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RfC on change of name

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Should the term "notability" be replaced with the term "suitability" (as in "a suitable topic") or "eligibility" (as in "an eligible topic"), over a transitional period, in order to reduce newcomer confusion? During the three-month transitional period, the new term would be mentioned as an alternative. Then, it would replace the old term in policies and guidelines, and "notability" would be mentioned as an alternative. Mrfoogles (talk) 18:32, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Many prior discussions have occurred, but recently see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)#"Eligibility",_"Suitability",_or_"Admissibility"_instead_of_"Notability" and Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)/Archive_61#Describing_Notability_in_plain_English Mrfoogles (talk) 18:33, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

@Dronebogus, Sheriff U3, Jéské Couriano, and JPxG: Fixing pings. jlwoodwa (talk) 18:41, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: missed one. jlwoodwa (talk) 18:42, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Pinging previous discussion participants: @DroneBogus @WhatamIdoing @Sherriff U3, @Chaotic Enby @CMD @Jlwoodwa @Donald Albury @Aaron Liu @Masem @LightNightLights @Blueboar @BD2412 @Davidstewartharvey @Anomie @Shushugah @Jeské Couriano @GreenMeansGo Mrfoogles (talk) 18:37, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

@North8000 @Kusma @Enos733 @SmokeyJoe @Hydrangeans @TheDJ @Elemimele @Folly Mox @ActivelyDisinterested @Joe Roe @The Four Deuces @Shooterwalker @Alanscottwalker @jpxg @LaukkuTheGreit @Chetsford Mrfoogles (talk) 18:40, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Jump to "Discussion"

• Support suitability as nom. This change will be difficult, but in the words of @WhatamIdoing, 'the question is: Twenty years from now, do I want editors to still be explaining "Yes, I see you have a reliable source using the exact words 'Alice Author is a notable new author', but that doesn't mean she's WP:Notable according to Wikipedia"? My answer is no." With the transitional period this will be possible -- see a demo of what this would look like once completed and it would significantly improve newcomer experience and the experience of experienced editors at AFD. It's very easy to mistakenly argue an author is notable based on their achievements, but it is very difficult to mistakenly argue an author is "suitable" or "eligible" just because they have published so many books, without thinking to read the criteria. Similar to how French wikipedia changed the name of their AFD from essentially "Articles for deletion" to "Discussions of admissibility", which significantly helped there, this change would greatly improve the accessibility and maintainability of this encyclopedia, and despite changing something that has been around a long time, is worth doing. Mrfoogles (talk) 18:45, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  One other objection to this proposal has been arguments that WP:NOT is not included in notability, but still causes articles to be deleted for the encyclopedia, so "suitability" would not always guarantee an article. However, neither does notability now -- and I believe that having to clarify not all suitable topics will get an article due to minor factors is orders of magnitude better, if it comes up at all, than having to explain to every new editor why their subject is not notable. This argument, however, is why I support suitability over eligibility, as well as the fact that it sounds closer to notability and represents less of a change. Mrfoogles (talk) 18:51, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• I prefer "Criteria for Article Creation." At present, many editors type in WP:NOTABLE as an argument for keeping an article without explaining which part of the policy applies. TFD (talk) 18:53, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  That is a good alternative that I wouldn't object too.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:54, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  A separate page for that title makes sense, but notability in practice is only one of the criteria that is required. It is the wrong impression to say notability (relabeled as this CAC) is the only criteria. Masem (t) 18:58, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  What other criteria are there? TFD (talk) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @The Four Deuces: WP:NOT and WP:BLP1E, and there may be others I can't remember off the top of my head. QuicoleJR (talk) 20:30, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Aren't they just qualifications of WP:NOTABLE? For example BLP1E says that "Being in the news does not in itself mean that someone should be the subject of a Wikipedia article." WP:NOTABLE says, "If reliable sources cover a person only in the context of a single event, and if that person otherwise remains, and is likely to remain, a low-profile individual, we should generally avoid having a biographical article on that individual."

  Can you think of any article that WP:NOTABLE would allow creation, but some other policy would stop? TFD (talk) 14:22, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brian Thompson (businessman) is a good example where the person's bio just skimmed the bare bones for significant coverage from WP:N (including events outside of his death), but ultimate failed BLP1E, or more specifically BLPVICTIM. WP:N can allude to BLP, but the specifics of where BLP can fail should be at BLP, not spelled out at WP:N. Masem (t) 14:33, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  BLP1E seems to be a specific set of cases supplemental to Sustained that is common enough to warrant its own section on another page combined with WP:Not. (quoting myself). As TFD specifically mentioned, that is part of WP:N. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:06, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  The closing administrator wrote, "the onus is therefore on those in favor of keeping the article to demonstrate the notability of the victim independent of the crime. Very few people have even attempted to do so here. Arguments that assume that any CEO of a big company is notable are without basis in our guidelines or practices."

