) 20:21, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
WP:V is the relevant policy - articles must be based on WP:RS. What you are asking is that allow an article where the only sourcing - the same sourcing that is used to establish that the topic is notable - for the article is coming from SPS , non-RS sources that are judged on popularity and not importance. --MASEM (t) 20:43, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure anyone here is quite sure what you're proposing, Itsmeront. Let me ask a question or two: Right now, Notability is determined by, basically, this criteria (from GNG), "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." Are you proposing:

  • Option 1: That Newsblogs, Expert Blogs, and community size should, without regard to reliability, be able to be used as sources in an article?
  • Option 2: That Newsblogs, Expert Blogs, and community size should only be used in an article if reliable, but should (or should be able to be) considered, even if not reliable, in deciding whether an article which may not otherwise meet the notability guidelines (i.e. may not have sufficient reliable sources) should be retained in (a) a deletion discussion (such as AFD) or (b) an articles for creation request or (c) both? (Those being the two primary situations in which notability becomes an issue.)
  • Option 3: Something else (if so, please explain).

I would note, hopefully just in passing, that Newsblogs and Expert Blogs are not necessarily non-reliable. Some are and some aren't: See NEWSBLOG for what we call newsblogs (though I think you may be using the term in a different way) and SPS for (among other things) blogs by experts as we define them here. Community size is, however, not reliable unless discussed in a reliable source. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 21:06, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you TransporterMan (TALK). In the argument we had on nim, I showed that blogs were written by experts, People that have been published in RS on the subject matter. Those are the blog entries deleted by Be..anyone should have been "considered" as potential Reliable Sources based on your policies. I would agree with Option 2: with some clarification. If an article has been established as Reliable, through whatever means, that editors should read links that are proposed to be indications of notability. (to answer the charge that an article should not exist because it is not notable in a deletion discussion) I would say that after a reading if an argument can be made that the news aggregator, expert blog, or community size presented is not reliable, then it can and should be thrown out. I would also like to say that useful references in a reliable article, should not be deleted, again unless an argument is made that the content is not reliable. I'm not sure how a blog that compares and contrasts Object oriented programming and how to use NIM to replicate features in other languages would qualify as unreliable. See the 4 part article here: [|Nim and OO]).
I would like to clarify RS comments, but really didn't want to do it here or now because I didn't want to confuse the issue. Some of the deletions above occurred, in my opinion, when nobody was watching. Saying that a published dissertation, is a self-published and, therefore, a non-reliable resource is ridiculous. Deciding that since a primary resource is no longer available online is not sufficient, in my opinion, to compound the problem of bit rot on the internet. I understand that where Open Source community work is concerned, there is a very high, almost too high bar, to climb before Wikipedia will consider the sources reliable. I also think that is a mistake since there is not likely to be reliable third party coverage. In the case of nim your normal editorial policies, if followed, should have been enough to prove RS. What concerns me here is that even after the editors decided there was enough reliable third party coverage, that they then changed to an argument that it was not notable. That aside I could also make the argument that for open source communities your requirements for RS do not make sense. I made the argument earlier that some of the software used to create Wikipedia would not qualify to be included in Wikipedia, but I'm satisfied with your Break All Rules and other policy exceptions that exist to allow someone to make an argument. What I was unable to do was answer the argument of Notability with what I consider to be Reliable indications of a large community, significant community coverage in Blogs, Reddit, YCombinator, and Slashdot, because when I said Slashdot everyone laughed. It is very short sited and a bad excuse for what I would call laziness, to not read the reference just because it contained the name Slashdot.
One last comment about programming languages. Alan Kay is known for many things, but one very important argument that he has made over and over is that the present is not based on the past. The present is based on only parts of the past. There is very valuable information lost when we think we understand where things come from. To really understand programming, and it's history, you should start by researching the past and inventing a future that is different than the future we currently live in. By deleting the past because you can not find current third party reliable resources, you are harming the future. I believe that it is in Wikipedia's best interest to address some of these issues, instead of alienating open source software developers. Every time I discuss this outside of Wikipedia, I get the same answer. The editors are just nuts don't waste your time. Itsmeront (talk) 21:54, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
  • TransporterMan (TALK I just read your comment more closely (including GNG) (sorry I didn't read closer the first time) and it seems that indeed Notability is very closely entwined into Reliability. So the argument that reliable sources were presented but they were not significant enough to provide notability (because only reliable third party sources, according to GNG, can be considered for Notability). In open source software development, there will always be very limited third party coverage and lots of other coverage that cause Wikipedia Editors to stick their collective noses in the air. Based on this definition I doubt that Wikipedia can actually be useful for documenting open source software development, history and advancments. It is a shame that Notability is so closely entwined into RS. That seems wrong to me but I have been corrected and I understand why my comments were so confusing. Thank you for taking the time to point it out. My suggestion is that in cases where some reliable sources exist, agreed limited in number, that notability be extended to "allow" the consideration of community size (actual size not third party reported size), news aggregator popularity, and expert blogs, to demonstrate that a community exists and that people are interested enough that an article in Wikipedia would be useful (my definition of Notability). Also, the policy should change such that useful information added to articles be allowed to stay unless the content is read by editors and an argument against the content being unreliable is made. "Deleted because this is slashdot, what a joke", edits should be discouraged. I'm happy that Nim is at least temporarily saved from the chopping block, but the article is definitely less useful then it could be now that useful links have been removed. Thank you again for your consideration. Itsmeront (talk) 03:27, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
IIRC I've removed 3 of 4 softpedia references introduced by me on MKVToolNix after it survived a speedy within 43 seconds, with PROD + AFD on the same day. Dogfood, similarly I cleaned up the Nim references after it survived a similar procedure plus deletion review, where I supported keep, added {{Openhub}}, and converted external link OSCON to {{cite web}}. If you disagree be bold, etc., it's a wiki. –Be..anyone (talk) 04:59, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Be..anyone (talk), actually I think your edits made the article better. Thank you for doing them. Those edits were fine. What I object to is removing slashdot and reddit, and the comment you removed reddit is imcomplete becuase you also removed very useful links to expert blog articles. By deleting these links you made the article much less useful for anyone that visits Nim on Wikipedia.
  • 02:40, 4 May 2015‎ Be..anyone . . (10,732 bytes) (-272)‎ . . (slashdot reference dismissed as BAD joke, willing to report more jokes on AN/I) (undo | thank)
  • 02:11, 4 May 2015‎ Be..anyone‎ . . (10,871 bytes) (-349)‎ . . (reddit removed) (undo | thank) links to expert blogs were also removed.
All three slashdot, reddit and the blogs are not jokes. They are useful discussions and solutions to real problems encountered by people using the program. Thank you for your keep argument! Itsmeront (talk) 17:23, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
I am completely opposed to use of any social media sites lacking professional editorial control and a reputation for accuracy, fact checking and correcting errors for the purpose of establishing notability on Wikipedia. We need reliable, independent sources for that purpose, and I am unaware of any social media site that meets that standard. If it is "reliable" then it cannot be "social" since social sites allow any passing jackass to post their ill-informed opinions. No, no, a thousand times no to the misguided notion that notability of a topic for inclusion in an encyclopedia can be established by faddish chatter on social media sites. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 07:40, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Yeah I'm begining to get the drift here that my cause is hopeless. You are completely wrong in your assesment of social media when it comes to software development, but I don't think that wikipedia editors are going to understand the difference. A community that forms around something like open source projects is not comprised of passing jackasses, infact without some of those jackasses as you call them you wouldn't be spreading YOUR stupid opinions on Wikipedia. Itsmeront (talk) 23:42, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

One Last Try Hi all. I would like to give this one last try and ask for your help to come up with an editorial policy that addresses these issues. First I would like to say that I am a programmer that owns a company that writes software for the government, colleages and universities around the world, and Fortune 100 to Fortune 10 companies. I lead a cryptography open source group in Squeak Smalltalk, and implemented the SHA256 and was responsible for the first implementation of TLS on squeak. I also have a patent on Peer to Peer databases. I know a bit of what I'm talking about, but don't consider myself a reliable source based on your policies. So feel free to disregard all that.

For people that work in and with open source programs, there is a tremendous amount of research required. We scour sources for useful information, not only for gems of software, but for advice on the proper usage, benefits and performance improvements. When your company relies on decisions you make you have to be very careful and get the answer right, or you will spend a lot of money trying to do something that will end up failing because you missed some nuance or idea and ran head first into a wall. In other words, Open Source Programmers are like Wikipedia Editors on steroids.

I'm currently working on Anti-Aliasing. So for something that might be a bit more current I figured I would have a look and see what Wikipedia says about FXAA. The answer is not much. I was even surprised to see that FXAA was mentioned at all. I had a look at reliable news sources and did find some information on FXAA so I guess that there is an article at all makes sense. The problem I'm trying to address here is that FXAA is a revolution in Anti-aliasing. It's not a stub, or low importance new development. It changes Anti-aliasing from something that you would expect to decrease performance by 400% to something that is only around 17% performance penalty. It also changes the methodology so that even shaders are Anti-aliased. Something current models, what Wikipedia points to as state of the art, does not.

Now it doesn't stop there, have a look at FXAA2 and FXAA3, something that Wikipedia knows nothing about. The problem here that I'm trying to address with a change to Wikipedia editorial policy is that FXAA2 and 3 are both well reviewed and provable. You can look at a huge number of expert blogs, news aggregators, and even twitter [[2]] to realize that a major change is happening in computer graphics.

When we develop software we are searching for software projects to use. Those projects will start out with a few developers, and if it is useful people will start blogging about it, more people will join the effort and it will grow in popularity. It may never be popular enough to be included in third party sources, but it can still be wildly popular in other sources. Many of these programs will get picked up and used in much more popular programs (like the software the runs Wikipedia). While I don't expect to see reliable third party coverage of FXAA, these programs will also not have major coverage but will have a major impact in software development. Having some of these, wildly popular, software projects listed on Wikipedia would make Wikipedia much more useful for developers, historians, and the curious.

I also believe strongly in the notion that noteworthiness is not temporary. Failed open source projects are still notable. Their failure may have nothing to do with the quality of the idea, but instead, the amount of time spent. Deleting things like Obol, or simula2 is just wrong. It does a disservice to history.

Again I would ask your help to improve Wikipedia, by considering how the editorial policy can be changed, such that the history of open source development can be better represented, and captured. I probably shouldn't have used the term Social Media since I was somewhat aware that the term was toxic here, but it seemed to apply. Maybe a better term for this is required. Itsmeront (talk) 19:03, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

But again, we build articles on reliable sources written by experts, not social media sources. This will mean some topics will go undiscussed even if there is a large number of people interested in it. (Case in point, we definitely do not cover every popular Internet meme, only ones that get noted in RSes). Open source is the same thing, though that said, there are tech magazines aimed at the programming side that can be used. For example, your FXAA concept, I do see reliable sources discussing it, you just need to know what are the reliable sources in those areas, such as HardOCP, CNet, and other "hardware" tech sites.
What happens more in open source is that because anyone can start an open source project, we cannot just let any open source project with an article, as that's the equivalent of self promotion. We need the secondary sources of reliability to notice the project and talk about it. Most open source projects will go by the wayside per our rules as a general encyclopedia. But this should not stop you from creating a different wiki elsewhere that is geared towards open source projects. --MASEM (t) 19:16, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree with FXAA that there are reliable sources, but not for FXAA2 or FXAA3. The question here is not about ANY open source project. It is about open source programs that are making enough of a difference to gain a large community, significant non-third party coverage, but a large amount of coverage in other media sources. For Wikipedia, these programs don't exist, but they are extremely important outside Wikipedia. The question is how can the policy be changed such that these important developments that are not chronicled in Wikipedia and will probably not be chronicled in third party sources be ALLOWED to be considered.
I know this is a very steep hill to climb, and if not considered now, the issue will eventually come up again from someone that can make a better argument than I, when third party coverage declines more. Itsmeront (talk) 20:36, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Here's my take on this... there is no need to change the policy. If a development really is important, it will (eventually) be discussed in reliable third party (independent) sources... and when that occurs, Wikipedia will "allow" that important development to be chronicled. Of course... if the development never does end up being discussed by reliable independent sources, then we have to question whether it really is as "important" as we assumed it was. In the meantime, we don't know if the development is actually important or not. We have to wait and see. Blueboar (talk) 21:14, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi Blueboar (talk). Thank you for your comment I agree that is exactly the state of things today, if policy doesn't change. My argument is that you are missing important developments and that is unfortunate. Am I the only person that sees declining coverage in thrid party sources for non entertainment topics like this? Maybe I have not really made the point well that the issue is compounded by the change in the media landscape. This is just an example.
Why?
Why would a well-known site, dearly loved by its readers and coming off a year of record page views, be sunset by its owner?
In one word, revenue.
The landscape is changing and this type of third party coverage is being replaced by citizen journalism, which good or bad is not considered reliable by Wikipedia. As this trend continues things will get worse and eventually Wikipedia will need to change it policy, or failing that decided to record all the articles on 8 track tapes and move on. (please take that as the joke intended) Itsmeront (talk) 21:28, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
We do recognize that, as we allow blog-type websites that have shown the qualities of traditional print journalism to be used as reliable sources for topics. But they need to have a history to evaluate and an editor pool that reviews all submissions, as to avoid the traditional issues associated with self-published sources. Things like Slashdot do not qualify for that. --MASEM (t) 22:34, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
  • I am getting tired of Itsmeront copying and pasting this: [3] from an AfD I participated in over a month ago into countless locations throughout Wikipedia. Should I expect to be talked about in several threads over the coming months or can I get an admin to tell this guy to WP:DROPTHESTICK already? ― Padenton|✉   23:09, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Sorry if you don't like it but that section is the point here. Get over it Itsmeront (talk) 23:28, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Itsmeront, you say: "... you are missing important developments and that is unfortunate." How are we to know which developments are important and which are not? Again, if a development really is important, it will get covered by the sort of sources we require... it may take time, but it will happen eventually. Given this, the policy isn't going to change any time soon. Get over it. Blueboar (talk) 01:06, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Blueboar (talk) I apologize if I offended you with the comment "get over it" to Padenton. It was "code especially for him" since I'm currently trying to tell him that his actions, Like telling people to "get over it" are inappropriate. It's hard to keep emotions out of arguments with bullies. I should not have said it here and I apologize. I think I also called someone's ideas stupid after he called open source developers jackasses. That was also inappropriate. I apologize for that too. The answer to your question is, if your question was serious, is that policy should "ALLOW" but not "REQUIRE" Wikipedia editors to make the decision. The question is mostly notably in my mind, but as pointed out, reliability is also important. Experts in software design can read expert blogs and decide if they are reliable. The front page of news aggregators, or a large community, working on software is another indication, but there should not be hard and fast rules because there is no one answer here. Expert blogs and news aggregators can be unreliable so, reading the citations first, then making an argument about reliability seems the best course. Right now, there is no way to make an argument that something is notable, even when it is, and should be in my opinion, notable for Wikipedia. Your policy currently prohibits the consideration of these factors, in the minds of most editors. Again I apologize if I offended you. Itsmeront (talk) 01:27, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
  • If this indeed is Itsmeront's "one last try," huzzah (and may we take him at his word?), because the TL;DR rendition of his argument seems to be "It doesn't matter how many of you disagree with me, I'm right, you're all wrong, so how do we go about changing the policy to reflect my POV regardless?" Unfortunately for his effort, Wikipedia still isn't a web host, and I don't foresee that changing just because it might make life easier for some computer programmers.

    Quite aside from Itsmeront's airy suggestion that the way around the consensus concerning social media is to come up with some term for it that won't be recognized by enough editors, I'm with Blueboar: if said "developments" are important enough to be covered by mainstream media or in published, reliable works, that's not only the standard in place for importance, it's the way it's always been on Wikipedia. I'm quite comfortable with that standard. Plainly, Itsmeront, you disagree, but the rest of us do not agree with you, and nearly two weeks' worth of filibustering as to how overwhelmingly important your hobby horse is hasn't changed that. It's long past time for you to lose gracefully and move on. Ravenswing 02:50, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Ravenswing Thank you for your comment. You have made your opinions clear. The only objection I would make, and I do understand your point, is calling it a hobby horse. I have come and edited Wikipedia a total of Two times and in both those cases I have run into significant challenges. This time much more than the last, but I would hardly call my call for change some sort of Hobby or Hobby horse argument. Having someone that is not in your club make a suggestion should not be something you take lightly. Most people will never come to Wikipedia and attempt to navigagte through the challenges I'm discussing here. I come with a suggestion, not a cause. When I'm eventually voted down I'll leave this alone. Until then I'm not sure why you feel you need to denegrate instead of argue the point. I have heard your point also and undestodd and thank you for at least particpating in the discussion. That is more than most people here, which I undestand, in your point of view, I should assume means that people don't agree or disagree enough to participate. Fair enough. The length of the argument in an archive I'm sure will not cost much in terms of hard drive space. Itsmeront (talk) 03:23, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

ItsMeRonT Criteria for OpenSource

I thought I would answer the question from Blueboar (talk) in more detail.

How are we to know which developments are important and which are not?

Instead of answering the question of how should Wikipedia editors encountering AfD about open source projects judge what is important, I thought I would give you my criteria. Given that there is insufficient Third Party reliable coverage.

  1. Does it work: a stub or an idea for projects is not sufficient. There should be evidence that the software does something useful, not just promises to do something useful in the future.
  2. Has it be around for a while: something that just showed up should not have an article. Most projects will be in development for a long while before they become useful for anyone to use.
  3. Evaluate the size of the community: This is more an art than a science. In most cases, a community will form and grow around useful projects. It is possible for one guy to write something perfectly the first time that doesn't need to change, but that is rare, it is also possible that the project is picked up by another project or forked by another group, which would account for the community size stabilizing or shinking. Those cases actually prove notability and should be considered. In general check to see that there is a large community and it seems to be growing.
  4. Does the project have a liberal license: Wikipedia needs to watch for advertising or self-promotion. A liberal license, like the MIT License, means that the community does not earn any money from their work. Anyone can take the code and do anything with it. (Much like Wikipedia). A license like GPL, or LGPL, can be sold by the license holder under separate terms. In other words the more liberal the license the less chance of self-promotion.
  5. Are people interested: Evaluate the quantity and quality of the expert blogs and news aggregators to see if people are discussing it. What they say is as important as how many people are saying it. You can judge the importance of a project by reading what people are saying.
  6. Validate claims: This is like make sure it works but more detailed. Claims for performance improvements, novel functionality, should be verified by a number of people on different platforms (if applicable). Developers like proof and real performance numbers. If a 20% performance improvement is claimed it should be simple enough to find real numbers that prove or disprove that claim. If the project is useful because it claims to do X find proof that the software does X.