  Most of the keep owners were unaware of the contents of the notability policy and therefore voted keep because by their definition he was notable. The other argument was sufficient coverage in reliable sources which would have been a valid argument if it were true.

  Note also that the AfD was closed as keep, due to the large numbers of keep votes. It's only because the final administrator was exceptionally qualified that it was deleted. But lots of articles, including biographies, of non-notable subjects survive AfDs.

  By calling the policy Notability, we are encouraging editors to use their own definitions rather than examining the criteria for inclusion. TFD (talk) 00:17, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Renaming will not fix that. Because the concept and practice of notability will still remain. Newer editors will use non-source handwaving, or weak sourcing like social media posts, or try to say "but there's three sources" or a whole host of similar problems that do not go away with just renaming the guideline page. Further, notability is but one facet of how we judge a topic appropriate to include, so the suggested terms of suitable or eligible also misconstrue what the guideline is supposed to be about make it look like the only guideline to consider; its again trading off one problem for another and without eliminating all the other problems that stem from newer editors simply not spending the time to familiarize themselves with P&G before getting deeply involved in WP. It would be far better to figure out how to get more editors to lurk and listen, or at least seek advice, before making their first articles, rather than try to futz with something that has worked for years just to satisfy new editors that seek instant gratification. Masem (t) 00:31, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  These are not problems that will be newly brought in to fill in the "disadvantages deficit"; they are problems that exist and whom this proposal does not touch. Thus, as this proposal fixes problems, we would have a net loss in the number of problems. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:22, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  But this hasn't worked for years—it's been confusing for years and will continue to be a problem if not remedied. Articles will still have to meet the criteria for reliable sources, but renaming will segregate the two basic branches of good articles: 1) that they're bonafide subjects worthy of an independent article, and 2) that they are adequately sourced. As it stands now, those two basic criteria are conflated, which I suspect results in more inappropriate articles than what you're suggesting. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 06:07, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Strong Support for suitability As it makes people think suitable for what? What is suitable for a article? Is what I want to add suitable per Wikipedia polices? It would be a lot easier to explain to a new user what suitability polices are then what notability polices are. Just because of their initial reaction/thoughts are when they hear/read the word. Other polices would also go into suitability as they also have an effect on whether or not an article is suitable for inclusion. The change would be of great benefit over time even though older users would have to adjust, but that is why there will be a 3 month transitional period. We can't just look at the short term drawbacks, we also need to look at the long term benefits. As a newer user myself I found it strange that we use notability when I first started editing. I have gotten used to it, but I think it would be good to change it now and reap the benefits for years and years down the road. Because lets face it Wikipedia needs new editors all the time to replace the old ones that have left Wikipedia. Other wise Wikipedia will only survive as long as the current editors live. So although there will be some pain in the change it will become as if there was never a change in a few years. People will look back on this in 10, 20 years and wonder why there was so much push back because it will be second nature to them. Also this would not remove notability it would keep it as an alternative to suitability. Which would mean that older users could still use it. It would just be preferable to use suitability. If we wait to find a one-to-one word match for what we define notability as on Wikipedia then we will have to makeup a word. And making up a word would have the draw back of having to explain to everyone what that word means. This way we get suitability, a word that matches very closely to what everyone outside of Wikipedia defines suitability as. And how many times outside of Wikipedia do you use notability in the terms you use it on Wikipedia? Whereas suitability gets used outside of Wikipedia in a similar way that notability does on Wikipedia. It may not be a perfect match, but what would be a perfect match outside of creating our own word? Make the change now and receive the benefits for years or wait till the next generation says "Why did our fathers (mothers) think this word was a good match for Wikipedia?". We also could extent the transitional time frame to be longer if it is needed to help people get used to the new terms.
  Sheriff U3 19:36, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support Suitability, or Eligibility. As per the discussion at Village pump, either words meaning are closer to what we mean on Wikipedia than the confusing phrase that is Notability.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:51, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Strong oppose as per my comments in the linked discussion. These words are not one-for-one replacements for "notability" and would create the same if not more confusion due to bad application of defined terms that trying to replace "notability" would solve. Namely, the three suggested terms all imply a black or white pass/fail type test, where notability itself (in its real world definition) still suggests that there's a spectrum of how much notability a topic can have (and as applied to WP's definition, how well a topic meets the GNG or an SNG). Further, notability in practice is not the only criteria we use to decide if a topic should have a standalone page, we also use NOT, the other content policies, BLP, and others. There is room on WP to have a page about the eligibility or suitability of a topic but which would incorporate the tests that should applied (does it meet a GNG or SNG? Does the topic not violate WP:NOT? etc.) and in which case makes the practice of evaluating those tests and calling the topic eligible or suitable for a article match what those terms mean in the real world, but they are not effective substitutions for the word of "notability" nor how notability is actually practiced. I'd also add that we just had a discussion on renaming notability six months ago, and in fact this tends to be PEREN discussion; until we find a word that is a true one-for-one and still upholds a real-world definition, any substitution will elimination one problem and introduce another, so there needs to be a really strong reason to do this. Masem (t) 18:57, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I agree it will introduce another small problem (e.g. other criteria exist in relatively rare cases), but I think this fixes more problems than it solves, especially for newcomers creating articles, who are important for recruitment. That’s why I think it’s worth it. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:53, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose Solution in search of a problem. The term "notability" is well-established in the wiki jargon and this would cause totally unnecessary chaos. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:01, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  The problem is:

  • Too many newcomers don't know that Wikipedia:Notability is not the same as wikt:notability.

  The fact that it is "well-established" among ~0.0001% of the world's population does not mean that the jargon is legible.

  I also doubt that it would cause any sort of "chaos". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning - I don't see our definition of notability as a fundamentally different concept from that - the definition of wikt:notable is Worthy of note; remarkable; memorable; noted or distinguished. The only requirement we add on top of that is restrictions on who is doesn't the noting, which doesn't overwrite the entire concept. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:39, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  As per the definition in Cambridge Oxfird Dictionary: Notability - important and deserving attention, because of being very good or interesting. However in Wikipedia, when we mean notability it is more than that. We are looking this to be evidenced by independent third party references. So therefore the word Notability is wrong. Suitability is probably better as it covers both as the meaning is: the fact of being acceptable or right for something or someone. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 20:01, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  To me it seems clear that our "notability" is more of how to semi-objectively quantify real-world "notability" by the demonstration of existing or likelihood of significant coverage (the core tenet of the GNG and most SNGs). It's not the exact same definition but its very closely related.

  And we do expect new editors to spend a bit of time to read and understand P&G before jumping into discussions on WP namespace. That a novice editor did not spend the 5 minutes to read what we mean by notability is really not our fault, but that of the editor for not familiarizing themselves. (Of course, I come from the mantra on the internet was "lurk and listen" before participating, while today people want instant gratification and jump into things before they fully understand it. Masem (t) 20:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I'm regularly explaining to newbies that by "notable" we generally mean "noted" -- not worthy of note, but already having gained note from appropriate sources. However, I'm not sure that the replacement words suggested really have advantage over it. "Suitable", for example, carries overtones of moral propriety, something that tawdry topics would not meet... but we do want those tawdry topics as long as they are, y'know, notable. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:42, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  New participants who don't know the meanings of guidelines are generally drawn when their article is up for deletion, and they want to keep it. Someone who doesn't know the meaning of suitability is unlikely (or at least far more unlikely than the current popularity of "keep cuz it's famous") to find a deletion discussion. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:24, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Let me list from my collection of dictionaries the meaning of notable and notability:

  • Remarkable - from Nelson's Webster's New Compact Dictionary ISBN 0-8407-4081-6
  • Worth noticing or paying attention to; remarkable; outstanding (a notable statesman; a notable success). A notable person. - from Webster's New World Dictionary: Basic School Edition by The World Publishing Company ©1971 (could not find the ISBN)
  • A notable or prominent person. Worthy of note: Remarkable : Distinguished, Prominent. Efficient or capable in performance of housewifely duties. - from Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) (The page with copyright date and ISBN is missing sadly. It was ripped out at some point.)
  • 1 Remarkable; worthy of notice; memorable; observable; distinguished or noted (They bore two or three charges from the horse with notable courage.) (Two young men of notable strength.). 2 Active; industrious; careful; as a notable woman. (In both senses, this word is obsolete in elegant style, or used only in irony. The second sense is in colloquial use in New England.) 3 In Scripture, conspicuous; sightly; as a notable horn. 4 Notorious. 5 Terrible. 6 Known or apparent. In France, the nobles or persons of rank and distinction were formerly called notables. A thing worthy of observation. - from Noah Webster's First Edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language (facsimile edition) ISBN 978-0-912498-03-4