If all of these are checked off the project should be notable enough for Wikipedia. (According to Ron). Itsmeront (talk)

What you need to keep in mind is at the end of the day, every article needs to have third-party sourcing to be kept. Notability is a presumption that that sourcing exists and is significant for topics that are not otherwise immediately apparent. Everything that's been discussed in this so far implies that for the bulk of these projects, there just isn't any third-party sourcing that meets our reliability requirements; forum posts and news aggregators are not reliable as explained. We don't care how popular or how many followers an open source project has - if third-parties have not written about it, we can't either. This is how we avoid pet projects and small-group self-promotion (the same logic you are using here would allow for garage bands, and local restaurants and businesses to be included). We are not an indiscriminate collection of information, and trying to document every open source project simply is outside our scope. Wikias and other sites are better suited for this. --MASEM (t) 19:06, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks MASEM (t) that is very well stated. I agree with your scope argument. For the case I'm talking about is there any solution for the declining third-party media coverage? Do you think that it doesn't matter, is not declining, or is not bad enough yet to do something about? Itsmeront (talk) 19:36, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I've pointed out before that in many areas where traditional print-based coverage is dying, new media online sources are thriving, and thus these are becoming our new RSes for verifyability and notability. This is particularly true for the tech areas, so for example, like video games, there's only a handful of actual print sources, but a plethera of online ones that started as blogs and proved their worth in time. I don't know enough in the open source world if there is similar nature, but it is also a more esoteric area (knowledge tends to be limited to the small group in that area) and thus that can be a problem. WP cannot correct the fact that where there used to be sources like Dr. Dobbs that no one has come along to replace that in a reliable manner. --MASEM (t) 19:47, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Fair enough thank you for your comments. I think the problem I'm pointing out is that the reliable sources are not commercial or news orgs. Expert blogs in this field are taking the place of print or even online news sources. The issue with finding them to be reliable is that a few experts become the RS for one topic. Becuase it's a single topic it's unlikely to be encountered enough for Wikipedia to consider it reliable. I agree with your points though. Hopefully, you are right and some media online source will find a way to make money off open source development enough to write about it and become a RS. Itsmeront (talk) 20:42, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Single topic blogs can become reliable sources, but it takes time and hopefully notice by others that the blog is an expert in that area. --MASEM (t) 20:51, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi MASEM (t), I would like to think you are correct in your assessment of the evolution of RS's but I fear you are wrong. Here is an example I posted which I would think should have qualified. Notice the pains I took to prove that this was an expert blog.

His work on Croquet is equally notable. Notice it was picked up by [Lisa Rein] Lisa Rein is a co-founder of Creative Commons, a video blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar, and a singer-songwriter-musician at lisarein.com. She is also a freelance journalist, writing for publications such as OpenP2P.com, XML.com, Wired News, CNET, Web Review, Web Techniques and many others. She now works at the Washington Post.

And the predictable response:

You just don't know the rules and so far as I can tell, you don't care. You're too busy filibustering the same points over and over, completely oblivious to what the guidelines define as reliable sources, etc. This "20th" source is more of the same worthless blog material. Even if you're born with brains, you are not born with skill or knowledge and that's what's missing. Very missing. What makes it worse is you ignore everything anyone tells you that doesn't match your opinion, making it unlikely you will ever gain the knowledge you don't have.

Itsmeront (talk) 15:34, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

  • Itsmeront, you didn't point out at all that this was an "expert" blog. You claimed that it's an "expert" blog. There's a large distinction, and one that's at the crux of the matter: says who? You? Me? With what criteria? Rein is an "expert blogger" because she has a video blog and her own website? Hell, I've got a blog and MY own website, I've written for several magazines and newspapers, so that would suggest I qualify just as readily as Rein, yes? Ravenswing 19:13, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi Ravenswing , I'm completely with you. My suggestion by pointing out her extensive background is that her article is worth reading. This is exactly my point. It seems to me that it really doesn't matter what you point out, expert or not, many editors will not read blogs. It should be clear from her creds that she is some sort of an expert in Open Source software. She is an original creator of Creative Commons, THE LICENSE THAT WIKIPEDIA uses. She is obviously a well-respected reporter. She is not hard to research. If she does a story about open source or technology, it is at least worth reading and considering. Don't you think? It really annoys me that even Wikipedia editors don't seem to get that you are part of this open source community. Your open source community didn't just appear from nowhere. Editors seem to think that without any understanding of or expertise in a topic you can decide what is import and what is not, by some sort of consensus, without actually reading and understanding the content, simply by saying well if it ain't covered by some imaginary concept of a RS it doesn't exist. I am probably one of the world's authorities on Croquet (distributed instruction replication and sequencing in computer systems). I can read that article and tell you the coverage is reliable. There is no way for me to prove to you or any editor that what I say is true. Itsmeront (talk) 19:41, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 6 June 2015

Fix the see-also link text at the end of WP:NNC. They seem to refer to titles from an old revision. 174.141.182.82 (talk) 04:27, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the issue is here. Everything appears to be working correctly. What issues are you seeing? --I am k6ka Talk to me! See what I have done 19:27, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

NEXIST

Esquivalience has re-arranged some sentences and added another to create a new "WP:NEXIST" section. I don't mind the re-arranging, but I'm a little concerned that the addition may somewhat exceed consensus:

Thus, before proposing or nominating an article or deletion, or casting a !vote based on notability in a deletion discussion, editors should attempt to find sources for the subject in question and consider the possibility of existent sources if none can be found by a search.

The link behind "find sources" is WP:BEFORE. Previous discussions have not supported making BEFORE "required". What do people think about including it in this way? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

With the wording "should attempt", that does not make it a required step but one strongly recommended. I'm fine with that. --MASEM (t) 00:33, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
For some time now, the failure or apparent failure of a nominator to do WP:BEFORE research prior to an AfD nom has been taken as at least weakening the value of the nomination, and in many cases as evidence for a bad-faith nom. I don't object to requiring or almost-requiring such research before a nom. Insisting on it before an editor makes a discussion comment or a !vote is less enforceable, and perhaps less reasonable. And trying to insist on it before someone on NPP tags a page for speedy deletion will simply be ignored, and if it were followed would largely remove the value of speedy deletions -- and I am one of the admins particularly noted for declining many speedys and insisting that the criteria be followed strictly. Moreover, there are deletion discussions where notability and sourcing aren't the major issues, and so the mater becomes irrelevant. Speedys for copyvios or attack pages hav noting top do with the quality of sourcing, and AFDs focusing on promotionalism or "should it be a separate topic or be merged" also often have little do do with sources. That makes this phrasing need clarification at best, IMO. DES (talk) 01:04, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

^What does "consider the possibility of existent sources if none can be found by a search" mean? I don't understand. Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:16, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

I didn't draft it, but I take it to mean that before nominating for deletion or !voting to delete, an editor should consider the likelihood that a different search would find sources. In particular, that sources might exist that are not indexed online, or would not be found via a standard search engine. For some topics it seems obvious that sources, if they exist, are likely to be off-line. (For example, events in areas with limited online presence, events that occurred before news was routinely digitized, comparatively obscure academic topics, particularly ones that got more attention in the pre-internet past than they do now, etc) For others, absence of online sources is pretty much definitive (recent pop music or culture, things themselves published on the web, recent 1st-world political topics, etc) but in some cases online sources are most likely to be found via databases without static web pages, which are therefore not indexed by search engines. If this is in fact what is meant above, perhaps it can be phrased better, or a longer essay could be written and linked to. DES (talk) 01:32, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
The basic idea is that contemporary topics can readily yield results in Google, but if you talk anything older than 1980, there is a better chance you'll have to evaluate print sources which are not indexed offline. A common example would be profession athletes of the 1920s-1940s where you'd likely have to turn to newspapers of the time to get more sources. Or, alternatively, modern events in parts of the world where English is not a primarily language may not come up in online searched when done in English but would be readily found in the native language. It's being cognizant of where sources might be found. --MASEM (t) 14:02, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
That part needs to be re-written so that people easily understand what it means, but that's trivially handled with routine copyediting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:36, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Masem that the "should" and "consider" make this a mostly-unenforceable best practice. I say "mostly" because I've argued in a similar (but not identical) context over at verifiability that even best practice material may be used on a NOTHERE basis to sanction an editor who habitually or routinely engages in mechanical practices which are not in keeping with the best interests of the encyclopedia because they fall below best practices (especially, but not only, if that's about all that they do here), but should not be used to sanction editors who occasionally do things not in keeping with best practices. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 13:37, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

At the extremes, there are two misinterpretations of should: the one that means "may optionally" and one that means "must". We see both of these. (The true definition of course is in RFC 2119: always do this unless there "exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item" and you fully understand the issues and have considered the relevant advantages and disadvantages of your choice.) We see both of these interpretations with respect to this line: one editor supports it as "requiring or almost-requiring" compliance and another doesn't object because it is "mostly-unenforceable" rather than a requirement.
If we're going to keep this, and we don't want a bunch of disputes about it, then I would like us to identify how strong/enforceable this recommendation is meant to be. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:36, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Because the wording may be heavily biased towards inclusionism, I have just changed "should" to "a good practice to". Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 20:18, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Personally, I have always liked the phrasing "editors are strongly encouraged to..." This indicates that we consider it a very good idea, but that it is not required. one thing we might want to mention... when you don't check to see whether sources exist, you end up looking like an total idiot if others can easily provide them. Blueboar (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
"strongly encouraged to" seems like a good way to convey that editors should not only rely on the article for sources, without causing an inclusionist-deletionist debate; changed it. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 23:57, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
I would sugest adding a sentance such as "Failing to make such checks often is taken badly by participants at WP:AFD." DES (talk) 13:57, 4 July 2015 (UTC) discussions."
While that's true, I suggest that's probably better at BEFORE, which is a more a process than a principle page. Referencing BEFORE here is necessary, but we should be careful to get too much in the implications of BEFORE here. --MASEM (t) 15:19, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Footnote 17 already covers this - add more sentences and there's going to be a 6000-word religious war. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 03:31, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Notability of concepts

1. Yes, not concept of notability. Is there anything out there on how to apply the GNG criteria for an article on a concept? Or is there anything on more specific guidelines for concepts/ideas/principles. This came to me from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Collapse (sports), so the example I'll use is Choke (sports). It is mentioned ubiquitously, but mostly without explanation, and rarely in-depth on what the concept means. How do you argue for or against the notability of Choke (sports)? Mnnlaxer (talk) 05:04, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Concepts can be notable, typically on the etymology or the history of the concept's use in sources. An example I know of a notable concept is toyetic, and arguably that choke article is too. What we do want to avoid is just a simple definition per WP:NOT#DICT, or a concept that hasn't had a chance to gain acceptance per WP:NEO before making an article on it, hence while the Collapse one is likely up for deletion. --MASEM (t) 06:21, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
I know concepts can be notable. But what is the criteria beyond "I know it when I see it"? How would you argue Choke (sports) is notable? There is no etymology and the history of using "choke" in sports is both hard to find and not very interesting. Mnnlaxer (talk) 17:07, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

2. Searching for "notability of concepts" led me to Wikipedia:Other stuff exists which says:

In consideration of precedent and consistency, though, identifying articles of the same nature that have been established and continue to exist on Wikipedia may provide extremely important insight into general notability of concepts, levels of notability (what's notable: international, national, regional, state, provincial?), and whether or not a level and type of article should be on Wikipedia.

Is that a typo? Shouldn't it say "the general concept of notability"? Mnnlaxer (talk) 05:04, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

No, in this case, "the general notability of concepts" would be any related topics to the topic in question, and not so much "concept" as you are asking above. --MASEM (t) 06:21, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't think inserting "related topics" instead makes any sense either, while "the general concept of notability" makes perfect sense. Mnnlaxer (talk) 17:07, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
I made the change at WP:Other stuff exists. - Mnnlaxer (talk) 02:46, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

3. More examples. AfD for "Various Artists" and the same situation applies to Various Authors. Strange that both articles capitalize the second word, like it is a proper noun. I'm sure I could troll through the AfD's and find lots more examples of articles about concepts. Anybody else think this is worthy of discussion in an essay or a section of an essay or guideline? Mnnlaxer (talk) 15:18, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

RfC

There is an RfC on the subject of whether Wikipedia:Notability (publishing) should become a guideline, which is taking place at Wikipedia talk:Notability (publishing)#Should this become a guideline?. James500 (talk) 20:40, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Rewritten notability guideline

Currently, the notability guideline is disorganized, confusing, and with too much room for interpretation. So I have created a rewritten draft (at least half of it) at User:Esquivalience/Notability rewrite. The improvements include:

  • Overhaul of WP:GNG: by defining significant coverage and reliable source with greater detail in the context of notability. However, a controversial addition that needs more discussion is the consideration of juxtaposition and placement when assessing whether a source significantly covers the topic and how strongly it does.
  • Modified the lead so it is clearer: currently, it is a mess of a summary.
  • Stressed the importance of WP:BEFORE and searching for sources - even our best admins forget this from time-to-time.
  • Removed WP:FAILNWP:WHYN, the only purpose of this is to describe why the "second prong" (i.e. reliable source coverage) exists. This can be easily discussed in the lead.
  • General stylistic and prose improvements, the style and prose at the current guideline is atrocious.

Any thoughts on this? Esquivalience t 17:32, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

First glance through seems good, though I would presently object to the removal of FAILN, as I read that section on the advice of how non-WP:N-able topics can still be included in WP in the scope of larger articles. --MASEM (t)
Errata: I mean WP:WHYN. Esquivalience t 18:23, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
I'd rather keep WHYN, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:29, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
I added it back; except with less redundancy. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 23:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
  • The biggest policy (i.e., non-stylistic) change is that secondary sources would no longer required by the GNG. Do you understand the implications of that change? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:29, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
    • @WhatamIdoing: It still does require secondary sources, see reliable sources section. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 02:20, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
      • Oh, I see: You have replaced the current explanation (which is a single bullet list) with a series of sections, only the first of which contains a bullet list. Your multiple sections as a whole are meant to replace the current bullet list.
        Your "placement" item is odd. Imagine a product review. Do you believe that the first product mentioned is more notable than the last? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
        • Placement matters if it indicates more or less notice; I have added a footnote to clarify. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 22:27, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Withdrawn - working out the deletionism first

Proposal

Now that I have changed it a bit to be less inclusionist-biased and gave it a through copyediting, I propose for the notability guideline as currently-written to be replaced with the rewritten guideline per above, per the reasons above. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 00:03, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Um... given the discussion, I am no longer sure what exactly what "per above" means... what exactly is being proposed? Blueboar (talk) 01:20, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
May I recommend that content change and stylistic change be decided separately? Chillum 01:52, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Support / oppose

  • Oppose. The GNG already has too much weight compared to subject-specific guidelines. This isn't an improvement. --Michig (talk) 06:49, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
  • Strongest possible oppose. We have a serious editor retention which is known to be caused by deletionism. The last thing we want to do is to make that problem worse by making the notability guidelines even more deletionist (eg changing "multiple" (ie two) to "several" (ie three), saying that SNG make something likely to be notable (which is gibberish nonsense) instead of notable, suggesting, essentially, that significant coverage means massive coverage, removing existing references to inherent notability, so that notability consists entirely of GNG). Frankly, it could kill the project. I'm fairly certain this will result in the deletion of even more perfectly good articles, which is incompatible with the aims of the project and article 2 of the WMF bylaws ("useful information" not to be deleted). The entire proposal is wrong in principle. James500 (talk) 02:39, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose - The deletionists does not need another reason to blatantly !vote delete and get a reason to bludgeon AfDs. James500 makes valid points.--BabbaQ (talk) 16:29, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose The subject specific guidelines exist because there is a way to be notable without passing the general notability guidelines. A scientist is notable for their discoveries, even if they didn't do interviews, or get covered sufficiently in the celebrity obsessed media. Things like that. Not every notable person and topic has sufficient coverage. Dream Focus 16:40, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Let's move "depth of coverage" (first para) and "audience" sections from WP:CORP here

For inexplicable reason, terms "depth of coverage" and "audience" (the former mentioned here; the other clearly should be) are discussed in Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies). I propose that we move the first para from WP:ORGDEPTH and the entire (very short) WP:AUD here. Those concepts are clearly applicable to GNG, not just to notability of organizations. For reference, here are the paragraphs I propose moving. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:37, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Depth of coverage

The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. If the depth of coverage is not substantial, then multiple[1] independent sources should be cited to establish notability. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject is not sufficient to establish notability.

Audience

The source's audience must also be considered. Evidence of significant coverage by international or national, or at least regional, media is a strong indication of notability. On the other hand, attention solely from local media, or media of limited interest and circulation, is not an indication of notability; at least one regional, national, or international source is necessary.

  • What is the guideline recommending if attention is solely from international media of limited interest? Thincat (talk) 10:40, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
    • If the source scores well for "geography" but poorly for what I'll call "niche-ness", then I think you use your best judgment, but generally at AFD the "limited interest and circulation" quality is taken to be a more important factor than the "international" aspect. A magazine for left-handed African elephant trainers, or for retired employees of a single corporation, no matter how "international", is not really showing attention from "the world at large" (to quote the nutshell). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:10, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't think that's a very good idea. Both of those paragraphs are controversial, especially the WP:AUD one. Until recently it had a "disputed" tag, and there have been repeated proposals to delete it entirely as doing more harm than good. It's far from the level of consensus that a policy should have. As for the "depth" paragraph, the problem is that it has no criteria for how deep is deep enough. The GNG policy says "significant coverage" and includes criteria: "addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content." The 2nd paragraph at WP:ORGDEPTH also had criteria: "attention that extends well beyond routine announcements and makes it possible to write more than a very brief, incomplete stub about an organization." Without some kind criteria defined in the policy, it's open to abuse and arbitrary, ad hoc definitions of what exactly is deep enough. – Margin1522 (talk) 12:51, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
    • To me, both of them seem valuable clarifications. In particular, I think we need to define the depth of coverage properly here. And the larger problem is that both of those sections are now being targeted from AfDs outside the organizations; so it's clear that those concepts have gained recognition broader than the niche notability topic they are discussed on. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:49, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Overall, I'd support, although I believe that both of them could be improved a bit.
    • I think that adding the "depth" idea is a good one. The main goal is to explain SIGCOV (which is poorly written). Potential improvements include adding a hook to WP:WHYN and a link to NPOV, because the goal is to be able to write at least a decent stub based entirely on third-party/independent sources. If you can't get a couple of basic paragraphs written without referring to the subject's own website, then SIGCOV has not been met.
    • The "audience" idea may be harder to adapt to a broader subject area than CORP. If people are interested in that, then it might be helpful to give "neighborhood newspaper" as an example of a source that "counts" very little towards notability. It's independent (so good for writing a neutral article), but it's indiscriminate, and it gives exactly zero evidence of attention from "the world at large". (Instead, it shows attention from your next-door neighbors—sometimes quite literally.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:10, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Strongest possible oppose. AUD is nonsense and should be deleted for the reasons already stated at great length on its talk page. I suspect that ORGDEPTH is more restrictive than GNG and don't support that either. James500 (talk) 20:35, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose The "or media of limited interest" would invalidate all the sources currently considered reliable for reviewing comic books, manga, anime, and other such things. Even video games, since most are only reviewed in detail on sites that review just games. You could even complain about technology that only got covered in tech magazines, or new animal species that only got mention in media that covers just them. No longer use a reference from a nature channel, since it has "limited interest", only showing nature. Dream Focus 17:07, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

RfC

There is an RfC on the subject of whether Wikipedia:Notability (history) should become a guideline, which is taking place at Wikipedia talk:Notability (history)#Should this become a guideline?. James500 (talk) 19:51, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Expanding notability policy to cover judges

Please see WT:Notability (people)#Proposed addition to WP:Notability (people)#Politicians. North of Eden (talk) 19:03, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Notability mills

Notability mills are somewhere between title mills (which confer notability), essay mills (which do the requisite writing), and search engine optimizers (which improve your search engine ranking).

This notability mill is brand new: its URL was created just four days ago, on June 27. I wouldn't have noticed it had they not very promptly spammed me with an offer of their Complimentary Wikipedia Eligibility Assessment Service.

I particularly liked the word "immediately" in their disclaimer, "not everyone is immediately a good candidate to feature on Wikipedia". Translation: don't try this at home, you need a wikiexpert.

I found myself asking a number of questions I couldn't answer, which is why (for want of a better place) I came here.