  (I listed them in the order that I picked them up from the shelf.) Sheriff U3 20:24, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Complicated is that WP:N does not explicitly even require a certain amount of sources. So when editors in good faith get told they need to find more sources (e.g WP:GOLDEN RULE) those are practices/guidelines, but the actual policy is incredibly vague and gives a more philosophical phrase presumed notability. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 20:37, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  My understanding is that you need 3 RS to have a chance at creating the article without it getting denied or deleted. But that might be some where else in the polices. Sheriff U3 20:41, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  It's not in any of them, because it's not actually true. That idea probably came you, via our inaccurate telephone game, from User:RoySmith/Three best sources. WP:THREE is an editor's personal essay, but it's not really about the minimum; it's about the maximum that he's willing to seriously investigate during an AFD discussion.

  The minimum necessary to be cited in a Wikipedia article is zero. The minimum necessary to exist in the real world is one. But that one would really have to be amazing; it's far, far more likely that the real world needs at least two, and more would be much more convincing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:50, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Oh interesting, the things you learn. Well thanks for the heads up. Sheriff U3 20:53, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Er, I cannot see an article with zero sources would survive a WP:V or WP:NOR challenge, even if it manages to pass an SNG. (now, saying "cited in the article" with the understanding that sources identified on a talk page or a AFD or similar discussion that just need incorporation into the article is an acceptable but non-ideal situation, but having no such articles at all identified anywhere is the problem) Masem (t) 21:05, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  And yet, de facto, the minimum number of sources cited, among extant Wikipedia articles, is indeed zero. We have tons of unsourced articles. Category:All_articles_lacking_sources lists some 65000 of them. If I encounter one that I think is impossible to source I'll challenge it, but often they are articles for which adequate sourcing probably exists but would be effort to find and nobody has yet taken that effort. For those, challenging means volunteering to take the effort yourself, or getting taken to task for not doing WP:BEFORE. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:42, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Strong support. @WhatamIdoig "Too many newcomers don't know that Wikipedia:Notability is not the same as wikt:notability." The problem is Wikipedia is using "notability" for both. We need to separate the definitions. One of them—I don't care which—needs a new term. (It would go a long way if the Notability page were better written and these two basic criteria were distinguished. Right now almost the entire page is about good sourcing, with very little to explain whether a page, however well sourced, should even exist in the first place.) Ghost writer's cat (talk) 06:20, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  WP:N (WP:Notability) is not Wikipedia:Verifiability; it's the possibility for verifiability. Wikipedia is not using "notability" for both; in fact, it never uses "notability" for "important and noteworthy". I don't see where WP:N is claiming that it is Verifiability, the policy on good sourcing. Aaron Liu (talk) 11:30, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  As I mentioned above the problem is what happens at almost every AfD discussion when the article was started by an inexperienced editor —- they argue their subject is obviously notable because they’re important. The idea is that suitability is a more fitting name and would prevent at least half of the confused newcomers from becoming confused. Mrfoogles (talk) 19:29, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  To the extent that it is well-established, the establishment is bad. It shouldn't exist! jp×g🗯️ 19:33, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support in principle. I prefer eligibility over suitability. I think that the proposed three-month transition period is too short by about five years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:23, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I would be okay with extending it, although maybe more like one year? Mostly as we’d be halfway there if both were allowed, anyway. Mrfoogles (talk) 19:31, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think it would be helpful to change the opening sentence to something like:

  "On Wikipedia, notability, or eligibility, is a test used by editors..."

  It could also be useful to change it to something like:

  On Wikipedia, notability is the article creation criteria that editors..."

  It's my experience that it takes people a really long time to notice even major changes to policies and guidelines. I've had the experience of changing a policy, and then two years later, an editor will quote my own words back to me, as if I didn't know what the policy says. So realistically, if we make this change, we should assume that almost nothing will actually change (e.g., in the way that editors talk to each other) for a couple of years.

  Also, making a thorough job of it would take that long because there are so many places (e.g., welcome templates) that use this language. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:57, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose What Pppery said. GMG^talk 19:25, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose For the reasons stated above, especially User:Pppery. Also, a RfC on something this important should be advertised on the village pump. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:34, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  It has been advertised on the village pump in the ideas lab area. That is where a lot of this was discussed. Sheriff U3 19:41, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I added it to T:CENT. QuicoleJR (talk) 20:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I added it to the Policy section and the Proposals section. Is there somewhere I missed? Mrfoogles (talk) 21:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose OP is well-intentioned but IMHO that's a bit misguided. The alternatives proposed so far ignore the fact that notability is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion for article creation. Masem has it right. There is simply no better word to describe the need for the article to be based on at least a couple of good sources. I also disagree with WhatamIdoing because a novice should eventually learn that the users themselves aren't supposed to say what is notable/"important enough". It's not the question of terminology confusion, it's more a question of being unaware of the rules on which Wikipedia operates. Not a bad thing in itself, but if you mean to seriously contribute, as in creating a new article from scratch, you would be better off at least reading the gist of the rules - we shouldn't expect much from newbies but they will have to confront the rules either way so we might just as well direct them to a family-friendly summary. They don't include notability, but that's a derivative of sorts from the verifiability principles. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 19:49, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose for several reasons. First, I don't agree that it is that hard to understand. I picked it up pretty quickly when I first joined back in 2023. If you simply read the policy page, it explains it quite clearly. I also find the dictionary argument unconvincing. Second, the new names have their own issues. Calling this "suitability" or "eligibility" would imply that this is the only concern for whether something has an article, which is untrue. We also have rules like NOT that affect suitability, and this name change would ignore that. Finally, I think that this is a lot more effort than it is worth for a semantic change, especially since we would still need to explain our "suitability" or "eligibility" requirements. Changing the name wouldn't change that.
  TLDR, this is more trouble than it is worth, it causes problems, and I don't agree that the issues cited by the OP are actually issues. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:59, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @QuicoleJR, since WP:N incorporates those "rules like NOT" right in the lead, I'm not sure how changing the page title would ignore that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:58, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  It mentions them once and then ignores them for the rest of the page. That one easily missable sentence doesn't change the fact that the entire rest of the page talks exclusively about GNG and the SNGs. Also, there are other requirements for inclusion, like BLP1E, that aren't mentioned. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support in principle. I generally prefer suitability over eligibility. I do think there may be better ways to articulate that a stand-alone page is not necessarily desirable for many subjects. --Enos733 (talk) 20:03, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose Eligibility makes it sound like something that's set in stone. Notability isn't a policy. I don't think the notability guidelines are hard to understand now as it is. Most newbies who are "confused" usually have a COI and don't want to understand the rules anyway. I'm not sure altering the name to eligibility is going to change that. The main issue is that newbies don't understand what "significant coverage" means. And with the move away from SNGs in recent years, it's harder for beginners to figure out what's notable. "Suitability" is far better though if this does end up changing. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 20:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support change to "article creation criteria" or something straightforward that makes clear that the notability guidelines describe what types of articles are appropriate for Wikipedia. The idea that it's not confusing to take a word in common usage and give it an entirely new definition is ridiculous on its face. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:22, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  As an aside, we really do need to significantly reduce the length and complexity of all of the notability guidelines. There is no reason that we need to have pages and pages on notability with random criteria and muddy carve-outs. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:23, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Suitability is also fine if consensus develops for that. I don't like eligibility for the same reason as AD. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:30, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  voorts, I think this problem is kinda everywhere in policies and guidelines. I have created a shortened version of content policies and guidelines at User:Szmenderowiecki/Attempt at compilation/Content. I don't guarantee you'd like it, but I tried my best and I'm open to feedback. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 20:40, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I like this suggested alternative, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:51, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Switching to "article creation criteria" is an interesting idea, but has a couple downsides. I think it would get shortened in almost every discussion to ACC, which 1) is less clear to newbies than the word "notability", and 2) WP:ACC has been used by something else for 20 years (since 2006). –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:36, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Neutral on suitability, Oppose eligibility. There's something I don't like about 'eligibility', it almost makes it sound like it's something you achieve or win. Suitability sounds better, as it suggests the opposite - that articles exist for Wikipedia's purposes. Even given that though I wonder if this is worthwhile, it's a change that will cause extensive changes. I'm unsure that the benefits it might bring are worth the work it will cause. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:29, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I wonder if part of the problem is that editors have different cultural connotations about the words being discussed. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:41, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Strong support for eligibility or suitability or Article creation criteria (albeit bit long) our current wording of 'notability' WP:BITEs newbies with its pretentious and Wikilawyer terminology that defies common usage of the term. So much could be saved if editors knew that certain topics are eligible or not, regardless of their real world notability (viral celebrities, mission critical paper-manufacturers, etc...) ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 20:33, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Leaning oppose to the proposed options. I would go with something like Encyclopedicness. BD2412 T 20:38, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  That's how Polish Wikipedia names notability. The problem is, Polish doesn't really have a good alternative name that isn't awkward, and besides, defining "encyclopedicness" could be reasonably seen as saying what belongs in an encyclopedia (full stop), and yet pl.wiki has its own version of WP:NOT. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 20:48, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  “Suitability” is sort of intended to get close to that. I don’t disagree a term in that direction would be good —- the phrase I like is “suitable for Wikipedia”, which is similar in meaning Mrfoogles (talk) 21:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as busywork and bikeshedding. The proposed terminology (which there is not even a consensus about what it even is) does not significantly improve on existing terminology, would potentially confuse and annoy many longstanding contributors, and require a ton of unnecessary work to implement. Dronebogus (talk) 20:41, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  The thing is it would also remove a lot of annoyance by helping to educate newbies who annoy experienced contributors at AFD —- it’s not bikeshedding unless there are bigger changes you should be focusing on, which there aren’t —- those are discussed in other RfCs Mrfoogles (talk) 21:07, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Change many be annoying and difficult to get used to for editors who have been around a while, but that is a poor reason not to enact change, and poor information science practice. It will be less frustrating to do it now than in five years from now. -- NotCharizard ^🗨 08:07, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Opposed - While I agree that the term “Notability” can sometimes be confusing for newcomers, it isn’t that hard to explain. And once explained, most editors get it.
  Sure, if I could go back in time to when we created the guideline I might have suggest “Notedness” as being closer to what we are talking about than “Notability”… but I wouldn’t have pushed super hard for that.
  That said, I do not think the suggested alternatives accurately sum up what we are talking about in the guideline. They would also cause confusion for new editors trying to understand what we are looking for. Finally, the idea of performing some sort of “phased in” name change is simply going to result in yet more confusion. Blueboar (talk) 20:49, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose Nothing wrong with the current system. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 20:51, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support The issue is more complex, and this is just a step towards a resolution. But perfection is the enemy of progress. Also this will need more complex refinement than just considering it to be the final word on every detail in the RFC. @Masem:'s idea of a meta "suitability" page would provide an even better framework for the big solution, but again. perfection is the enemy of progress. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:54, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think that WP:N is supposed to be that "meta" page. Perhaps we should re-visit the idea of splitting the GNG out to its own page, so that people might eventually stop conflating the GNG with WP:N (ARTN, NRVE, NEXIST, NTEMP, SUSTAINED, NOPAGE, WHYN, FAILN, etc.). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  If we want a meta page now, it would be best to start with that as an Essay to get it in place, and then work it up to be a guideline (it would not be policy as it would be more prescriptive than descriptive) Masem (t) 21:06, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @Masem: Wanna work on that? North8000 (talk) 21:14, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I would be willing to help with this. - Enos733 (talk) 17:23, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing: We do have a mini version of such a meta-page (mis)placed in the wp:notability lead. And the reality is that the community already does follow the proposed non-existent meta page. Decisions that are labelled "notability" already include criteria that are not in or not acknowledged in the notability guidelines. North8000 (talk) 21:11, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  What criteria are not in WP:N? NOT is already acknowledged in WP:N. BLP is already acknowledged in WP:N.