  1. Are notability mills common? And if so, sufficiently so as to justify a suitably named article sibling to Essay mills?
  2. Are they harmless, or should Wikipedia be on its guard against them, or at least have a WP guideline about them?
  3. Has the Electronic Frontier Foundation encountered this sort of thing before, and if so do they have any sort of position on its ethics, netiquette, etc.?
  4. Wikipedia has no objection to people selling article scrapings as books provided the book states that the material was obtained from Wikipedia articles. Should it have a similar full-disclosure rule to the effect that all evidence of notability obtained from a notability mill be disclosed as such?

Personally I find this sort of thing offensive and not in the spirit of Wikipedia. But perhaps I'm just entering my elderly curmudgeon phase. :) Vaughan Pratt (talk) 02:30, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Probably another run-of-the-mill paid editing firm thinking that WP:42 or even WP:GNG requires a doctorate in searching Google News; just treat them like any other paid editing firm and WP:RBI. Esquivalience (alt) (talk) 03:09, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
  • This particular one might not be a problem; it's already offline. Ravenswing 09:12, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
As an FYI in case anyone cares, this company is still offering their Complimentary Wikipedia Eligibility Assessment Service as of this morning. The spam I received from them on July 1 has been reworded slightly. The Business Development Manager formerly known as Lisa J Henson should now be addressed as Jenifer Davis. Whereas previously the company gave both a URL and a phone number, now they claim merely to be a NY company that has been in business since 2009, along with other claims such as annual donations to Wikimedia, but give no company name, phone number, URL, or street address that would permit verifying those claims. The only way to contact them is to reply to the sender, [email protected], which currently is only an MX record, not a website. Vaughan Pratt (talk) 19:54, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
@Vaughan Pratt: I'm not 100% convinced that "notability mills" are for real, and are a serious problem; a few wannabe "WP pros" offering services and then disappearing overnight (the one you reported above is a 404 error as of yesterday) aren't evidentiary of much; I'd be more concerned about in-house manipulators at government agencies and non-governmental groups (see lead item on my userpage). But let's assume some stable, real-business notability mills are up and running, with paid staff.

The digital-age civil libertarian position: I worked for about 9 years at EFF as one of their main public voices (along with Mike Godwin who has also been Staff Counsel at WMF in the intervening years, and Will Doherty. We did get press calls about paper mills periodically, and my stock answer was along these lines (and should be illustrative of the issue in general): "Publication of papers and other research-oriented material, on the Internet as well as in print, is protected [in the US] by the First Amendment, so we'd oppose any blanket attempt to silence websites because they have research papers on them. The state-level laws that restrict or ban brick-and-mortar 'essay mills' are regulation of business practices, and where they affect freedom of expression and publication, they are narrowly tailored and are time, place, and manner (in this case, manner) restrictions on commercial speech. Where they fail to be sufficiently tailored in this regard, and to remain within the kinds of restrictions the Supreme Court has permitted, they are subject to legal challenge. The principal regulatory danger here is vagueness and overbreadth in hasty and poorly thought-out legislation rushing to 'do something about that Internet thing' without properly understanding that it is simply a publication medium like paper books, and not some kind of public menace." I have not detected any sea-changes in the rationales used by EFF and other "digital liberty" groups, only in what issues they're choosing to focus on. The core principles have remained constant: If it's legal offline, it's legal online; targeted attempts to restrict online activities in particular are misguided and counterproductive; and computer-mediated communications are creating new ways of doing things that mustn't be suppressed simply because they're different. This is a general "civil liberties in the digital age" stance, shared by EFF, CDT, EPIC, ACLU, etc.

The upshot: If it's legal to be a PR and image consultant off the Internet, it's legal to be one on it, even if the Internet provides some new PR avenues that did not exist on paper. But, being involved in such work legitimately does not give anyone the right to do illegitimate (illegal, unlawful, unethical, or agreement-violating) things offline, so it doesn't online either. So, it would not be okay to violate WP terms of service in furtherance of a client's PR image, even if there's no call for some kind of despotic crackdown on either Internet PR people in general, or even specifically on paid WP editors who have not done anything transgressive. This actually relates conceptually to a lot of previous issues, like use of encryption in FidoNet-technology networks, unsolicited bulk e-mail, even use of the early Internet for commercial purposes at all. A "you can't do anything like that here because we said so, and this is our playground" approach tends to fail. It's more practical to identify some very specific baseline limits that relate to resource abuse and enforce those, regardless as to intent of the use.

On Wikipedia: WP seems to be doing this pretty well with the WP:CORE content policies. I.e., there's not a policy against pushing a POV if you're paid, there's a policy against pushing a POV at all, whatever your motivation, because it's an abuse of the purpose of the resource that WMF provides. With a WP:COI policy that's also general, and various behavioral policies that also apply to everyone, it effectively narrows very tightly what a paid editor can actually do without being nailed to the wall. But there will always be bad apples. A "notability mill" is essentially the same thing as a PR consultant who "works" the press to engineer favorable media coverage that distorts the truth. Spin-doctoring isn't a crime, even if it's a "worst practice". It's up to professional journalistic and editorial diligence to thwart it in that realm, and up to the WP consensus, administrative, and arbitration processes to weed it out here. And we need to get our priorities straight: Someone being paid $100 to create a questionably encyclopedic article on Jane's Noodle House in Saskatoon, which will probably get AfDed soon enough, is way, way less of a WP credibility threat than the government of Pakistan trying to covertly WP:OWN all articles about that country (which is actually happening).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:07, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

I fully agree with all these points, especially the point that it's trivial by comparison with covert manipulation of Wikipedia by governments, some of whom would presumably be less competent at covering their tracks than others. Note that I wasn't claiming that this particular outfit was doing anything wrong, only that they're acting as though they thought they were, e.g. by claiming to be a company operating since 2009 yet giving none of the usual information such as company name, street address, URL, or even a PO box. They did give a phone number in their first email to me (though not in the second) but that turned out not to be a way of reaching them: when I called it, someone answered "Hello" (with much noisy background conversation), I asked "Is this the place for Wikipedia?", and he hung up on me without another word. Vaughan Pratt (talk) 17:54, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Video Games

  • Hello all. I have observed lots of articles being created about Video Games. Whilst I appreciate enthusiasm of editors in creating new articles; I personally feel that lots of the Video Games are not worth having an article of its own. There was practically 100s of thousands of video games in existence and most don't even survive one year. In the absence of a clear guideline, the articles gets created. Can we have a discussion on this subject and perhaps draft a guideline on this subject? Comments invited. Thanks, Arun Kumar SINGH (Talk) 07:37, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't see a need for a separate guideline. Our general Notability Guideline (WP:GNG) should be enough. Yes, some video games are notable, while others are not. GNG is enough for us to determine which are notable and which are not. In short, we can consider a video game notable if it has been discussed (in reasonable depth) by independent reliable sources. Blueboar (talk) 11:52, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
  • At the VG wikiproject, we are aware that particular for indie games, there can be non-notable games that get no coverage in the main VG sources (which we document at WP:VG/S), and we do try to have these deleted and/or merged, but as Blueboar said, there are also many video games that do get the GNG-required coverage, so we do have lots of such articles. --MASEM (t) 16:33, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
  • If there is significant coverage (reviews, praise, criticism) in reliable sources (see WP:RSN and WP:VG/S) independent of the subject (not the developer's or the publisher's website) then a game is presumed suitable for a standalone article. Not too hard to apply. Esquivalience t 18:54, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Nutshell wording

Note: This comment isn't really about SPA and promotional activity, people who don't care about criteria. I'm looking at the widespread poor understanding of our criteria for articles once the topic is "in scope", such as new-ish editors or good faith commercial editors, which is what WP:N explains.

The concept and process by which we decide what topics "in scope" get articles, can be very elusive and unclear to non-editors. Being clearer helps everyone - it explains why some topics aren't covered and clarifies to our good-faith non-editors and less experienced editors, what exactly we're looking for when we make this decision. Newcomers creating articles are invested in their articles, so it's common AFD experience that improving clarity on our criteria helps focus understanding, while poor clarity causes long arguments and hurt feeling. The current nutshell isn't really well worded in part, and it has some issues.

EXISTING NUTSHELL:
Wikipedia articles cover notable topics—those that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable independent sources to gauge this attention. The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic should have its own article.
ISSUES I'D LIKE TO SEE IMPROVED:
  1. Should start more directly with "What is notability" ("Notability is..."), not "What do WP articles cover" — the former not the latter is the topic!
  2. Should (however briefly) note that specific NG's exist and why (note - guidance that acts like a specific NG might exist for a "topic area" such as WP:PROF or a "type of situation" such as WP:BLP1E)
  3. Shouldn't use terms that might be poorly understand or perceived as insider jargon to a lay reader, unless they're going to be explained (however briefly): "independent" in our usage is one, and "content" (as in doesn't determine content) might be another to many people. Otherwise use different words.
  4. Worth noting (in light of how xxxx often it comes up!) that however interesting or promising, non-notable articles aren't created. Instead we reassess notability on request if our criteria are believed met.
POSSIBLE DRAFT REFACTOR (PLEASE IMPROVE AND SHORTEN!)
Notability is Wikipedia's basic rule used to decide whether or not a topic within Wikipedia's scope should have its own article. Wikipedia only covers notable topics—those topics within its scope that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time. We consider evidence from reliable independent sources not closely connected to the topic, to gauge the significance and quality of attention, and therefore whether the topic seems "notable". Non-notable topics, even if interesting, should not have articles; instead we reassess the topic on request, if its coverage and attention have significantly changed.
Many kinds of topic have additional notability guidelines; these add more exact guidance and improve consistency among similar topics. Notability only affects whether an article should exist. It never affects the contents of an article (how it is written).

On the plus side, it's probably more direct and clearer - what notability is, how we assess it, we don't create articles (even in scope) otherwise, but it can change and be reassessed. Specific guidelines exist for some kinds of topic. It feels more useful. On the minus side, it's quite a bit longer (though not off the scale). Can these or similar improvements be explained more concisely, and still better explain the page and concept? FT2 (Talk | email) 16:38, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

The nutshell summary should focus on a few vital aspects; more summary information can continue to be included in the immediately adjacent introduction. (I would place information about subject-specific notability guidelines in the introduction rather than the nutshell, for instance.) I would suggest paralleling the introduction to a certain extent. For example:
Notability is a test used to determine if a given topic warrants a Wikipedia article, based on the degree of attention it has received from the world at large over a period of time. We use evidence from reliable, independent sources to evaluate the level of attention and its significance. The guidance on this page is solely related to whether or not a topic should have a standalone article; it is not used to determine an article's content.
I'm not quite sure I understand your objections to the terms "independent" and "content", since you still used them in your proposed text. I think they are being used in a fairly ordinary manner (unlike of course the term "notability" itself, but that's long discussion we already had). isaacl (talk) 17:59, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm not against trying to improve the lead, and this seems like a good start. If we are talking about doing this, one aspect I think that needs to be introduced in the lead is that notability is meant as a test of presumption of what will be a good topic on WP, not as a guarantee for a topic to be an article nor a requirement that all articles must meet. --MASEM (t) 18:14, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
  • I would say definitely, the lead can especially be improved. The lead should be modified to properly and unambiguously summarize the article or even the subject guidelines - the average new article creator or COI editor is probably too busy or unwilling to read the whole guideline and its footnotes, unlike editors who need to have the full details. Esquivalience t 18:51, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
I like isaacl's approach. How about this:
Notability is a test used to determine whether a topic that is suitable for Wikipedia should have a Wikipedia article. Notability is assessed using evidence from reliable, independent sources, which shows the attention the topic has received from the world at large, and the significance of that attention. Wikipedia does not cover topics that have not yet received a high standard of attention, even if they are interesting or promising. The guidance on this page, and notability standards for specific topic areas, are only used to decide whether or not an article can be created for a topic; they are not used to determine the content of Wikipedia articles, how they are written, or whether the topic should be covered under an existing article.
Optional rewrites of middle sentence, which explain the concept/purpose better by linking WP:N directly to its underlying explanation in WP:NOT:
  1. Wikipedia does not cover topics that have not yet received a high standard of attention, even if they are interesting or promising. (as above)
  2. Topics that have not yet received this level of wider attention do not have standalone articles, because Wikipedia is only intended to cover 'significant' topics that belong in an encyclopedia.
  3. Wikipedia is only intended to cover 'significant' topics that belong in an encyclopedia, and this is assessed from the attention received, rather than beliefs about 'importance'.
Also how about this for the last sentence, to reflect that WP:N doesn't completely exclude from coverage, which is easily misunderstood:
[T]hey are not used to determine the content of Wikipedia articles, how they are written, or whether the topic should be covered in an existing article.
One minor point - I don't think "over time" is actually needed in the nutshell. We already say it depends on the quality/significance of that attention which covers it enough here, also in some cases items might be deemed notable even though they may not get much attention "over time" (for example because they led to/caused something else). FT2 (Talk | email) 11:55, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
I don't think the link to WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE is a good target for the corresponding text, as the referenced section does not discuss significance. Regarding the proposed text on topics that fail Wikipedia's standard for inclusion, I'll give it some additional thought. On something having an enduring effect, this is part of the significance of the topic over time. isaacl (talk) 12:38, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
On reflection, I agree with the point about the link. I think the last point you mention may have misunderstood slightly - it's merely observing that sometimes an original cause (which we would deem notable) may not actually get much "attention over time" if someone looks for coverage of that original event, even if its effects and outcomes do have considerable "attention over time". As we already say it depends on the level/quality/significance of attention received, we don't need to add "...and/or over time..." as a qualifier, that phrase is redundant for the nutshell. FT2 (Talk | email) 12:46, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
Regarding the last sentence: although it is a fair inclusion from the introduction section of the overall guideline, it makes me a bit uneasy, because in practice verifiability plus due weight considerations add up to something a lot like the notability guidance. I disagree with your premise regarding the coverage of an original cause; to meet Wikipedia's standards for inclusion, I think it should be mentioned in the coverage of the resulting aftereffects of the cause. (This is an aside, though, regarding the wording of the nutshell summary.) isaacl (talk) 12:51, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
I had written a proposed revision for the first two sentences but I didn't copy it over when resolving an edit conflict. I think you are diverting from your original intent of defining notability without using Wikipedia jargon. I propose combining the first two sentences as follows:
Notability is a test used to determine if a topic within Wikipedia's scope has received significant attention from the world at large, based on evidence from reliable, independent sources, and so warrants a Wikipedia article.
isaacl (talk) 14:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
The run-on doesn't save many words and seems to make it less easy to digest. But the points are good ones. How about this:
Notability is the criterion for topics within Wikipedia's scope to be allowed an article. To assess notability, editors review reliable, independent sources showing the kind of attention the topic has received from the world at large; editors' personal beliefs about 'importance' are not considered. Notability standards, including specialist standards for particular topic areas, only indicate whether or not an article can be created for a topic; they are not used to determine the content of Wikipedia articles [or whether the topic may be covered within an existing article].
What I like about this wording over both our previous attempts - 1/ It's probably clearer to a newcomer, what it is, how it works, and its rationale and basis. 2/ It describes WP:N as a criterion not a test (the test is assessing the evidence vs the criterion). 3/ It directly says that editors assess notability (ie there's discussion), and gives a sense what it's based on. 4/ it alludes briefly to invalid arguments and topic-specific guidelines without taking long sentences. 5/ I think the last point is important to mention, but put it in [...] since we can separate that from the other matters. FT2 (Talk | email) 11:10, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
The phrase about editors' personal beliefs is not contained within the guidance, so before including it in the nutshell summary, something to that effect should be placed in the main text. I think "criterion" is more jargon-like than "test", so it may not fit your desired intent. I propose the following (consider "criterion" to be interchangeable with "test"):
Notability is the criterion used to determine if topics within Wikipedia's scope warrant an article in Wikipedia. Editors evaluate a topic's notability by reviewing reliable, independent sources to assess if the topic has received significant attention from the world at large. Notability standards are used only to judge if a separate article should be created; they are not used to determine what is covered by an article.
isaacl (talk) 12:29, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

There should be the reasoning for the notability guideline, and the first sentence should actively use the word "notable" in it instead of just passively using "notability is a criterion/test":

-Esquivalience t 13:16, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

  • "significant attention from the world at large" to me suggests that obscure subjects that are only covered by topic-specific sources may not be notable. That's not quite the intention of the policy. Unfortunately, I don't currently have an alternative writeup for this bit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:00, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
    • I feel it to be an indication that the topic in question should be significant to more than just a small, closed group of persons. The wording is taken from the existing nutshell summary; I think it is helpful in giving the right impression to someone who isn't reading anything else on the page. I'll see if I can think of any better wording. isaacl (talk) 15:11, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
  • I guess it depends what you think as active; using "notability" as the subject places it in the active voice. The original expressed concern was for the first sentence to deal with defining the term in the title of the page. However personally I don't have an issue with your first and second sentences. The last sentence in that paragraph appears to be truncated; did you mean to say something like this: A topic's notability only determines if the topic warrants a stand-alone article; the content policies, particularly Wikipedia:Verifiability and the principle of due and undue weight are used to judge the topic's coverage in other articles.
    I don't think the following section with the bullet list is required for the nutshell summary (also note the first bullet point is not currently covered in the page). I think it would fit better in the introduction. isaacl (talk) 15:04, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
We are going to definitely have problems from some users with the word "must" as this would appear to elevate this to policy, as well as with the stand-alone list language. I would completely remove the list language from the nutshell (it is far too naunced a factor to include here), and rewrite the first sentence "All topics within Wikipedia's scope are expected to be notable for it to be covered in a stand-alone article..." to allow the IAR and other cases like those as WP:OUTCOMES to be not forced into this. --MASEM (t) 15:10, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

At a first look what I don't think works very well is to use WP to describe WP as in linking to, "Wikipedia's scope". This is slightly circular. Rushing off so no time but just a thought.(Littleolive oil (talk) 15:53, 25 August 2015 (UTC))

It's not part of the definition of notability, but a clarification that the notability criterion only applies to topics within scope. If the topics are out of scope, then their notability is moot. isaacl (talk) 16:07, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Amended per suggestions above. Esquivalience t 17:10, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
    • I don't like the addition of the sentence starting with, "This especially applies..."; I think it is unnecessarily specific. I suggest leaving "from the world at large" for now, or else the preceding clause is dangling. isaacl (talk) 17:49, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

This feels like it contains poor wording. First it's got a long list of random topics (not concise, begs question, giving a principle is better), second it only says "significant attention" ("significant" as a bare qualifier doesn't imply anything much on its own: my press release on my band got "significant attention" didn't it?). Technically, "all" at the start is redundant. But this version did sparked a thought of a way round these issues - see "variant 5" below which combines this with Francis Schonken's approach. FT2 (Talk | email) 02:55, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Variant 4 (if I counted right)

Advantages:

  • Short. A nutshell should retain attention, for which compactness is an advantage. For this reason, typically, it is not a good idea to put extended rationales in a nutshell.
  • To the point. E.g., this is not the nutshell of WP:What Wikipedia is not, so why force it in? There are other criteria aside from Notability, that is no business of the nutshell of this guideline (and is explained in the guideline itself). Same reasoning for topic-specific notability guidelines: these are not part of *this* (general) guideline, and are listed elsewhere on the page.
  • Is not an "alternative formulation" of the core of the criterion, which would be steering for interpretation issues.
  • Specific terms wikilinked: yeah, continue reading if you don't understand them: the guideline page has a sense, if it could be all crammed into the nutshell, we'd delete the rest.
  • As it may raise questions (e.g. what is meant by these terms?) it invites to read further, which is a characteristic of a good nutshell.
  • That it starts with "Notability is..." is purely coincidental (I don't see that as a characteristic that necessarily improves a nutshell, but here you are for those who like it that way).

--Francis Schonken (talk) 17:48, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Withdrawing my support to this proposal in favour of the #Still shorter proposal below. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:21, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
I have some copy-editing suggestions, but those can be addressed later if this version garners sufficient consensus support. My personal preference is for as much concision as is manageable, so I appreciate the compactness; often my attempts to incorporate the wording of others leads to somewhat longer statements. isaacl (talk) 17:58, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
I like this version. To the point and concise; I really can't state anything more here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:38, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
I also support it, though I'd add one word: "A topic usually passes this criterion" (italics only to emphasize it here, no italics in use). We do have some special criteria and this is a bit too absolute without that qualifier. While I think that word needs to be added, I support this version either way. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 14:31, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Variant 5

I like both the work of isaacl and Francis Schonken but together they suggest a synthesis.

  • Starts with the crisp and elegant first short sentence from Francis' version to introduce the term and its use.
  • It defines what it means for topics to be "notable" by stating that standards exist and they are based on good evidence of attention. That's easier for newcomers and suggests already that not everything will meet the requirements. It's better to say "Notability on Wikipedia means X" because it avoids conflict with personal and external understandings of the word.
  • It then puts the guidelines in their real context: notability guidelines really say is how to assess the evidence (what evidence and what standard of attention we look for).
  • I'm convinced by Frances' appeal to brevity, and left out mention of "article content". (If needed, the shortest version I came up with was "Note that other policies cover article content and style")

Advantages: - intuitive, accurate, avoids drawing users into jargon phrases, and avoids many problems by stating what it means to be notable, and then that NG's say how to assess. It means we don't have to explain why several NG's exist, or that they "especially" apply to people, organizations, etc. It implies a lot as well - that there is an assessment process (not just "CEO decides"), that it's based on external documented evidence which we look at (not editor or creator opinion), that the standard is not trivial (it must be "reached"). Also avoids a load of potholes in the wording. FT2 (Talk | email) 02:55, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Again, I have some copy-editing suggestions, but they can be discussed further if there is general consensus to pursue this proposal. isaacl (talk) 04:01, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Still shorter

Using the WP:42 summary:

Withdrawing my earlier proposal in favour of this one. I think the advantages are clear, e.g. avoiding ill-chosen formulations like "To be 'notable' on Wikipedia..." (if you're elected ArbCom member or something like that you'll be notable "on" Wikipedia too...). Further: short; goes to the core of the guidance on this page without unnecessary ado; attention retention as high as one could imagine; etc... --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:21, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

I like that. Short and the adjectives/terminology used should be clear enough to laypeople. Explanation of why we have this policy can be put elsewhere on the policy page. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:18, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
Brevity is good, but it just doesn't help a reader. Think what kind of person this nutshell is there to help - someone who doesn't know much about it and needs to. The most common reason they'll need the nutshell is because someone has described an article or topic of interest to them as "notable" or "non-notable", or said they need evidence of "notability" (probably in a WP:PROD or AFD). So they come here. So we need to firstly, explain what notability is, not just what "articles need". Same as how WP:ADMIN starts with "Administrators are..." and not "Use of tools must be...". FT2 (Talk | email) 14:01, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

New lead?

A problem with the notability guideline is the lead - the prose is mediocre and it doesn't summarize everything. Any thoughts on this draft lead?

- Esquivalience t 18:22, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Um. I am fairly sure WP:INDISCRIMINATE applies to the structure of information and not the topics; the text of the paragraph is "data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources" and all examples offered are cited for bad structure and not bad topic. Also, more philosphically, I've always taken "notability" as being a guidance as to which topics we can have verifiable and neutral articles for and not as a way to exclude certain topics. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:35, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
  • The spirit of WP:INDISCRIMINATE also applies to the inclusion of topics; i.e. Wikipedia overall should not be a total collection of indiscriminate garbage. Esquivalience t 02:54, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
    • We'll have to disagree on that. I do not see how the spirit of that policy could be to exclude certain topics as opposed to excluding certain structures of information. I also worry about such a summary encouraging WP:IDONTLIKEIT usages. The rest of the lead is fine however. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:25, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
      • I agree with Jo-Jo that a reference to INDISCRIMINATE is inappropriate as being out of the scope of that policy and could easily be misused. (I would also note that the Policy policy (not a typo, and I'm not attempting to perform the Jedi Mind Trick ) says that policies should clearly express their spirit. So either (a) if the spirit of INDISCRIMINATE includes this meaning then its text is defective and should be corrected or (b) the spirit of INDISCRIMINATE is already clearly expressed in its text and doesn't include this. As long as INDISCRIMINATE has been around without being questioned or changed in regard to that proposed meaning, I think the only logical conclusion is (b).) I've not yet looked at the rest of the proposed text to have an opinion about it, this discussion about INDISCRIMINATE just happened to catch my eye. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 14:23, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose, falls short of about everything a good intro should be. For starters it is too long, second, it summarizes the guidance, instead of being an introduction to it, third it uses overcomplex sentences for concepts that are relatively simple.
For the second of these shortcomings: when one starts summarizing guidance in both the nutshell and the intro, one can be sure at least one of the two is forgotten when the guidance is updated, unavoidably leading to legion interpretation discussion, etc. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:21, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

statement of notability

Many people during deletion discussions say that a Wikipedia article requires "a statement of notability". Are they alluding to some specific policy or guideline that requires such a statement? Could we add a link from this WP: notability guideline to whatever other guideline or policy they are alluding to, if one exists? --DavidCary (talk) 16:43, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I think they are alluding to the WP:NRVE section of the WP:Notability guideline itself, not to some other guideline. Blueboar (talk) 21:38, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
eight years ago, articles were actually being speedy deleted if they did not contain an explicit statement using the right words. That's obviously absurd--all that is necessary is to write the article so the notability is apparent at a glance, because many patrollers don't actually read the article through. DGG ( talk ) 22:14, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
We want an "indication" of notability, which is nearly always demonstrated by sourcing, but we do not need any type of statement like "John Q Smith is notable because he invented sliced bread." in the article text itself. That might come up in discussion at AFD or the like. --MASEM (t) 22:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
I would think an article should at least mention why the subject is notable. We may not require that to be in any set format, but if there is nothing stated the article is likely to be nominated for deletion. Blueboar (talk) 00:24, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
  • A statement of why the subject is notable is very desirable if is not immediately obvious. At AfD, discussion participants should not have to research from scratch to find any possibilities of notability. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:40, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Re: Notability is based on the existence of suitable sources, not on the state of sourcing in an article:

I don't disagree with the statement... but the reality is that if the state of sourcing in the article is poor, the article is far more likely to be nominated for deletion. I think this is something that the guideline should highlight. Blueboar (talk) 12:24, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

and

The guideline currently states:

"A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right; and"

I propose that we switch the "or" to "and" and eliminate the word "either". This will allow us to screen out the flood of articles on businesses that simply are not important to anybody except their owners, employees, and a few customers. In other words, it will help prevent the insertion of adverts into Wikipedia. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:07, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

The notability sub-guideline for businesses, WP:CORP, is actually equivalent to the notability guideline: An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. It also has several "alternative criteria" so it is slightly more inclusive. So in that sense, this change would not accomplish what you're seeking. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:24, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes, we'd have to change WP:CORP, but we have to change this before we can go there. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:00, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
SNGs have always been alternatives to the GNG, by design. Changing or to and would be a drastic change of how notability is considered. --MASEM (t) 14:02, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
It may be a drastic change, but it is sorely needed. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:00, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
That would be a significant sea change going against past RFCs that establish the "or" as imperative. If the issue is to prevent businesses that have very notability beyond themselves, that's already possible with both the requirement of independent sourcing and avoiding COI. Further notability can be challenged by the fact it is a presumption: if no significant sourcing can be found to expand an article past a stub, deletion is a reasonable option whether it originally met the GNG or SNG. --MASEM (t) 20:56, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I would strongly oppose such a change. For current businesses it is perhaps not a major issue, but there are many subject areas in which sources are not online and not readily available, and use of the alternative criteria in an SNG can be a very helpful tool in countering systematic bias. In any case, WP:CORP unlike several over SNGs, doesn't really set up any alternative criteria that don't more or less include passing the WP:GNG. The closest is the warning that companies listed on a major stock exchange such as the NYSE or NASDAQ are almost certain to have sufficient coverage to be notable, and should not be nominated for deletion without checking for such coverage, which is merely an instance of WP:BEFORE in any case. What articles in the "flood" are being defended by appeal to a separate criterion in WP:CORP? Most of the ones I see merely state that the business exists, and is "important" based on revenue, jobs numbers, or the like, often sourced if at all to the company's own web site. WE don't need a change to WP:N to deal with that, nor would the change proposed help in any way, in my view. Can anyone cite specific instances in which this change would have made a difference? DES (talk) 23:07, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Does an independent publication become no longer independent because the journalist spoke with the subject?

From Wikipedia:Notability#Self-promotion and publicity (bolding added for emphasis):

The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself ... have actually considered the topic notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it—without incentive, promotion, or other influence by people connected to the topic matter.

An editor has stated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Manika (singer):

An interview with the subject, padding for the publications, is absolutely incentive to cover her. Surely if this artist were truly notable, readers would be so interested in her that journalists would write articles without her participation. And for the record, my claims could not be made about any artist who meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

This is regarding these three articles in which the subject was interviewed:

  1. Lyle, Michael (2011-11-29). "Henderson teen hopes to become a pop star". Las Vegas Review-Journal. Archived from the original on 2015-09-05. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
  2. Przybys, John (2011-12-08). "Las Vegas-born singer Manika takes on two holiday classics". Las Vegas Review-Journal. Archived from the original on 2015-09-05. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
  3. Romero, Angie (2011-05-16). "Introducing Manika". Latina. Archived from the original on 2015-09-05. Retrieved 2015-09-05.

A good journalist always attempts to interview the article's subject. These good journalists from Las Vegas Review-Journal and Latina spoke with her for their pieces because attempting to speak with article subjects is their job.

That the journalists spoke with her does not make them suddenly non-independent.

Is an article in The New York Times no longer usable as a source to establish notability for a subject if their journalist spoke with that subject? No.

My question to the community: Does an independent publication become no longer independent because the journalist spoke with the subject?

Cunard (talk) 18:40, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

You're trying to have a broad discussion about an isolated incident without providing sufficient context. For the uninitiated: the dispute here involves an AfD about a singer whose only coverage in reliable third-party sources consists of 2-3 interviews. Interviews are perfectly acceptable to use. When a subject's only substantial media coverage consists of 2-3 of them, that's a completely different story. Chase (talk | contributions) 18:50, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Chase: your interpretation strikes me, and Cunard, as odd. Can you provide any more specific policy or guideline to support your position? Bondegezou (talk) 09:12, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Chase, I don't think it's a "different story" in the least degree. Quite aside from the fallacy inherent in proclaiming interviews to be good sources unless there are more of them than you like, the whole premise of the GNG is as the backbone of WP:V. An interview in a reliable media source is a perfectly valid way for the world to have heard of you. Ravenswing 11:11, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
An interview does not necessarily change a source to non-independent, but it could be promotional and so may need to be weighed accordingly. The subject's words are first-hand source material and so must be handled accordingly. isaacl (talk) 11:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • There is a distinction to be made between using an interview for WP:Verifiability purposes and using it for WP:Notability purposes. In regards to establishing Notability, the key question is whether the interviewer is independent of the interviewee... In this case, the interviewers are independent (they work for news outlets, and not the recording artist or any company associated with the recording artist). They have no stake in promoting the artist. The fact that the interview took place demonstrates that someone not directly connected to the artist has taken note of the artist and his/her work.
As far as Verifiability goes (ie using the content of the interview to state facts in our article)... what the interview does establish is the "fact" that the interview took place, and that the interviewee said "X". It does not establish that X is accurate. This means that any information taken from interviews should not be stated bluntly as fact (in Wikipedia's voice) - we should not write: "Joe Blow was ten years old when he wrote his first song"... instead it should be hedged (attributed so it is in the interviewees voice) - we should write: "In an interview conducted by the New York Times, Joe Blow said he was ten years old when he wrote his first song"). Blueboar (talk) 13:41, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • It would seem to me the issue is not with there being interviews or too many interviews, but nothing else. The part of an interview that is in the subject's words is primary, and if nothing of substance is in the interviewer's comments, it is a primary source and does little for notability, even if it is reliable for specific facts. DES (talk) 13:43, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • One thing to keep in mind is that there are interviews and then there are interviews; some have the interviewer having done a lot of previous work to keep questions appropriate, on target, and specific towards a topic (eg a Barbara Walters interview), while others are just more mindless exercises, fill-in-the-blanks. The former type, where the interviewer has shown effort to be more than just the person asking questions probably is a good source for notability, the latter less so. Also keep in mind that interviews can be secondary: if they are talking to actor on recounting the work they did in a film some years ago, that's secondary information though from a first-party source. I would agree that in the specific example, these don't feel like drill-down interviews nor secondary in nature, and add some aspects of narrow/local focused coverage, and that begs if the topic is notable. --MASEM (t) 14:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • It depends. An interview where the person is simply being given a platform to speak for themselves is not usually a RS for notability, and is otherwise a RS only insofar as it represents the views of the subject. An interview where the re is an actual dialog, or where the journalist takes an active role and summarizes on the basis of what is said is more reliable. The question will always arise about to what degree the journalist is being selective in choosing to do this interview, or whether it was arranged by a promotor. This is normally difficult for us to determine, but sometimes there are indications. The clearest is when an otherwise insignificant person is being interviewed, where it can be assumed the initiative came from the PR agent--the classic example is a young good-looking performer, or, nowadays, a young would-be entrepreneur. And even here, if this interview does lead to others covering it as a story, the PR agent has succeeded in making the person actually notable. DGG ( talk ) 20:54, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
  • This thread seems to have morphed to a broader topic (as they do). Several AFDs to my knowledge have concluded "delete as non-notable" because the notability claim depended on interviews with the article subjects, and as it says in one of the footnotes in the article here, "interviews are primary sources". I concur completely with the previous two replies, basically "there are interviews and there are interviews". Is there any room here for acceptance of some interviews (as described by DGG) as acceptable secondary sources for establishing notability? Not for anything the subject says, of course, for that they're still clearly priamry. Jeh (talk) 08:07, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

RFC on significant coverage and fictional characters

Requesting outside input on how WPVG should be interpreting "significant" coverage when evaluating fictional characters and listicles. RFC here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games#Rosenberg resolution czar 15:42, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Airbnb

I do not know if this topic warrants a page or not. It is my understanding that mathematical formulas cannot be the subject of copyright or proprietary information. I really do not know if this is true or not, but I know that Weight Watcher's could not keep the mathematical formula they use to determine how many points a particular food has a secret and the formula was here on Wikipedia. Anyway, Airbnb.com has this sliding scale for their commission that they charge guests. It is between 6% and 12% of whatever the host charges the guests. The guests often ask me how much the commission will be but I cannot answer this question because Airbnb.com will not tell me the formula. Is this legal? I asked if this was proprietary information and they said yes. Basically, how it works is, if the guest is paying a small amount the commission is higher, and if they are paying a lot it is lower, but they will not reveal the points at which it goes up or down. This stupid company prides itself on honesty and transparency, but that is only for the users, not for them. Is this a topic that would warrant a page or investigation. Would it even be possible to find out? Annforbes86 (talk) 22:19, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

I have answered this query at the Teahouse. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:47, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Companies notable for one event

Please consider commenting on a proposed new change at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#Companies_notable_for_one_event. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:16, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Self-promotion and publicity: a sentence on interviews?

I think we need to at least caution against interviews as sources for notability. This would be, IMHO, supported by Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_52#Can_someone_be_notable_for_the_fact_that_they_were_interviewed_by_a_major_media_outlet..._regardless_of_what_they_were_interviewed_about, Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_51#How_to_word_it_so_people_know_notable_interviews_count_towards_notability.3F and Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_49#Interviews_count_as_primary.2C_but_it_says_for_GNG_you_need_secondary_source. At the very least, it seems to me we have a consensus that not all interviews are sufficient. Trying to word a sentence about when they are might be a pain, but overall I think we should say something, and link to Wikipedia:Interviews, if only so that some people don't treat an interview as a 100% bad (or good) source by default. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:02, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

This seems like better advice at WP:PSTS, since its whether the interview is primary or secondary (and there's no absolute answer there either : an interview with a person asking them to recollect events from several years back would be secondary if the interviewer person is adding their commentary on the matter). --MASEM (t) 15:31, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Seeking input about the inclusion of a high school in a political biography article

This page is only for talking about how to modify or improve the Notability policy, and this inquiry isn't even about the issue of Notability, much less about the policy. Try NPOVN or, to attract additional neutral editors to help form consensus, RFC. — TransporterMan (TALK) 20:59, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

An editor and I are having a disagreement on the article Ted Deutch about whether the article subject's high school should be included. I've added a half-sentence reference to the "Early life and education" section, as well as a category identifying him as Liberty High School alumni, but the editor has repeatedly reverted it ([4] [5] [6] [7]). In the talk page, he says that it's "silly trivia of no importance" and "not important enough to include in his article", with which I obviously disagree. I'd like to gather more input to determine a WP:CONSENSUS as to whether this information should be included, so any feedback at Talk:Ted Deutch#Inclusion of high school would be appreciated. Please keep the conversation there, not here on this talk page, so it's all in one place. Thanks! — Hunter Kahn 15:38, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#RFC: delete and redirect

There is an RfC at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#RFC: delete and redirect that asks: "Should our default practice be to delete article histories and contributions when a small article is converted into a redirect to a larger article?" Cunard (talk) 05:54, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

"One sentence mention"

I suggest changing "one sentence" to "fourteen word" in footnote 1. This is a purely cosmetic change, but it might discourage certain types of bizarre wikilawyering. Sentences can be arbitrarily long (eg one sentence in James Joyce's "Ulysses" is 4,391 words long) and can therefore contain an arbitrarily large amount of information. One could communicate the same information in one sentence or multiple sentences. (One could, for example, rewrite the example given in two sentences without change of meaning). Whether one does so is a purely stylistic choice that has nothing to do with the importance of the information in question. Accordingly, since it is the amount of information (the number of facts, or depth of coverage, or level of detail) that matters, I would suggest removing anything that might be taken to suggest that an author's style of writing affects notability. I appreciate this could backfire with people looking at the number of words instead of the amount of information, but I think it less likely than people looking at the number of sentences because of the present text. James500 (talk) 16:23, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Can you point to any examples of such quibbling, or are you worrying about a hypothetical problem not actually observed in the wild? Anyway, I have a better suggestion: just remove the whole footnote. The two examples it gives are so extreme as to elucidate the concept of "trivial" not at all. EEng (talk) 18:03, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
There are certainly a number of entire essays devoted to this "quibbling". Eliminating "one sentence" would allow us to get rid of them. I can't recall an example off the top of my head, but I think the issue of a source that is one or a small number of really long sentences has to arise sooner or later, by the laws of chance alone. In that event, in view of the existence of the essays, I think some very extreme deletionists would fight it out on a perceived technicality. Questions about the lower limit do frequently arise when a relatively short source contains information that is particularly important and possibly difficult to merge (one of the reasons we have SNG), or there are a large number of relatively short sources, and the sum total of the information in all of them put together is large. The lack of clear guidance causes a lot of arguments. I'm not sure the lower example is that extreme, since the 'selective database' criteria of NJOURNALS, which is widely accepted, allows the use of something that is equivalent to mere inclusion in a "list of the best". I have known instances where editors have absurdly argued that books several hundred pages long were not sufficient, so I don't want to remove the upper example altogether, for fear of a spree of nominations. Indeed, I would suggest replacing it with a more realistic example of something that would always be regarded as significant. James500 (talk) 03:48, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
WP:BURO. If people are quibbling because a guideline saying specifically "sentence" and are trying to justify keeping or deletion on the exact wording, that's not how guidelines are to be used. They capture the intent, and it's pretty clear from the example what the intent is, ignoring that there might be that Joyce's 4000-word-long sentence as a clear extreme. Guidelines are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive. --MASEM (t) 04:01, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
I agree with Masem. It may be that somewhere there's someone who will actually argue that "one sentence" is some kind of formal lower bound, or that 500-page books aren't substantial enough, but such people will soon be laughed off any talk page. People either that dumb or that asinine will just as easily argue that the "14 words" is a formal dividing line. You may not have noticed that I acted on my suggestion in my earlier post, and boldly removed the examples entirely. I encourage everyone to think whether anything is actually lost thereby, but if y'all think it should go back, so be it -- though in that case I'd hope we can come up with good examples that actually help editors parse hard cases, instead of the extreme obviousness of the current examples. (Unfortunately I can't think of any such good examples, though like Justice Potter, I know significant coverage when I see it.) EEng (talk) 04:15, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
How about the following suggestions for the very obvious (ie not a lower bound): one (good) 'scholarly' book (from eg OUP/CUP) or (journal) article of reasonable length (in eg Law Quarterly Review/Modern Law Review or something of that kind of stature or otherwise similarly suitable); NYT/The Times obituary; Britannica/ODNB article. I assume the nature of the topic (ie clearly a distinct thing in of itself, rather than more clearly a facet of a broader thing) is such that awkward merger would be undesirable. In view of things like NJOURNALS, I don't think I can give you a lower bound. To express a definitive opinion about hard cases, I'd have to give the matter a lot more thought. James500 (talk) 11:31, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't agree with removing the examples wholesale without replacing them with anything. Saying a book is non-trivial is pretty unnecessary, yes, but though EEng removed the examples as being too extreme, it serves to enable those who routinely argue in favor of single sentences and list items counting among significant coverage. The original request was to change "one sentence" to "14 words" along these same lines, under the pretense of being "purely cosmetic". Before opening this thread James first went to Wikipedia:Trivial mentions, which previously just functioned to highlight a couple passages from GNG and changed it into this. In addition to removing some of what was there, he added a page-dominating "alternative view" which argues that the example sentence in the GNG is not something that can be generalized and only means that that sentence is what is not significant coverage. So I have to disagree with that the examples are too extreme to be helpful. Changing "one sentence" to "14 words" helps to wikilawyer that point. Removing it altogether removes a common understanding of "trivial mention". That's not to say it couldn't be improved upon, though. What about indeed getting rid of the footnote but replacing it in the text with "There is no fixed minimum number of sentences or paragraphs, but a single sentence rarely constitutes significant coverage." It makes it more generalized and open without losing the meaning altogether. Thoughts? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:24, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

No, User:Rhododendrites, in its original form that essay was a terrible piece of wikilawyering that insisted that all single sentences were inherently insignificant regardless of their length and character, even if they were 4000 words long and communicating information of the utmost importance. I did not suggest that the example could not be generalized to broadly similar single sentences, I only pointed out that there was no reason to assume that it could be generalized to a completely disimilar sentence. Or at least that was what I expected a literate and reasonably intelligent person to understand by what I said. James500 (talk) 16:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I like the idea of something along the lines of what you're saying, in the main text. The problem is that I can think of a lot of vaguely right-seeming ideas we want to get across, but so far I don't know how to synthesize them into something coherent and actually useful. Adding my own ideas to Rh's just above:
  • There is no fixed minimum number of sentences or paragraphs, but a single sentence rarely constitutes significant coverage
  • cannot be reduced to a simple length requirement
  • a subjective evaluation
..um... see, here I get lost. The more I think about it the more at a loss for words I get (and that doesn't happen much, as my friends and relations will testify). But maybe we can do something useful with the examples. Can we fill in the blanks of the following?
The one-sentence mention by Martin Walker of the band Three Blind Mice in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton ("In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice")[1] is plainly trivial. Had the passage read
__________________________________________________________
it might be considered significant coverage, and the following would certainly be considered significant:
__________________________________________________________
EEng (talk) 15:11, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I suggest the word you are looking for is probably "similar". A sentence/passage similar to the example is plainly trivial. Or perhaps "broadly similar" or "not completely disimilar". Or something to that effect. I think a proper definition of "trivial mention" would likely require its own guideline, containing a mountain of text. James500 (talk) 16:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Um, I'm not looking for a word. Honestly, I have trouble parsing your comments. EEng (talk) 16:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I apologise if what I said was unclear. I was suggesting that the original text of the footnote might be replaced with something roughly like the following text:
The one-sentence mention by Martin Walker of the band Three Blind Mice in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton ("In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice") is plainly trivial. Any broadly similar one sentence mention is also plainly trivial. James500 (talk) 17:35, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Certainly better than nothing, but I think that guidelines are most useful when the advice is general, but with language that leaves a little bit of gray area for exceptions. This example doesn't actually seem to be clarifying anything because it creates a different question of what "broadly similar" means and, to me anyway, makes it hard to extract a generalizable best practice. The fact of the matter is, in the majority of cases a single sentence is not considered sufficient -- but there are exceptions. So let's just say that. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I have no idea how the "broadly similar" bit helps. As Rh said, it just replaces one question with another.
You know, maybe if we're serious about this we should all go back to editing, and in the course of that we might find sample passages in source we feel would be especially good illustrations. I still think we should have three if we can: one clearly trivial, one clearly substantial (but not a book), and a grey-area one. EEng (talk) 18:30, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm still of the position that while we need something there, it would be best if we could word it in a general way rather than talk about specifics at all. A general principle is evenly gray rather than create several dimensions of gray for each of the examples. BTW: I restored the previous version of the page. The examples need work, but something is better than nothing so in the meantime I think it's best to restore. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:43, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

The focus on number of pages, sentences, or words is tangential. From the disputes I've seen, the question is whether or not the cited source is covering the topic in a meaningful way beyond a simple noting of its existence. Accordingly I think not providing a length-based guideline avoids obscuring the true intent. isaacl (talk) 18:32, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

"Meaningful" is too vague in practice. The point of elaborating upon it is to expand upon what that means in practice. What is or is not "meaningful" or "significant" is the central point of many notability-based discussions. Guidelines are useful to avoid re-inventing the wheel every time, codifying best practices derived from consensus-based application of the rules in practice. Setting a baseline best practice based on the fact that a single sentence is not considered significant coverage in the vast majority of cases seems helpful to quickly avoid wasting time explaining the finer points of what "meaningful" or "significant" means when someone is advocating for a few words or presence of a name on a list as "meaningful" or "significant". — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I have no issue with giving additional guidance for clarification. I think, though, giving real examples that are not length-based would be preferable. For example, in college sports, coverage of a game can mention a player in multiple sentences. This does not add up to notability for the player, though, as it is considered to be routine coverage. isaacl (talk) 18:55, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Now, see, that's a great example! Why don't you add that? EEng (talk) 19:02, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I don't want to see the word "routine" anywhere in this guideline. It is used at AfD as a code word for "I don't like it" or "ignore all coverage in periodicals whatsoever". James500 (talk) 20:55, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Routine, trivial, whatever. Let me suggest this additional example:
Coverage of sports events routinely describe the actions of players during the various plays; repeated mention, of one particular player, in such descriptions do not constitute substantial coverage of that player.
EEng (talk) 21:35, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
I've added an example regarding sports games. isaacl (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
That is not an example of GNG. WP:ROUTINE is a separate guideline. SNG like ROUTINE are not part of GNG. I see no value in GNG simply repeating things said by other guidelines. There are too many restrictive SNG to repeat all their criteria in GNG (the list would be impossibly lengthy), and there is no reason to single out that one in particular. James500 (talk) 20:34, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
While the word "routine" doesn't have to be used, when judging the notability of sports figures Wikipedia's guidance on routine coverage is an important consideration, as well as the underlying policy that Wikipedia is not a place for news reports. isaacl (talk) 23:11, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Having given the matter further consideration, I am not convinced that we should restore that footnote in any form. Anything that is included in that footnote is certain to have an awesome spin put on it by wikilawyers. The more detailed the explanation included, the more ammunition they have. I doubt that the community will ever reach a consensus on meaningful, as opposed to extreme, examples of what constitutes a trivial mention. I doubt we are capable of forming a sufficient consensus on this page without an RfC. A new much more precise definition of "trivial mention" would be a massive change that is likely to be opposed by a lot editors on both extremes. I don't want to discuss this for weeks and months and then get nowhere or get something awful. Since the concept is subjective, I doubt that a truly satisfactory explanation is possible. In the mean time, I think the two examples are sufficiently bad that they may be useless or worse. And, let's be honest, many editors don't even read them. James500 (talk) 20:55, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Well, that you're disinclined towards these examples is a given. You've made your distaste for this passage (and this guideline in general) quite clear (except as can be argued to the letter, e.g. via your edits to the trivial mentions essay linked above). Removing the example makes it easier to continue arguing in favor of one-sentence mentions (and sentence fragments and list items) counting among significant coverage. There is a tiring irony in the manner and frequency with which you advocate a position based on the assumption of bad faith that such and such other people do/would wikilawyer over them. I'm increasingly of the mind that an rfc or some other mechanism/venue is the only way to ensure the consensus interpretation of the guideline is effectively reflected. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
As the person who originally removed the two examples as useless, now that they're back, and I've modified them a bit, I'm glad they're back. What do you think of the modifications I made? EEng (talk) 22:56, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

(1) I never thought I would be able to say this, because I could not figure out how it could be done, but ... I think that the rewritten version of the lower example is excellent! I think that its wording is probably beyond being twisted. The higher example is certainly much better than it was, though it could do with further reduction. How about reducing it from a full book to a full chapter? (2) I am aware that some guidelines contain references to "routine" coverage. However, I am also aware, from the talk pages of those guidelines, and their archives, that there is intense opposition, to at least some of those references, from a large number of editors advancing many excellent arguments. It is clear to me that those particular references are living on borrowed time and will eventually be deleted. Restaurant reviews, for example, are not root of all evil. (3) User:Rhododendrites, I urge you to consider that your accusations are, not for the first time, entirely erroneous. Far from opposing the rewritten version of the lower example, I strongly support it. I did not oppose the original version because I wanted to allow wikilawyering, but rather, because the original version was verbal garbage, and, despite racking my brains, I could not figure out how to put it right. Far from expressing distaste for this guideline in general, I have expressed distaste for mega-deletionist interpretations of it. James500 (talk) 11:02, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

@EEng: It looks a little clearer than it was originally, and I do prefer it being in the text rather than in the footnote. As above, I think it would be better to replace the examples with something more generally applicable, but acknowledging that would likely demand an RfC or somesuch, I'm satisfied.
@James500: I'll just reply to (3) That's great that you support it. Genuinely. However, that you did not express distaste for the guideline here and did not here advocate here for counting one sentence mentions, etc. doesn't mean there aren't a whole lot of belying diffs. That said, if this is as resolved as it can be, I see no point in continuing to engage on the matter.
There is still the question of Wikipedia:Trivial mentions, though. You and I have been arguing across a few different pages lately (we both clearly keep an eye on notability/deletion-related discussions) and I'm concerned that me jumping in to edit that essay as well would not, at this point in time anyway, lead to a productive outcome. I will say that I strongly object to your changes of this to this, which, as I see it, hijacks the meaning of the essay from its original intent to turn it into a spectacle of wikilawyering. My recommendation would be to restore the original text (and perhaps update it given the updates here -- maybe EEng could do that), then take the "alternative view" to a separate [new] essay which you then link to from the first in the See also section. There are many such differing essays linking to each other as such. But I'll leave that to you and others to sort out. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:18, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

(1) The original text of that essay was a terrible piece of wikilawyering. All I did was make it as neutral as possible. Since the original text was entirely about the expression "one sentence mention" (notice that it didn't even mention the other example, because the agenda was to delete as much stuff as possible) a total rewrite would be necessary. It would have to be ripped to pieces. Even the new version is rendered obsolete by the changes here. Moving 'alternative view 2', but not the other, to a separate essay would not be appropriate as the essay "Trivial mentions" should not express only the most deletionist interpretation possible. The nature of its location is such that it should be as neutral as possible. Bearing in mind how little the guideline says about "trivial mentions" any gloss placed on the guideline could only be pure speculation. I doubt there is value in having such speculation in that location in particular. My inclination is to mark it as historical or redirect it, or if there are other guidelines mentioning "trivial mentions", disambiguate it, or, if you really must, have a list of essays containing such pure speculation as aforesaid. And the potential for such speculation may be infinite. I can think of many tests that one might apply. Notice that Wikipedia:Significant coverage is a redirect. (2) I have no idea what the diffs you refer to are. I can only assume that you must have misunderstood something that I said. James500 (talk) 17:18, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

  • Seems like there's more going on here than I'd realized. Perhaps I can act as a third opinion when I'm free later today. EEng (talk) 20:39, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, I've poke around, and I have to agree with Rh that James' changes to WP:Trivial Mentions [8] are inappropriate. You say you're making it NPOV, but NPOV doesn't apply in project space, which is a place for editors to express viewpoints on project matters; essays in particular are for an editor/group of editors to express what may even be a minority view. Furthermore, your changes complexify the text beyond all reason. I'll wait to hear from you, but I think reversion is in order. You might want to start an alternative essay of your own (which you can link from the See-also of Trival Mentions.) EEng (talk) 09:15, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Hearing nothing, I'm reverting. EEng (talk) 15:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
@User:EEng: I haven't replied because I have been occupied elsewhere. I am under the impression that Rhododendrites would agree with the proposition that essays that reflect a minority position should be userfied. Since the notion that a sentence thousands of words long is plainly trivial is obviously an extreme minority position, and since the quotes in this essay are now out of date, and thus contradict the guideline, I suggest this essay should suffer that fate. I am tempted to MfD it if some kind of improvement is not made. James500 (talk) 16:13, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
If you are foolish enough to try MfD, you risked being laughed at, or reprimanded for WP:POINTYness, or worse. Everything is meant to be read with common sense, not like a proposition in formal logic, and no one in his right mind would take the position that a thousand-word sentence is what's contemplated in that essay. Please don't waste people's time. EEng (talk) 06:42, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
It is fairly obvious that is exactly what is being contemplated by that essay, otherwise there is no reason to write what it says, as that simply is what the essay says. If its wording was merely ambiguous I might agree with you, but its wording is not remotely ambiguous. Nor is it an error that could plausibly be made by accident (though the original editor might have genuinely imagined that was the intended meaning of the dodgy wording now removed from the guideline). An inexperienced editor might take what it says seriously. James500 (talk) 22:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
If an inexperienced editor can't understand what it says, right there at the beginning:
...then I'm not sure we can do anything about that. EEng (talk) 00:22, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

On the "routine" language

There's been some back and forth on the main page over text introduced above (see this diff for how it was added) that is being contested.

My take is that what we're trying to say is that a topic that is only covered by routine coverage, as is the case of most non-championship major league sporting events, is not sufficient for meeting notability, hence why we don't have articles for every single such game. It is not meant to discount such sources as invalid throughout WP, as they can augment other non-routine sources for a topic, just that if that's the whole extent of the coverage, you likely don't have a notable topic. If the wording needs to be changed we should discuss that but this is a valid aspect to add. --MASEM (t) 16:22, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

@Masem: The language that was inserted included none of those nuances. Something more nuanced along these lines would be fine:
For ordinary sports events and games, a WP:ROUTINE newspaper account comparable to those typically published for such events, is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about the event or game. Similarly, WP:ROUTINE coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about individual athletes.
Cbl62 (talk) 16:38, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
That's fair to add, I would also make sure it is clear that such sources are not precluded to otherwise support other "significant" sources for an article. I'm just trying to resolve the slow edit warring going on. --MASEM (t) 16:40, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
That's way better than what I had. EEng (talk) 16:44, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
It's a single example that I added on the request of another editor as something between an entire book covering a topic and a single sentence in an article. I think the nuance should be left to the referenced links, rather than duplicated on this page. I suggest omitting this example and looking for one with fewer nuances. isaacl (talk) 16:47, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
We can broaden it to general routine news - such as the day-to-day performance of the stock market, etc. A key facet that is necessary in the context here is that numerous sources do not always equal notability as we define it, if at the end of the day all those sources are routine. The nuances of ROUTINE can be left there, but this concept should at least be introduced here. --MASEM (t) 16:50, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I disagree. As WP:ROUTINE is an SNG, it is not part of GNG and should not be mentioned in GNG. There is no value in GNG repeating things said by other guidelines. There are too many SNG that purport to restrict GNG in some way to repeat all such criteria in GNG (the list would be impossibly lengthy), and there is no reason to single out that one in particular. It certainly should not be presented as an example of GNG when it is in fact a completely different guideline. The fact that WP:ROUTINE is an SNG indicates there is no consensus for it to apply to topics other than news events, and I certainly would not support its extension as it is meaningless outside of that context. James500 (talk) 16:56, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
    • ROUTINE is part of the Events SNG, but the concept of routine coverage applies to all topics (such as the athletes example Cbl62 gives above). It applies to NORG too (such as routine restaurant reviews from local papers). The specific nature of how routine sources should be avoided on the SNGs can be documented but this page should reference the general nature that routine coverage alone is not sufficient for notability. --MASEM (t) 16:59, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
      • I disagree. SNG describe exceptional cases. Concepts that appear in SNG are not necessarily of general application. In fact, their appearance in SNG normally means the opposite. I can't see why this one should be. The "routine restaurant reviews" of ORG has been under heavy fire on WT:ORG for some time. It is probably a drafting error that should read "brief" or something like that. There is, after all, no such thing as a routine object, though there are routine events. James500 (talk) 17:18, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
        • You're missing the point. NEVENT is a relatively new SNG. The concept of routine coverage is of high critical importance to understanding when an event is notable or not, so explicit advice there is proper. But before NEVENT was created, it was generally the case that routine coverage of a topic was not considered sufficient for notability; this just wasn't documented to a great degree but it was accepted practice. Just because the authors of NEVENT decided to codify ROUTINE there does not mean that we never considered routine coverage of a topic before under the GNG or any SNG; it had been in practice many years prior. This is basically providing an example of a long-standing practice. --MASEM (t) 17:23, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
        • I disagree. There is no such practice. I have never seen it. Even if people had used this as an excuse at AfD in the past, since consensus depends on weighing the relative merits of arguments, and not on what the majority think, that fact would be irrelevant. The reason that it is not included in GNG is lack of consensus that it should apply generally. James500 (talk) 17:38, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
          • Search the talk archives of this page (WT:N) and you'll find discussion of how routine sources are not used for notability going back to at least 2009. I want to say we actually had "routine coverage" advice in this guideline some years ago but it was lost or changed as part of an update, but I can confidentially state that we definitely dismissed routine coverage for all topics as sole indication of notability prior to NEVENT codifying it. --MASEM (t) 17:47, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
          • Please provide links and/or diffs. James500 (talk) 18:10, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I am neutral as to whether there is no need to reference WP:ROUTINE at WP:GNG. My point above was simply to ensure that, if it were to be included, any such repetition should be accurate and appropriately capture important nuances. Cbl62 (talk) 17:02, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • James, for someone who worries so much about lawyering, you sure pack a lot of words (and abbreviations/acronyms, and links...) into little meaning. I'm fine with the most recent wording, but we could augment it:
For ordinary sports events and games, a WP:ROUTINE newspaper account comparable to those typically published for such events, is not significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about the event or game. Similarly, WP:ROUTINE coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about individual athletes. Similar concepts apply to typical coverage of daily stock-market activity, and mention of individual stocks in such coverage, etc.
EEng (talk) 17:28, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Let's not personalize this. Material specifically about games and events belongs in EVENT. Material specifically about athletes belongs in ATHLETE. Material specifically about stock market coverage belongs in ORG. Not here, complexifying GNG beyond all reason. James500 (talk) 18:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm not personalizing anything, just telling you that your posts are awfully wordy and reference-laden, which detracts from their usefulness. By your reasoning the first example currently in the guideline (re IBM) shouldn't be there, but rather in WP:CORP, and the second example (re Bill Clinton's high school band) shouldn't be there, but rather in WP:MUSIC. Examples need to be from the real world; as long as they're labeled Examples people will understand their function here. EEng (talk) 18:32, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, but the concept of depth (number of facts, amount of information) is simple. It is obvious how those example generalize to other texts (huge book vs wafer thin). The concept of routine coverage is completely nebulous. Those examples do not give me the slightest clue what would be considered routine coverage for other topics. Thus they are not helpful outside an SNG. James500 (talk) 18:58, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
The SNGs do not exactly divide up the possible article space; if they did, this argument might make sense. But there are topics that fail to fall into any SNG, so would have to be evaluated as part of the GNG, and routine coverage aspects would still apply. For example, the daily performance of the stock market (not of any specific stock) falls outside any SNG and thus would be judged as a GNG, but as that is mostly routine coverage we would not consider that notable. --MASEM (t) 18:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Is there such a thing as a non-notable stock market? Examples might help me understand this line of reasoning. Is the coverage objectionable because it is "routine" or because the data is numerical? James500 (talk) 18:35, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
No, but there are non-notable days in stock-market activity and non-notable stocks. EEng (talk) 18:41, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
The wording of the example does not make it clear that it is not referring to the stock market itself. I think a much better approach would be to create an SNG on chronology. Individual days should be notable, back to some date, probably coinciding with the widespread appearance of suitable periodicals or works with chronological information. Control of spin off articles can take place there. James500 (talk) 19:26, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I think you're missing the bigger picture here. The SNGs are meant as shortcuts to eventually meeting the GNG; they are meant to define conditions for topics that because of meeting certain merits the topic will likely gain significant GNG-quality coverage. They are not wholly separate from the GNG itself. The routine consideration of sources is thus something that is already built into the GNG, only expanded more on in ROUTINE when NEVENT was created. Further, you seems to be asking for highly specific instructions to cover every concievable case, and that's simply not going to happen: WP guidelines (in particular) are not prescriptive but descriptive, and thus the broad advice that routine coverage is not sufficient for notability does belong in the GNG, with more specifics to be provided on those SNGs where this can be more a problem as it is for NEVENTS. --MASEM (t) 19:40, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
The notion that SNG only exist as a shortcut to GNG is the deletionist interpretation. Consensus, reflected in the wording of N and the last RfC, is that GNG and SNG are complete alternatives. SNG serve other purposes such as eliminating the systematic bias that would result from applying GNG alone, and discouraging crackpot nominations of the "no matter how extensive the coverage is, I'll insist it is not enough" variety (imagine someone using the two examples in GNG to claim that whole chapters of books are not enough) and attempts to systematically push the envelope of what can be deleted under GNG. Highly specific instructions are a good thing: they simplify AfDs enormously. And SNGs already contain them. James500 (talk) 20:05, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
No, that's not right. the GNG and the SNG are based on the idea that notability is a presumption, that if condition X is met, that the topic is likely appropriate for an encyclopedia. The GNG itself is meant to delineate the type of sources we want to see in an encyclopedia article, under WP:V and WP:NOR (that is, independent, third-party, secondary sources). But even if the GNG is met by the existence of a couple of significant sources it still may be presumptious that a valid encyclopedic article can be made from them, and this is often when topics are merged. SNGs are not inclusion guidelines (this has been reviewed before and rejected by the community), but instead other ways to presume notability by way of being able to demonstrate sourcing now that shows the topic is at least important (such as winning an award) and thus giving them the time under no DEADLINE to find and fill out sources. If someone does a rigorous good faith effort to find sources (and this includes looking for offline and print works in some cases) and cannot come up with anything to expand the article from a stub, then that presumption of notability was wrong and deletion is reasonable. Sine the goal for both GNG and SNG is to demonstrate that an encyclopedic article can be written, it is expected that SNG-meeting topics can eventually gain the sourcing necessary. In AFDs we give SNG-meeting topics wide berth from deletion unless someone has demonstrated an extensive search for sources and found nothing, but SNG-meeting topics can be deleted even if the SNG is met. That's why the advice on ROUTINE applies everywhere, and why the GNG already includes this and there should be no issue with offering a more specific example. --MASEM (t) 20:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • J500: "The notion that SNG only exist as a shortcut to GNG is the deletionist interpretation. Consensus, reflected in the wording of N and the last RfC, is that GNG and SNG are complete alternatives. SNG serve other purposes such as eliminating the systematic bias that would result from applying GNG alone." Please see WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, sir. On Wikipedia, the primary measure of notability is the depth of significant coverage in independent, reliable sources. If you're here to argue that SNGs trump GNG, you've come to the wrong place for anarchy, brother. With most SNGs, we often accept that a small percentage of non-notable topics will slide through with the rest of the notable topics within the defined class, but that does not mean that an overwhelming majority of the individual members of the defined class should not be notable per GNG. GNG is the bedrock of all notability guidelines on Wikipedia, and serves as a backstop for article topics that may not satisfy any particular SNG, but may still satisfy GNG. And, no, that does not make me or any other discussion participant a "deletionist"; it means we believe in meaningful standards for inclusion. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Generally agree with Masem and Dirtlawyer1. SSGs are specialized guides to applying the concept "notability" to specific domains. If application of an SSG results in a determination of notability that does not meet the GNG, something is wrong in the wording or application of either the GNG or the SSG, because that shouldn't happen. All of the SSGs are guides to how to tell what's "probably notable" or "likely notable" or somesuch. They're useful shortcuts and indicators, but not intended as a bypass. Saying the SSG supersedes the GNG is like saying MOS:TABLES supersedes or contradicts WP:MOS -- if it seems that way, there's a problem with the wording of one of them or with your interpretation. Also, James, your use of the word "deletionist" has lost meaning since you characterize everything up to your own position as "deletionist" (or even "[super/ultra/extreme/mega] deletionist") and use preposterous hypotheticals like "no matter how extensive the coverage is, I'll insist it is not enough" nominations. (PS: I'll ask you again to indent your replies. If I understand correctly that not indenting is a principled stand you're taking (similar to how you refuse to bold !votes), I'd just like to add my name to the long list of people whose request you've ignored). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 20:29, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Nothing in the wording of any policy or guideline suggests that this is true of any SNG that does not expressly otherwise provide. All previous community discussions of which I am aware rejected this proposition. If I am in error, please provide links and/or diffs. I think I can predict, with the assurance of a phrophet, that if another RfC was called on this issue, the community would reject that proposition again. [I won't try to address all your points, but I will answer this: Concern with systematic bias has nothing to do righting great wrongs, and everything to do with concern about about a preponderance of coverage of 'low brow' popular culture topics for people with low or average IQs, against 'high brow' intellectual/academic topics (think topics in advanced mathematics or history) that are felt to be of greater educational and encyclopedic value and more beneficial to intelligent readers. And don't address me as "brother" or "J500", young man. Anarchy indeed!] James500 (talk) 21:28, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Please tell me you're joking about this IQ business. Please - tell - me - you're - joking. EEng (talk) 04:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Nearly all the SNGs have language similar to what one finds at WP:NSPORT#Applicable policies and guidelines, where it is clear that NSPORT is meant to provide criteria to allow inclusion of topics that have a strong chance of being guided towards the GNG. And if you're talking about the difference between "low brow" and "high brow" topics, keep in mind that first and foremost we are an educational work, and what you are calling "high brow" topics are of the most interest of that specific feature. We have readily found plenty of ways to include "low brow" topics by using more mainstream sources as opposed to books and peer-reviews that academic topics generally get. However, we also can't satisfy the more fanatic nature that some of these pop culture topics often will draw in without becoming indiscriminate. --MASEM (t) 21:49, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Masem and Rh are both correct (as is Dirtlawyer in his posts below). GNG is the ultimate notability criterion. The SNGs are heuristics that save time by giving a provisional free pass to classes of subjects which experience shows can be expected, with high but not infallible confidence, to be the subject of appropriate coverage e.g. for obvious reasons Nobel laureates almost certainly will have such coverage. But this provisional free pass raises a rebuttable presumption: if after an exhaustive search it turns out such coverage is in fact absent, then the subject is not notable.
When editors in AfD discussions say things like, "People with full-length obituaries in the New York Times are automatically notable", they're really talking about this rebuttable presumption. No one and nothing are "automatically" and absolutely notable, regardless of lack of coverage.
There are two kinds of editors: those who divide editors into two kinds, and those who don't. The ones who divide editors into two kinds, remarkably, call themselves "Inclusionists", who imagine themselves opposed to an imaginary group they call the "Deletioninsts". These so-called Deletionists, however, are aware of no such division, being aware only of editors who do or don't understand and adhere to notability policy and guidelines. The fundamental role of GNG, and provisional-rebuttable role of SNGs, is just the way things are, not a deletionist conspiracy. EEng (talk) 04:17, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The SNGs are heuristics that save time by giving a provisional free pass to classes of subjects which experience shows can be expected... But this provisional free pass raises a rebuttable presumption. That is the "AND" interpretation of the Notability guidelines - that a topic must meet both the GNG and any applicable SNG to be notable; but as James500 rightly points out, that interpretation failed to gain consensus in the last RfC, and every time it has been proposed. The interpretation with consensus is that each SNG is enough on its own to establish notability even where GNG is not strictly met, i.e. the "OR" interpretation where meeting either one is enough.
For generality, the GNG excludes a whole lot of information sources because in a general case they could be used to support inclusion of any kind of crap. However, the SNGs do allow for alternate information corpus that can be considered reliable and comprehensive in particular domains, even if they don't meet the strict standard of third party, independent, secondary sources. Government censuses, catalogs of various kinds, etc. can be trusted to support articles for geographic places, buildings, schools... thanks to their systematic and reliable nature, even though the sources don't meet GNG definition.
Thus there exist topics for which there is enough information from those alternate sources to write neutral articles; but this principle cannot be generalized because that kind of sources does not exist for all domains, and thus the general guideline needs to use a more strict criterion than those for specific subdomains which have been vetted by editors. Diego (talk) 12:03, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I don't know where you turn what I said into "the 'AND' interpreatation". I said nothing of the sort. It's not SNG AND GNG -- and neither is it SNG OR GNG. It's just GNG (but we accept SNG temporarily -- in fact, indefinitely unless and until clear and convincing evidence arises that GNG can never be met). As with any neatly packaged scheme, there are exceptions e.g. populated places get an essentially permanent free pass because of the faith that there's coverage somewhere even if we can't find it.
I don't know what RfC you're talking about.
EEng (talk) 18:59, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The RfC I referred to was Esquivalience's proposal for a complete (awful) rewrite which was very quickly snowball opposed by myself and IIRC, others including Michig, Dream Focus and BabbaQ. That was some time in the late spring or summer of this year. By the way, the level of indentation you are using is not very easy to read on the mobile site in portrait on a small screen. It is making the thread very long, and a higher level of indentation will likely be totally unreadable. James500 (talk) 20:12, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
That an "awful" rewrite didn't pass doesn't tell us much. And you may need to use a more appropriate device. EEng (talk) 21:15, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
There is a difference between where one is making the presumption of notability - which means either the GNG or an SNG has to be met - and the long-term evaluation of an article after exhausting possible sources, where core content policies eventually must be met which only the GNG alludes to (but itself not always sufficient). SNGs cannot override WP:V, NOR or NPOV, and most of the claims SNGs provide are through sources that would otherwise fail these policies in the short term, but we allow them to be kept to give time for sources to be found and developed. But if at the end of the day the only sources that can be found about, for example, an academic professor is their bio on a college webpage, that's failing WP:V and deletion should ultimately happen. So for presumption of notability, it is GNG or SNG, but for long-term justification of that presumption, the GNG is the only real route. --MASEM (t) 14:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
If that were true, we would have removed the majority of articles in Category:Populated places by location and Category:Schools, or any other category automatically populated from a database of trusted data. But we have not, therefore that reasoning is incorrect. Diego (talk) 15:48, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
First: WP:N is a guideline, not policy, so there are clear exceptions. Populated places has always been one for two reasons: that consensus has decided that one of en.wiki's functions should be also as a gazetteer, documenting such places, and secondly, that if there is a populated place of modern times, there is going to be some documented history about that place that may take a heck of a long time to find, so there's no reason to push for meeting notability on those places. Schools are a different beast because they fall under WP:OUTCOMES, and attempts to define school notability have failed a few times, because there are significant differences between geographical regions to how schools are handled, so that's one of those areas we know we need to address but it is nearly impossible to agree on a method to address them. --MASEM (t) 16:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • If routine coverage of events does not constitute significant coverage of events, as the guideline currently states, then it seems awfully reasonable to say that the same routine coverage of events would not constitute significant coverage of the people, places, and things involved in the events. The way we talk about routine coverage of events shouldn't make it seem like events are the only things being covered in routine coverage of events. To stick with the sports example (and I don't have a strong opinion on that particular example), routine coverage of sports events is also routine coverage of the athletes, teams, arena/venue, crowd, plays used, scores, host city, sports season, brand of equipment used, etc. -- not just the event. It's the same principle, so I agree it makes sense to have it somewhere in the GNG. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:49, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Sorry to be late to the discussion, y'all, but I just saw the most recent reversion of the attempted addition of the WP:ROUTINE exposition regarding coverage of sports events. I support it. Most coverage of individual sports games and matches is exactly what should be included within the ambit of WP:ROUTINE. Most NFL games get two or three paragraphs in every major newspaper in the country on Monday morning, and the same for top-25 Division I college football teams on Sundays. Of course, the Atlanta Falcons or Georgia Bulldogs get complete 1000 to 1500-word articles for every game in the sports section of The Atlanta Journal Constitution and that coverage is still 100% WP:ROUTINE. Coverage of sports events -- when used to divine the notability of sports events -- is best viewed through the lens of not only WP:ROUTINE, but also WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE. A college football game may be on the front page of every sports section in the country on Sunday morning, even heralded in the hyperbole of sports-writing as "unforgettable," "historic," "unprecedented" or "an instant classic," and a month later it's completely forgotten by mainstream, independent media sources. Personally, I had no problem with the suggested text here: [9], although its meaning would clearer and cleaner if limited to the event, and not expanded to include the participants. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:17, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
  • There is an aspect of routine coverage that I think deserves to be discussed further: what if there is repeated (ie on-going) routine coverage"?
I would agree that, taken individually, each routine coverage mention is not enough to establish notability... but what if the subject is routinely mentioned in lots of sources (over a reasonable period of time), and we take all this routine coverage as a group? I think there is a reasonable argument for saying that this on-going and repeated routine coverage would establish at least some degree of notability. Thoughts on this? Blueboar (talk) 14:04, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@Blueboar: If there's routine coverage of something, it often is ongoing. High school sports, for example, is always covered by local papers without questioning whether or not each individual game/player is significant. Different athletes, ball fields, plays, crowd chants, vendors, etc. might be mentioned each time, but that the same athlete is mentioned several times in multiple editions of the same routine coverage means it's still routine coverage. I can't tell if this is a comment about the specific proposal/discussion above or a general question about routine coverage? I hope you don't mind I removed the separate sub-heading and moved it in with the discussion for clarity of presentation. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:23, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Sounds reasonable indeed. What kind of "group" routine coverage are you thinking about? Going on by Dirtlawyer1's idea above that WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE is relevant, repeated coverage through an extended period of time would count towards the notability of the content, even if it appears only on newspaper sections that would be considered "routine" if they covered the content just one time. WP:NEWSPAPER also says that "Wikipedia considers the enduring notability of persons and events", so an event that is not forgotten but repeatedly remembered does have some enduring effect; therefore it seems that your idea is sound.
Notability is all about having enough neutral content to write an article about the topic. If the event is remembered and mentioned by reliable sources way after it first happened, they have had time to reflect on its meaning and to correct any misconceptions that might have occurred on the first coverage; therefore the content will have been cleaned up from any initial bias, in a way that one-shot routine news coverage would have not. Diego (talk) 14:25, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I don't believe a general assumption can be made that continued routine coverage equals significant coverage. The key aspect is the requirements for news coverage is different than the requirements for inclusion in Wikipedia. Newspapers cover a city's weather everyday, because its readers expect it; this doesn't mean "Weather in city X" should be a Wikipedia article. In a similar fashion, local newspapers are expected to cover local sports; no editorial judgment is being made regarding the noteworthiness of an athlete who is mentioned in routine accounts of local sporting events, or of the playing venue where dozens of games could be covered every month. isaacl (talk) 18:09, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I agree there's some issues here too. I have seen and tried to nominate some local murder-involved crimes that happened that had some national attention at the time it happened, but the only ongoing coverage is the anniversary of the crime in local sources that reflect on the impact of the murders on the victim's loved ones. I would call this routine coverage, and the type that does not demonstrate a long tail for notability. --MASEM (t) 18:48, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • FYI, Diego, my comments regarding WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE were really limited to the notability of events (as is the particular guideline), because news events (including sports events) often have a very short-term burst of intense coverage, and later nothing. There is an intersection of guidelines where WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE, WP:NOTNEWS and WP:ROUTINE all play a role in evaluating the enduring notability of an event. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:57, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Blueboar's point is one of the reasons (and there are many others) why the "routine coverage" argument is a fallacy. The fact that a topic receives regular (ie periodic) coverage, and lots of it, indicates that the topic is more, not less, notable. Let's not introduce routine coverage nonsense into GNG, particularly when we already have perfectly good guidelines, NTEMP and NOTNEWS, to deal with brief bursts of news coverage. I should also point out, in view of Rhododendrites' comment, that local coverage is a separate issue and that its exclusion GNG has also been rejected in the past for lack of consensus. Any attempt to introduce such things is a pipe dream that will never happen and can only serve to waste our time. James500 (talk) 19:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
    • Advice about routine sources and notability is already part of this guideline, it's been there for a while (see Wikipedia:Notability#Events). --MASEM (t) 21:04, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
      • That isn't part of GNG. It is a separate part of the guideline and it only applies to events, which are a special case anyway because of the SNG. QED. I'm not arguing (yet) that this shouldn't continue to apply to events (as I've not had time to review and consider that) only that it should not be extended further. James500 (talk) 23:05, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

@James500, EEng, Dirtlawyer1, and Masem: Coming back to James's statement "Consensus, reflected in the wording of N and the last RfC, is that GNG and SNG are complete alternatives." It sounds like the RfC he was talking about was Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_57#Rewritten_notability_guideline, a complete rewrite of the whole guideline which was withdrawn after 4 opposes. Fairly standard wikilawyering to try to generalize to say that means there is consensus opposed to a specific change he included in that rewrite. However, there was a very specific RfC question that saw a lot of participation a few years back: Wikipedia:Notability/RFC:compromise. The wording of the relevant proposal was:

Proposal: Specific notability guidelines such as WP:MUSIC and WP:Notability (people) override the general notability guideline, WP:N in areas where specific notability guidelines are applicable. That is, if an article on a topic covered by a specific notability guideline passes WP:N but does not pass the specific notability guideline in question, the topic is deemed not notable. Similarly, if an article on a topic covered by a specific notability guideline passes that specific notability guideline in question but does not pass WP:N, the topic is deemed notable.

The overwhelming consensus was opposed tho that idea that an SNG can override the GNG. Only 19% of participants supported the idea. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:51, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

(1) That discussion took place more than 7 years ago, when notability was recently introduced and in a state of flux. It is very unlikely to be relevant today as it was too long ago (consensus can change) and there have been too many discussions, particularly at the SNG themselves, such as WP:NGEO, since then. I could also point you to a far more recent RfC at WT:42 that roundly rejected that proposition. (2) Consensus isn't a majority vote. It is determined by weighing the relative merits of arguments. It makes no difference whether it was 19% or 90%. (3) Invoking discussions that are ancient history and invoking raw numbers of voters are standard wikilawyering. James500 (talk) 15:29, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
(1) You repeatedly make definitive statements about what is and what is not, making vague references to past discussions and absolute declarations of what there is and is not consensus for. Above you claimed "Consensus, reflected in the wording of N and the last RfC, is that GNG and SNG are complete alternatives." When asked what RfC, you pointed to this, a complete rewrite that was withdrawn after 4 opposes. Trying to say that the rejection of a total rewrite is consensus about the question of whether SNGs can override the GNG is ridiculous. Now you're saying "I could also point you to a far more recent RfC at WT:42 that roundly rejected that proposition." Well ok then. Right now there are no RfCs at WT:42, so I looked through the archives. The only one I see is this one on whether the page should be an information page or an essay. In that RfC there was no consensus to change the page type. ...is that what you're referring to as "roundly reject[ing] that proposition" about SNGs and GNG?? Or did you mean to say "There have been, at some point, some people who had a local discussion on the talk page of a user essay and they said some things that are like what I'm saying now"? (i.e. not an RfC but some local discussion with nowhere close to the awareness and participation of e.g. that "compromise" RfC, which, old as it may be, we would have no reason to think is incorrect without another similar thread showing that consensus has changed). If you want your absolute declarations based on past RfCs/consensus to have credibility, you really need to start linking. (2) ... (3) .... — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:12, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It is not ridiculous when the fact that the rewrite sought to subordinate SNGs to GNGs was a reason why it was rejected, repeatedly given in the rejection rationales. Likewise, at the RfC at WT:42, the issue was whether the page accurately reflected the notability guidelines that it was supposed to summarise. The consensus was that it did not, that its attempted subordination of SNG to GNG was a reason for that, and that there was thus no consensus for the information page template to remain. That RfC consensus necessarily involved a finding that SNG were not subordinate to GNG. And of course the consensus at NGEO is the exact opposite of what you are saying now. The RfC you have pointed to is too old to be relevant. On top of that, you are assessing consensus incorrectly (by counting numbers alone). And the terms of the RfC are not capable of supporting the argument you advance. That proposal sought to subordinate GNG (and the rest of N as well) to SNG. But I have not argued that. All I have argued is that SNG are not subordinate to GNG. The most obvious problem with that proposal is the sentence that reads "That is, if an article on a topic covered by a specific notability guideline passes WP:N but does not pass the specific notability guideline in question, the topic is deemed not notable." I have not argued that there is consensus for that proposition, in the absence of express words in the SNG (whereas under that proposal express words word not have been required eg if the SNG said "A is notable if X" without further explanation, under that proposal it would be construed to mean "A is notable if and only if X" (making GNG irrelevant) whereas consensus is to read it as "A is notable if either X or it satisfies GNG"), indeed, the wording of N is incompatible with that proposition. Also that proposal is concerned with the relationship between N and SNG, not the relationship between GNG and SNG. Accordingly the failure of that proposal proves nothing about a scenario to which it does not relate. And why did you not echo notify User:Diego Moya who agrees with me above when you sent notifications to everyone who disagrees? James500 (talk) 20:56, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
You pointed to RfCs as definitive proof, I pointed out that anybody who actually clicks on them can see they're very clearly not, but you're staying the course. So I guess what else can be said here? I forget the term for that tactic large corporations are sometimes said to use where they continuously throw procedural and rhetorical hurdles of wildly varying merit and relevance at a lawsuit to delay it for so long the other side runs out of funds/time/energy... But it's true I should've pinged Diego Moya - I scanned for people who mentioned the RfC above and it looks like he should've been in there instead of Masem. Oh well. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 05:06, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Back to discussion of the proposed text for Example 3

The most recent proposed text (to be added to the Examples) is:

For ordinary sports events and games, a WP:ROUTINE newspaper account comparable to those typically published for such events, is not significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about the event or game. Similarly, WP:ROUTINE coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of a stand-alone article about individual athletes. Similar concepts apply to typical coverage of daily stock-market activity, and mention of individual stocks in such coverage, etc.

(Fellow editors, feel free to tinker with the wording, but please do so by posting your revised wording at the end of the !votes so far, so it's clear which exact wording each editor was commenting on.) EEng (talk) 04:17, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

  • Support because, when added to the two examples already present, it helps editors understand that volume of coverage isn't all that matters. EEng (talk) 04:17, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I prefer a shorter, easier-to-grasp example be used. The list is only intended to give an idea of what is considered to be significant coverage. Having long, detailed examples gives the impression that the list is intended to be exhaustive. isaacl (talk) 04:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Tentative Support - Thinking about it, I don't love the stock market example, though. It's just less broadly familiar to people than sports coverage and thus potentially confusing. It also doesn't seem necessary because extra examples seem to be making up for my bigger point: if we're going to give an example of routine coverage, routine coverage should be mentioned in the sentence about "significant coverage" that we're giving examples of in the first place. This example of routine coverage would then have more context (and would help explain the concept). So, for example "Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:" followed by the two existing examples and the above (preferably without the stock market example). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 05:16, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Looking back our new "third example" did balloon very quickly. Let's cut it back (including removing some of the text Cbl added, the purpose of which I don't quite understand -- Cbl, feel free to explain why it's needed), and work in Rh's change to the introductory text:

Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:
  • The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial.
  • Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton[1], that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
  • A WP:ROUTINE newspaper account of an ordinary sports event, comparable to those typically published for such events, is not significant coverage of the event or the people or places involved.

References

  1. ^ Martin Walker (1992-01-06). "Tough love child of Kennedy". The Guardian.

In particular, I removed Cbl's text about "for the creation of a standalone article"; I think that's trying to clarify that ROUTINE coverage can be used for article content even if not for notability, but that's already implicit in the fact that this whole discussion of significant coverage is clearly for notability purposes only, not for limiting article content.

New thoughts? EEng (talk) 07:32, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

  • Support - I did make a change though. The example said "...is not significant coverage of the event or its participants" then had a second sentence about passing mentions of athletes, statistics, etc. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but it seems confusing to include its participants and then list athletes separate (as though they aren't participants). Maybe I misunderstand some part of the intent there, in which case, of course, change what I wrote, but I don't think the second sentence is even necessary if we change the first to just say "...is not significant coverage of the event or the people or places involved." Curious what others think, though. Note that I would support the above with or without my edits, though. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm fine with that. EEng (talk) 18:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Works for me. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:30, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Pinging Cbl62 to make sure I haven't overpruned something he feels is important. EEng (talk) 20:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • My proposed language was intended to ensure that we are simply memorializing existing policy rather than expanding it or creating new policy. The two relevant guidelines are:
* Events. WP:ROUTINE is a subpart of the guideline on notability of events. This has been applied universally and strictly in the sports context to mean that sports coverage is not significant coverage to create articles on individual sporting events unless there is something of truly enduring historic significance about the game.
* Athletes. WP:NSPORTS is the SNG for athletes. It does not bar the use of sports coverage (most of which is game coverage) to establish notability of athletes. It does, however, provide that they are notablie "if they have been the subject of non-trivial media coverage beyond merely a repeating of their statistics, mentions in game summaries, or other WP:ROUTINE coverage." If expanded in the manner suggested, game coverage could not be used at all to establish athlete notability. The rough working rule I operate under is that passing references of athletes in sports coverage aren't enough, but sometimes game coverage includes detailed coverage of an athlete's unusual accomplishments, and that type of detailed coverage absolutely can and should be considered in assessing whether an athlete should have a stand-alone article. Eliminating game coverage as an entire class would be a drastic and IMO unwarranted change in the notability standards for athletes. Such a change should not be made without full input from all relevant sporting wiki-projects. Accordingly, my proposed language was intended to keep the reference to a restatement of existing policy.
I have long worried about athletes being held to a disparate, stricter standard than other persons, such as entertainers and businessman. A rule stating that coverage of sporting events can't be used to establish athlete notability would be akin to a rule that coverage of TV shows and films can't be used to establish notability of entertainers, or that coverage of mergers and acquisitions can't be used to establish the notability of businessmen. The rule for notability of persons under GNG should not be to exclude wholesale certain types of coverage, thus creating a major bias against a particular class of persons, but rather to focus on the depth and detail in the coverage of a person. If a person has received non-trivial coverage in multiple, reliable, and independent sources, that is what matters. Excluding game coverage altogether, even where it includes detailed coverage of a particular athlete, is fundamentally inconsistent with GNG and our broader notability principles. Cbl62 (talk) 20:52, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
My GOD you are FAST! Can your concerns be addressed by tinkering with the wording (in a new copy here below)? EEng (talk) 20:58, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@Masem: I thought the language proposed above was reasonable in restating existing policy. Here it is again with some minor tweaking:
For ordinary sports events and games, WP:ROUTINE newspaper accounts comparable to those typically published for such events, is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of stand-alone articles about individual games. Similarly, routine, non-detailed coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of stand-alone articles about individual athletes. Cbl62 (talk) 21:10, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
That I think is fine with tweaks. --MASEM (t) 22:55, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Speaking as someone who spends more than half his wiki-time editing sports-related articles, I am much more sanguine than Cbl62 about better describing the meaning of WP:ROUTINE coverage in the context of ordinary post-game coverage. More than once in the past 5 years, I have seen industrious sports editors stitch together three or four one-sentence to one-paragraph mentions of athletes in post-game articles and then vociferously claim the athlete was "notable" per GNG. I have also seen sports editors find a one-sentence mention of a so-called "rivalry" in a ROUTINE post-game wire service article and then conflate that into notability for the "rivalry" game series. I would suggest that the solution is to better define what is ROUTINE and what is "significant" per GNG and provide better examples of both at WP:GNG and WP:EVENT. IMO, the problem has not been excluding clearly notable athletes and coaches, but finding ever more aggressive ways of including non-notable athletes and coaches by wiki-lawyering widely varied meanings and standards for "routine" and "significant" coverage based on the wildly subjective opinions of different AfD participants. Providing more and better examples of "routine" and "significant" coverage would go a long way to creating a more consistent standard of notability for our athlete and coach biographies and other sports-related articles. Frankly, it's long overdue. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:11, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • "Similarly, routine, non-detailed coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.)" - This verbiage is far too similar to the existing vaguely phrased standard, which continues to be treated as a threshold minimum standard of coverage for athlete notability. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard AfD participants state that absolutely minimal coverage of an athlete in ROUTINE post-game coverage is evidence of notability because it exceeds a "box score". It needs to be tighter, and I believe the best way to proceed is to provide more concrete examples of "routine" and "significant" coverage rather than re-write the same generalities we already have. A three-sentence mention of a wide receiver's performance in game, including a quote from the coach or athlete, and mentions of the athlete's class, age and hometown, as well as recounting his game performance statistics, may still be absolutely ROUTINE, but that is the sort of coverage upon which the notability of many athlete bios are built. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:23, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
* Dirtlawyer and I agree in most cases and disagree in other cases as to how GNG should be read for athletes. This is probably not the best forum to rewrite policy on athlete notability. Nor do I think that was the intention. If the discussion is going to veer in the direction of rewriting policy, the discussion needs to be much broader and all applicable projects notified. Cbl62 (talk) 22:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm only involved in couple of the sports projects; in those ones, I haven't seen an issue with a truly unusual or exceptional event being treated as non-notable due to game coverage only. That being said, nor can I recall an example where such an event did not garner additional coverage. Anything exceptional will typically have coverage by columnists that qualifies as significant coverage. Thus I'm not too worried about trying to be exhaustive in an example on this page. I would prefer working out all the details either in the section on "Events", or on the referenced page regarding routine coverage. isaacl (talk) 21:15, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Strongest possible oppose of EEng's version of 07:32, 1 December 2015 (UTC) and anything like it. The introduction of any concept of routine coverage into GNG is a terrible idea for many reasons. Nor do I think it a good thing to discuss the wording of possible changes when the very concept lacks consensus and clearly isn't going to achieve consensus. But, leaving that aside, the wording of the proposed changed is totally unsatisfactory even in its own terms. It does not provide any definition whatsoever of "routine". Much less does it do what it needs to do, which is to provide a definition that is restrictive or exhaustive in the sense of providing a clear limit or boundary for what is considered "routine", a bright line to prevent that particular envelope being pushed. The example is hopeless. It gives no assistance whatsoever to determining what is routine outside the particular case to which it relates. It has no relevance to anything other than sports events. (Thus it is of no use outside an SNG.) It is quite vague even in that context (ordinary, typical, comparable?) We are not even given an example of coverage (preferably periodical, and especially newspaper coverage) that is not routine. This is manna for deletionist wikilawyers. They can now indiscriminately insist that all periodical coverage whatsoever, and perhaps all other coverage, is routine. And they can do this in the middle of the editor retention emergency, which is being caused by that kind of thing. James500 (talk) 22:53, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Back to discussion of the proposed text for Example 3 (2)

Incorporating Cbl's tweaked third example (above), the text would now read:

Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:
  • The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial.
  • Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton[1], that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
  • For ordinary sports events and games, WP:ROUTINE newspaper accounts comparable to those typically published for such events, is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of stand-alone articles about individual games. Similarly, routine, non-detailed coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not considered to be significant coverage for the creation of stand-alone articles about individual athletes.

References

Cbl62, I don't understand why we need to keep repeating considered to be significant coverage for the creation of stand-alone articles. Isn't this entire significant coverage bullet about "for the creation of stand-alone articles"? Why does it need to be said in this one example? Also, why do we need considered to be? Can't we just say, "is not significant coverage of individual games", and "is not significant coverage of individual athletes"? It would cut a lot of verbiage.

EEng (talk) 03:40, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

No objection to your proposed pruning. Cbl62 (talk) 03:44, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Well, this is going swimmingly:

Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:
  • The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial.
  • Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton[1], that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
  • For ordinary sports events and games, WP:ROUTINE newspaper accounts comparable to those typically published for such events, is not significant coverage of individual games. Similarly, routine, non-detailed coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not significant coverage of individual athletes.

EEng (talk) 03:51, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

  • Oppose the introductory language changing the core language of GNG as follows: Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject This will open a huge can of worms as deletionists argue that all game coverage (perhaps even all sports coverage) is "routine" and therefore not sufficient coverage. Cbl62 (talk) 05:27, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
OK, don't everyone panic all at once. Rhododendrites, in the interests of getting a useful third example into the text, can you give up your Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it Routine coverage and trivial mentions do not constitute significant coverage, but the subject change? EEng (talk) 05:48, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
The "Events" section on this page states For example, routine news coverage such as press releases, public announcements, sports coverage, and tabloid journalism is not significant coverage. So I don't see any new language being introduced that will result in new deletions, and has been mentioned above, there is in practice no issue with establishing sufficient significant coverage with Wikipedia's current sports content. Nonetheless, I really think a simpler example will better match the other two examples, which are much shorter. isaacl (talk) 06:55, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
(1) Actually the deletionists will go much further than Cbl62 suggests. They will argue, for example, that obituaries in the New York Times (presently regarded as a 'gold standard' source) are routine because the NYT publishes them regularly and in large numbers (I assume they are published every day, which is certain to result in them being labelled 'routine'). [One does already hear them making ludicrous comments to the effect that a person isn't notable for having died, whereas the obituaries are in fact published because the person was notable during their life. And we can expect more of that kind of nonsense under the proposed change.] No periodical coverage whatsoever would be safe. Even without the introductory language, the example alone will probably produce that effect. (2) Since the "Events" section only presently applies to events, the proposed change clearly would introduce new language with respect to other topics, and presumably would result in new deletions of topics other than events. Certainly we will face indiscriminate mass nominations of such topics the moment it is introduced. [Note: I typed this answer out earlier but I failed to add it by accident.] James500 (talk) 21:35, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Query - @EEng and Cbl62: From where was this verbiage drawn: "e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc."? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 05:09, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It is a paraphrase of the language used in WP:NCOLLATH. Cbl62 (talk) 05:27, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
@Cbl62: Regarding '...argue that all game coverage (perhaps even all sports coverage) is "routine" and therefore not sufficient coverage.' It seems like if we're going to use sports as an example, there would be a way to retain the mention of routine coverage in the main line but make it clear with the example. The following alternative is a response to this as well as in response to a separate concern that the third example is more complex and broad than the other two (e.g. example 1 is a specific book, example 2 is a specific article, example 3 is a set). What about getting a little more specific? Note that the two links here are for the sake of including examples -- I chose them pretty arbitrarily:
"A routine news story about an ordinary sports event which covers the game in an unexceptional way is not significant coverage of that game.(link) Similarly, unexceptional coverage of athletes in routine articles or statistics compilations is not significant coverage of that athlete.(link)."
That said, however, and in response to EEng, as I said above, I would support adding an example of routine coverage here even without my proposed changes to the main text or example text -- but I think changing the main bullet is inevitable and we would save time and effort in the long run by addressing it now (i.e. I think it's asking for problems not to explicitly mention routine outside of the example). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:32, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Well, since Cbl finds the "main bullet" change concerning (and note that's a change to the policy text itself, rather than just the addition of an example) I appreciate your letting it go, at least for now, so that we can focus on this third example.
As to that third "example", the idea of substituting something concrete for the current abstraction seems like a good one. And maybe it doesn't need to be sports, if that's part of the hangup. Either way... any ideas, anyone? EEng (talk) 15:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose I am opposed to the introduction of "routine" as a concept because this is not our actual policy. There are numerous events which are quite routine but we cover them assiduously. These include sporting events, elections and weather, which are all to be regularly found on the main page in WP:ITN and WP:FA. Recent examples include United States presidential election, 1880, Typhoon Gay, 2015 Davis Cup, 103rd Grey Cup, &c. What people seem to be striving for here is a concept of importance but that won't fly either because most of the topics we cover are not especially important. There are some folk who would toss out anything that isn't vital. That might have been a good idea at the outset but we're long past that point now. Wikipedia now has 5 million articles and counting. Please deal with it. Andrew D. (talk) 17:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Andrew, I think you're missing the point entirely: "routine" is a term of art on Wikipedia, it has a long-standing history in AfD practice and the notability guidelines, and it's not going away. Flatly opposing the concept will get you nowhere; arguing over its proper application is an open question. Using your examples above, "routinely" scheduled events (elections, major sporting events, etc.) are not the same as WP:ROUTINE coverage of events. Cheers. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:46, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm used to people citing WP:MILL at AfD but that's an essay and so counts for little. I don't recall WP:ROUTINE being cited to the same extent and checked. It has been cited 226 times at AfD in six years, which isn't much. The first case I come to is Oyster Run where it does not seem to have been decisive. Browsing the list, I see one I recognise: List of bespectacled baseball players and again that's a keeper. No, I stand by my !vote and oppose any extension of this concept as contrary to our actual and general practise. Andrew D. (talk) 19:24, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Possible Example 4/Obituaries

  • How about, as a third example, something to the effect that an obituary in the New York Times is plainly significant coverage of a person, but not necessarily significant coverage of their death considered as a separate topic? I could live with that. James500 (talk) 15:53, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
That's actually an interesting idea, though it's complicated by the fact that an obituary doesn't necessarily count as significant coverage for that person, much less his/her death specifically. Can we call that Example 4?
For Example 3, I was hoping we could stay with something that illustrates that sheer bulk (sentence vs. book) isn't the only criterion. Also, I like someone's suggestion of concrete examples instead of abstract statements. EEng (talk) 16:16, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
We should be careful on the obit part, or at least clarify the difference between the regular pages of obits in a newspaper, and the type of obits that the NYTimes writes for important people ala [10]. I'd further hesitate that there may be a case where an article is credited about a person on the weight of one or more such obits like the linked article where there is a clear vector for potential expansion if someone does the ground work in finding sources. As long as we're clear that we are considering the daily obit page of a newspaper, in contrast to these more in-depth obits for important people, that's good. --MASEM (t) 16:27, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
A key distinction is between (1) true obituaries (e.g., this and this), over which a major metropolitan daily typically assigns a reporter and exercises editorial control, and (2) paid death notices (e.g., this) or mere republications of same by local newspapers (e.g., this and this). The former is significant coverage. The latter is not. Of course, there is a lot of gray in between the extremes where reasonable minds may differ as to how significant the coverage is. Cbl62 (talk) 17:25, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
I share Cbl's concerns regarding "obituaries," which may vary from 1,500-word life and career summaries in The New York Times which are professionally researched, sourced and edited -- sometimes well in advance of the anticipated death of notable persons -- to the typical one-paragraph death notices found in The Delta Catfish Wrapper, which usually mention surviving family, funeral arrangements and sending charitable contributions in lieu of flowers. Such coverage may or may not be significant depending on the substance and detail provided. The problem of paid-for obituaries is a distinctly separate problem: they are a form of paid advertising, and should be given very little or no weight in determining notability. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:46, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • To understand why I made the suggestion at the top of this thread, you probably need to read this comment, which I failed to add earlier by accident: [11]. I was primarily concerned to give an extreme example of newspaper coverage that should plainly not be attacked as routine, not to get into a debate over which obituaries are significant. James500 (talk) 21:54, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Continue discussion of Example 4/Obits here

Back to discussion of the proposed text for Example 3 (3)

The text now reads:

Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it need not be the main topic of the source material. Examples:
  • The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial.
  • Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton[1], that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
  • For ordinary sports events and games, WP:ROUTINE newspaper accounts comparable to those typically published for such events, is not significant coverage of individual games. Similarly, routine, non-detailed coverage of athletes (e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.) is not significant coverage of individual athletes.
  • A possible Example 4 re obituaries, under discussion in previous sectiion

Please jump back two sections to see the current concerns re the sports example. Let's keep this rolling. EEng (talk) 19:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Collapse personal attack
  • Oppose EEng seems to be trying to wear people down by endless iteration. Let's not keep this rolling; let's kill it completely. The proposed text is totally unacceptable because it would tend to disqualify routine sporting events such as The Boat Race 1993 which are not just accepted on Wikipedia but are featured. This is clearly wishful thinking rather than an accurate summary of our established and accepted practise. Prescriptive law-making is not the way we do this - see WP:NOTLAW, "the written rules themselves do not set accepted practice. Rather, they document already existing community consensus regarding what should be accepted and what should be rejected." Andrew D. (talk) 19:33, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
(ec) Pardon me? A number of editors have spent a lot of time trying to improve the presentation of the notability policy, without changing its meaning by adding examples. If you'd read the discussion to this point, which you clearly haven't, you'd see that the most recent suggestions are to (a) replace the sports context with something completely different and/or (b) swap in a specific example instead of the current abstract statement. No one's trying to kill your precious boat races, so if you want to help you should suggest something for (a) or (b), or make a change to the wording of the current text, so as to address your concern. EEng (talk) 19:55, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
The point at issue here is the paragraph about routine coverage. That's not an example, it tries to introduce a new principle to the idea of notability. A list of examples is not the place to do this. I don't think the concept belongs here at all. Notability is the idea that something has been noticed. What you're pushing here is the idea that, even though something has been noticed, we still shouldn't have it. That's some other idea, best conveyed by shortcuts such as WP:TOOMUCH, WP:NOTSTATBOOK, WP:NOTNEWSPAPER. It doesn't belong here. Andrew D. (talk) 21:23, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm not "pushing" anything, Mr. Too-Much-In-A-Hurry-To-Get-His-Facts-Straight. I've just been laying out current version of the proposal (incorporating changes suggested since last time) periodically, to avoid confusion over what's being discussed. I didn't suggest or write this third example -- others did. So take your "EEng seems to be trying to wear people down by endless iteration" nonsense and go soak your head. EEng (talk) 21:34, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Andrew, in broad brush strokes, I agree that notability is based on the premise that "something has been noticed," but the concept as embodied in the guidelines is more nuanced and more detailed, and the general principle is subject to various caveats. To elaborate, notability means not only "something has been noticed," but that it has been noticed in the right places, and that notice has been documented in particular forms.
EEng, if we need to slow down to get Andrew over this hump, that's okay. Or at least make sure that Andrew understands what we're actually talking about, in particular the circumstances to which WP:ROUTINE is supposed to apply. If we can't agree after that exercise so be it, but Andrew does deserve to understand what we are really trying to do here. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 22:28, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm all for that, but his "pushing" comment pissed me off. Again, I do wonder whether we should (a) shift the example to a topic area other than sports, and/or (b) give an actual example, as IBM and Clinton examples are. Dirtlawyer1, I leave it to you to decide when salvaging the current Example 3 text is hopeless, and (a)/(b) should be done. EEng (talk) 00:16, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • There's clearly a distinction between, say, the reporting associated with any specific non-playoff American football game, and the reporting associated with the Super Bowl, though both can be considered routine in that they happen like clockwork. We clearly have established practice that separate the two, but it's not readily documented, and we need to find a way to make that clear. Only to offer the idea on brainstorming: to me the scale of ROUTINE is to imply things that happen on a daily or weekly basis, which clearly make most non-playoff games in most sports unremarkable but the championship rounds notable. Another way to think about this is that routine coverage is the type that is "fill in the blanks", where repeated stories all hit the same points, so things like regular games, sports stat books when talking about players, stock market performances on a day-to-day basis, death notices, and so forth. I don't know if these are good distinguishing things, but I feel that defined what is "routine" will be near impossible but we can define what is outside the grey area as well, but for that, we also might need a seperate guideline page. What I will say is that this does start dropping out of considering that WP is not a source of indiscriminate information, and that might help to define what "routine" should be better. --MASEM (t) 19:48, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure about The Boat Race, but the other examples you cited above have non-routine coverage, and so remain unaffected by current practice regarding coverage of sport seasons with routine games. isaacl (talk) 19:51, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Andrew, you're a smart guy: slow down, and re-read what I wrote above. You are hopelessy confusing two different things. "Routine coverage" is a Wikipedia term of art, referenced by WP:ROUTINE, that refers to the typical day-after coverage of daily news events (see, e.g., WP:NOTNEWS). It does not refer to the routinely scheduled events themselves, such as sports events; otherwise, regularly scheduled Super Bowls and FIFA World Cup championships would be treated as "routine" when they clearly are not. Full-length books have been written about the Super Bowl, World Cup, and, yes, the Boat Race. Major events like these are notable beyond any doubt per GNG; they not only receive routine day-after coverage in newspapers and other media, they are the subject of feature articles, histories and retrospectives weeks months, and even years after the fact. None of that constitutes routine coverage per WP:ROUTINE. Without WP:ROUTINE, every high school football championship in America, and every regular season MLB baseball game, NBA basketball game, NFL football game, NHL hockey game and NCAA Division I college football game would be "notable" and eligible for a stand-alone article. You need to wrap your head around what WP:ROUTINE is and is not, because you clearly do not fully understand what it is. It is most certainly not understood to exclude a major annual sporting event such as the Boat Race. Relax. See also WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE, which conceptually overlaps and complements WP:ROUTINE, and suggests that non-routine coverage is that which exceeds the typical news cycle. If a news event is still getting in-depth coverage in a week after it happened, it's probably notable; if its getting non-trivial coverage one year after the fact, it's almost certainly notable. It's the difference between the prime minister receiving front-page coverage of today's campaign speech (speech probably not notable), and the media still discussing Churchill's "some form of Gestapo" gaffe 70 years after the 1945 general election (notable beyond all doubt). Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:06, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • EEng seems to be trying to wear people down by endless iteration - a gross assumption of bad faith. what EEng is doing is trying to keep this large thread focused on particular tasks based on the directions it moves. Talking about proposed wording is always messy, so it's helpful when someone tries to prevent it from becoming too diffuse or to splinter off on too many tangents. We'll see if it succeeds, but it's most definitely not "wearing people down". If anything, it's refusing to let people wear down the conversation. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 05:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Problem - Having addressed Andrew's concerns (hopefully), I have one of my own. I think the insertion of these examples is a horrible idea: "(e.g., passing mentions in game coverage, statistical compilations, box scores, etc.)". These were based on a couple included in single NSPORTS specific notability guideline for college sports (WP:NCOLLATH, and paraphrased and expanded by Cbl62. No other sport-specific SNG utilizes anything resembling these examples. While these examples were clearly intended to be the most trivial and easily disqualified examples of "routine" coverage that no one should ever dispute as "significant". Instead, in college sports-related-AfDs, some editors often treat these clearly trivial examples of routine coverage as the minimum threshold -- if coverage exceed a box score, list of scores, list of statistics, then it is "significant". That was never intended, but that has become the oft-heard argument. By including these trivial examples of routine coverage in GNG, we will likely be dumbing down the standard for all athletes in all sports, and by implication all other subjects as well. We need to either (a) omit these examples entirely, or (b) we need to include examples of "routine coverage" that exceed these trivial examples so that editors seeking guidance will understand that "routine coverage" may mean substantially more than a "box score" or a "passing mention." This was why I raised my original concern above; hopefully, I have articulated it better on this attempt. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
The examples given should be clear examples. In the world of GNG, whether we're talking about obituaries or sports coverage, there are clear examples at either end of the spectrum. In between, there is a lot of gray area. We can prescribe clear examples, but in the gray area, judgment must be applied on a case-by-case basis to determine whether GNG is satisfied. Trying to define large swaths of sports coverage as routine and insignificant is a dangerous and ill-advised course. There is no general rule that regular daily coverage of entertainment, business, local government, or other spheres of human activty do not constitute significant coverage. Nor should there be such a rule for sports coverage. Again, we can prescribe clear cases, but GNG requires reasonable minds to weigh and balance the coverage in the vast gray area. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed that process works well. Cbl62 (talk) 21:00, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Then it should be clarified by footnote or otherwise that the examples represent clear failures to demonstrate significant coverage, and they should not be treated as threshold examples which when minimally exceeded constitute "significant coverage"; if we are unable to clarify this point, I must oppose the inclusion of these examples. I have witnessed how these examples of trivial coverage are often misused in real-life AfDs for college sports-related subjects, and I am adamantly opposed to extending that potential misuse to every other sports topic, and generally throughout all notability discussions that reference WP:GNG and WP:ROUTINE. I hope you understand this point and can accept it. We should not be watering down existing standards by accident. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 22:17, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose and end this discussion per Andrew Davison, all the other editors who have criticised this and the arguments that I have made above. At the end of the day, it is clear that the exclusion of 'routine coverage' from GNG (outside cases provided for by SNG) has no prospect of achieving consensus. [I'm not sure if Andrew's example of the Boat Race is right but I can think of a better one. I assume that the FA cup final is not an "ordinary" game for the purpose of the example (though mega-deletionists might try to argue that it is at AfD because its not international) but ... what about the semi-finals? And what about the quarter-finals? And what about the earlier rounds? It is all very vague.] James500 (talk) 22:37, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I chose an Oxbridge boat race as an example because it's an event that I often watch myself but it wasn't long ago that we didn't have a page for each annual race - there was just a single page for the overall history. I was thinking of starting a page about a recent race but didn't get around to it. Since then, TRM has started cranking out such pages and has made a good job of it, getting them up the FA level. For another example, I was looking at the sports pages of the evening paper on the way home. There was some continuing coverage of the Fury vs Klitschko fight - a recent event that I hadn't noticed before. A bit of hunting soon turns up a stub about the event – Wladimir Klitschko vs. Tyson Fury. Is this routine or not? One could argue it either way and I don't think there's any clear policy statement that we can or should make about this, especially in the middle of a different guideline. Andrew D. (talk) 23:09, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Andrew, in all honesty I don't have a clue. about the fight. I haven't followed boxing in years, and I don't think I've scratched a single boxing article in 7 years on wiki. That said, I would suggest that the notability of the fight in question will probably turn on (1) WP:EVENT, (2) WP:GNG, (3) WP:NOTNEWS, (4) WP:ROUTINE, and (5) WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE. I do note the existence of a lot of individual fights listed on the Template:Muhammad Ali and Template:Mike Tyson navboxes. Are all of those individual fights notable? I don't know, but I bet most, if not all of the heavyweight championship fights are.
  • As for the Boat Race, James, the series has been covered in so many feature article retrospectives in The Times and other major British newspapers that all of the modern editions are almost certainly notable. Andrew would have a better sense of the nature of the coverage of the old-timey races than I do, but I'm under the impression the anual races got a fair amount of coverage back in the day, too, given the Oxford-vs.-Cambridge rivalry angle. Again, I'm not an expert. That said, the World Series and the Super Bowl are not "international," but they are undoubtedly notable. I've never seen this "international coverage" criteria you mention, although I would personally give a good deal more benefit of the doubt to an Australian subject who received coverage in the States, or an American subject who received coverage down under. I think that intangible is inherent in the concept of notability: to borrow Andrew's language above, the more widely "noticed" a subject is, the more likely it is to be notable. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:15, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
I really think that we need to consider the option of creating a separate guideline on understanding what is and isn't routine, knowing there is no bright line to distinguish this, where we can populate examples either side, and making sure it is clear that this only is about the determination of notability and that routine reporting is not disqualified as being used for reliable sourcing otherwise. --MASEM (t) 00:35, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
You are very wise. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:37, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
Please ping me if you come up with a proposal. Cbl62 (talk) 03:01, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose For avoidance of doubt, I oppose example 3(3) in its entirety. ROUTINE is a different concept from NOTABILITY and so belongs on a different page, as Masem says. Examples such as The Boat Race 1993 indicate that we do host such content and so there is no clear, simple guideline which we can state for this. The Notability guideline has existed for quite some time without the proposed para and the concept is fairly clear. Per WP:TOOMUCH, WP:TLDR and WP:CREEP, we should not make such additions. Andrew D. (talk) 08:14, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
    • Let me clear that my intent on a separate page is to explain how routine sourcing impacts the accessment of notability for a topic, but leaving what the definition of "routine" as fuzzy and broad since it is impossible to be concise in a workable definition. Instead, the page would feature a list of examples what is clearly accepts as routine, and what is clearly accepted as non-routine, as it pertains to understanding notability. Assuming consensus for that page, that would subsequently be linked off this guideline. --MASEM (t) 15:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. WP:ROUTINE is a deletionist essay, not mainstream policy, and it should not be made into policy. We need more articles, not fewer, and "routine" coverage is perfectly valid, if significant. There's no rule saying that topics have to be "unique" or "unusual"...if there was, almost everything I've done here would be gone. --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 13:34, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
    • Actually WP:IINFO is policy that says we should avoid indiscriminate information. Full-fledged coverage of topics that are not "unique" or "unusual" verves into indiscriminate coverage. Mind you, I agree that there is a huge grey area of what is the difference between routine and what is not, but it is important to recognize this is coming from policy. --MASEM (t) 15:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
    "Indiscriminate" does not have an accepted definition other than the four cases listed at IINFO (in-universe fiction, lyrics, statistics without context and too detailed software logs); more often than not IINFO is used at deletion discussions as synonymous with "I don't like it". There certainly isn't consensus that being "unique or unusual" is a requirement for a topic to be accepted (we have articles about water and sky and people, which are fairly usual topics).
    IINFO was born to fight random collections of miscellany such as "in popular culture" and "characters in Y" and "list of X" (where X is not well defined). Structured collections with items of the same kind do not fall under the spirit of what we all agree is indiscriminate. Diego (talk) 16:19, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
    Those examples are not what I would consider "usual", because they describe very unique things - unusual is not equal to rarity/scarcity here. Its definitely true that IINFO is not a bright line test, but keep in mind examples at WP:NOT are not the only cases, those are just the only well-defined cases. Same thing would be true of what I propose for a separate ROUTINE page - we can only define this by what is known to be acceptable and not acceptable, leaving grey areas to be discussed when they come up (and hopefully added to be an ongoing "casebook" to help future discussion). --MASEM (t) 16:26, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Support in principle - As an experienced AfD participant, I strongly support the concept of including additional guidance on the meaning of "routine" (as outlined in the WP:ROUTINE guideline) in the form of examples of coverage that are clearly "significant" per GNG, and examples of coverage that are clearly "routine" and therefore not significant per GNG. This is exactly the sort of common sense guidance that our editors, article creators and AfD participants desperately need. WP:ROUTINE is not new and it should not be perceived as something threatening to entire classes of established articles. Having given this some thought overnight, I think the best way to proceed is to expand upon Masem's suggestion above: we should include five or six examples of routine coverage that are clearly not significant, and each example should be shown in the context of an actual linked newspaper article (via a current online newsite, Newspapers.com, or Wayback Machine). Conversely, we should also provide five or six examples of significant coverage that is clearly not routine; again, the examples should be shown in the context of actual linked newspaper articles. The examples should not be limited to, nor dominated by sports topics, and should include several topic areas where WP:ROUTINE commonly comes into play. As for the suggestion that WP:ROUTINE is a "deletionist essay," made above, I urge everyone to review the Wikipedia definitions of "policy," "guideline" and "essay," and absorb the relative authority and precedence of each form of guidance, per Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. Factually, WP:ROUTINE is already a part of our notability guidelines and it's not going away. What we are trying to do here is provide better guidance as its intended meaning and interpretations, and how it should be applied. Cheers. Dirtlawyer1 (talk)
    • The more I think about it, the more I think this separate page idea will be useful in a lot of areas. A common issue, for example, at NORG is restaurant reviews. A local paper is going to routinely go around and review a local business once a week or more which generally is not considered towards significance of the local restaurant (but would still be useful to source if the restaurant is notable by other means). On the other hand, things like Michelin stars, while "routine", are considered appropriate sources for significance towards notability. Don't ask me to define what the line is, but I can stake those two points on either side of the line and say those are representative of what we'd take as a routine source and a non-routine source in judging notability. --MASEM (t) 16:57, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • FWIW I started User:Masem/Routine for this separate page on routine coverage idea. Please feel free to add examples on either side of this "routine" fence, as a brainstorming phase, and don't worry about conflicting ideas yet. We can prune down later. --MASEM (t) 17:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Masem, I think you're blurring the line in the examples of your draft essay: it's not that the events are "routine" or routinely scheduled, it's that the events received routine coverage per WP:ROUTINE. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 03:42, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
  • @Dirtlawyer1: The one thing I want to try to make sure is clear is based on an example above: Let's take the Super Bowl for example. It happens every year, and there's regular coverage of it (including things like the half time show and the ads), that all could be considered "routine" if someone were being high specific on the word. But the fact that I would claim is that while you could argue the Super Bowl is a routine event, the coverage of it is far from routine as no other American football game gets the same amount of attention. This in part may be why there is some disagreement on what "routine" means since there are multiple meanings of the word that are nuanced in this case. --MASEM (t) 00:28, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
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