  Did you mean "not in the SNGs or the GNG, ignoring the rest of WP:N"? I would agree with that, but I think that argues for moving the GNG to its own page, and making this existing guideline be that meta-page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing: The SNGs assist in implementing the putative meta-page. The unacknowledged criteria that are included in ostensible "notability" decisions are degree of enclyclopedicness (degree of compliance with wp:not) and to a lesser extent, real world notability/significance/impact. North8000 (talk) 22:53, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  The degree of compliance with NOT is right there in WP:N.

  Real-world significance is something we have always disclaimed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  There's only a small amount of content on WP:N that is not related to meeting the GNG and SNG. Ignoring that, and excluding the content specific to the GNG (which about half of what would be left) is then trying to establish a few other aspects still related to notability, the relation between the GNG and SNGs, notability is not a requirement for a standalone, and notability does not specifically apply to content, among other aspects. It doesn't make sense to separate the GNG stuff from all this other stuff, as you'd still be left with a page about notability in general. Again, my suggestion would be better to expand to an essay (to start) about the eligibility or suitability of a topic for WP, which includes WP:N, NOT, BLP , etc. as well as the fact that even if all these are met, topics may still be deleted or merged by consensus-driven actions at AFD or elsewhere.

  In that fashion if we have a new editor questioning why their topic is being deleted, we can point to the eligibility/suitability page, where it would then be clear notability is a measure under that. To the RFC's introductory point, we'd then would like to have experienced editors, when helping newer editors, understand that a topic was not eligible (per that essay page) likely for not meeting notability aspects, rather than simply saying the topic was not notable. That's not going to 100% remove the apparent confusion that our def of notability is not the same as the real-world, but framing that notability is a criteria for being eligible or suitable for an article would help to clear up some of that. Masem (t) 23:20, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think that would work! Great idea, we could start on a draft for it, if we did not want to publish it right away. I would be willing to help with it if we were to start on it. Sheriff U3 23:45, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Did a search of WP:Suitability and found WP:ROC. Sheriff U3 23:49, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose While "notability" does lead to some incorrect assumptions from inexperienced users, I don't see "eligibility" or "suitability" as not also having similar problems (in type if not direction). These names would work better for a guideline or essay that points out the existence of WP:N, WP:NOT, WP:BLP, and other guidelines and policies that together all determine whether a topic is eligible or suitable for an article. Something like "notedness" would probably be a real improvement on the situation, although it sounds more awkward. Anomie⚔ 21:01, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
  • I see some below are promoting "inclusion criteria". I find that a little clearer than "eligibility" or "suitability", but it has the same drawback that it would work better for a guideline or essay that covers all of our different inclusion criteria rather than specifically what's currently called "notability". Anomie⚔ 12:54, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose While I agree that our definition of "notability' is a lot more specific than the general meaning of the word, it is, regardless, intuitive and does capture the essence of our inclusion criteria. The term includes the meaning of what we are trying to say and most people will, except at the margins, understand what is notable and what is not without having to read the policy pages. Suitability and eligibility, on the other hand, are less intuitive and is divorced from our inclusion criteria. Without reading the criteria, editors will have no idea what is suitable or eligible. RegentsPark (comment) 21:01, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @RegentsPark: You put this in the wrong section. That RFC is in the talk page section below this one. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:11, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @QuicoleJR: Thanks (and moved)!RegentsPark (comment) 21:23, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Without reading the criteria, editors will have no idea what is suitable or eligible. This seems to be one of the reasons behind the changes; to make it clear article creation works through criteria rather than through an editor's feel for what is notable to them. CMD (talk) 16:18, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Any topic is "eligible" for inclusion on Wikipedia. Any topic is "suitable" for inclusion on Wikipedia. Not every topic is notable for inclusion on Wikipedia. This seems to be a solution in search of a problem to me. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:24, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  It is only suitable for inclusion if it meets all of the polices. I could say the same thing about notability in the way you put it. "Every topic is notable notable for inclusion in Wikipedia, because I know about it and think it is notable." You see it works both ways. That is why it defines what is suitable for inclusion, based off of current policy. Sheriff U3 21:46, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per Pppery. This is just going to make things more confusing for everyone and waste much more time. It's going to make things more time-consuming and frustrating, and its value is minuscule. ‍Relativity ⚡️ 21:48, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  The value over time would be worth it. Think about the next 10, 15, 20 years not the immediate future, other wise no changes would ever happen because it is "too hard" in fact Wikipedia would never have been created because it is "too hard" to make an encyclopedia from scratch. The question you should be asking is if there is anyone willing to make the changes. In which case I would be willing to implement these name changes. And what is so confusing about this? All it is just a simple name change. The value to long-term editors is small, but the value to new and future editors is huge. Plus it would save time on trying to explain to new users about what Wikipedia means by notable, whereas suitability already carries a similar meaning that fluctuates depending on where and what it is in real life. Sheriff U3 22:28, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose: There's two decades' worth of policy, guidelines, and discussions here calling it "notability" and now we're going to rename it? And I don't see how "suitability" or "eligibility" is solving any problems. If someone contests a new article, and the creator asks why, they can be told, "Well, it isn't notable", which, while not completely clear, at least gives a hint as to the problem. Replace that with "Well, it isn't suitable", and it tells them nothing, it's just about tautological: "It isn't suitable because it isn't suitable." So then they ask, "What's unsuitable about it", and back comes the answer, "Because it isn't a notable topic." This puts us back where we were if we'd said "notable" in the first place without injecting the "suitable" step. Then, if the user doesn't grasp what notability is, they'll be sent to the renamed page that's now called Wikipedia:Notability, which, under any title, will be just as complicated and daunting as it is now.
  In addition, "notable" can be understood as a description of an article's subject in the context of the world. I can talk about whether someone or something is notable independently of the existence of Wikipedia. The quality of being notable or non-notable inheres in the person or thing at a given time. "Joe Schmoe down my block is a notable guy." Different people will have different criteria for making that assessment of him, but whichever criteria are chosen, a frame of reference still isn't required. In contrast, it's meaningless to say "Joe Schmoe down down my block is a suitable guy" without stating relative to what: suitable for a given job, for my attention, for election, for a Wikipedia article. "Suitable" is meaningful only in reference to something else. Largoplazo (talk) 22:25, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think what you point out in the second paragraph is deliberate – people sometimes show up with sources saying "John Doe is a notable actor" and are surprised that Wikipedia does not consider that proof of notability. Nobody would be surprised that "John Doe is suitable for such-and-such purpose off Wikipedia" does not prove that he is suitable for a Wikipedia article. jlwoodwa (talk) 22:54, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  You are stuck on thinking about notability. Using your example of a new editor creating an article that should not be a part of the encyclopedia I come up with this:

  EE (Experienced Editor) Well it isn't wp:suitable.

  NE (New Editor) What is unsuitable about it?

  EE Because it does not have reliable secondary sources that have significant coverage of the topic.

  So you see it can work without using the word notability or notable. Here is another example:

  EE (Experienced Editor) Your article is not suitable to be included on Wikipedia because it does not meet Wikipedia:Suitability.

  NE (New Editor) How does my article not meet the suitability policy?

  EE Your article doesn't have enough reliable sources that have significant coverage to show that it should be included on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Reliable Sources to find out how to find more reliable sources. Also your sources are not independent of the subject so that also violates WP:Suitability.

  NE Ok will look at WP:RS and WP:Suitability.

  If you think that those two examples are not enough then ask and I will gladly give more examples, all without mentioning notability. Sheriff U3 22:57, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Here's what would happen as well though:

  Experienced Editor: Your topic is not WP:Suitable for a Wikipedia article.

  Newbie: Yes, it is. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 23:13, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think so. Or, at least, I don't think the newbie would then say "I have a Reliable Source right here saying 'Alice Expert is a suitable expert', so the fact that she's WP:Suitable is a verifiable fact."

  That happens now (and has happened for years) with "Notable", but I don't think it will happen with "Suitable".

  We could name the guideline "WP:Foo", and there would still be people who actually read it and come to a different conclusion about whether ____ is supported by the guideline. But changing the name, to anything that is unlikely to be used as a description of a person/subject in reliable sources, would remove the "follow the sources" claims. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:17, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  But then they would just be blatantly ignoring Wikipedia polices. Whereas with notability they come with the knowledge that it is notable in RL, but don't realize that it is not notable per Wikipedia. And suitability makes people think: "What does Wikipedia consider as suitable for an article?" Cause it carries with it the knowledge that it depends on the context and situation. Notability though does not depend on the context and situation as much. Sheriff U3 23:23, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Your examples are additional demonstrations of my point about it being tautological—it gives the newbie no new information, and is a bit off-putting. Frankly, it sounds like "because I said so". In response, "it isn't a notable topic" is shorter than your responses and may be sufficiently explanatory if, for example, they wrote an article about their ninth grade classmate, and they can understand immediately on being told that that of course their ninth grade classmate isn't notable In contrast, if you went at that person directly with "because it does not have reliable secondary sources that have significant coverage of the topic", they could be completely lost. Save that for people for aren't satisfied by the explanation "It isn't a notable topic". Largoplazo (talk) 23:20, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I could just as easily say "It is not a suitable topic for Wikipedia", if it was something like that. And they could still see that it is not suitable for a worldwide encyclopedia that is read by millions. Sheriff U3 23:35, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  If that was already obvious to them, they wouldn't have created it in the first place. Res ipsa loquitur: that they created the article implies that as far as they're concerned it's suitable. Largoplazo (talk) 01:57, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Sure, but in practice if you tell them “it isn’t a notable topic”, they usually respond with “but yes it is, Battle For Dream Island has millions of viewers!” The hope is that if we use suitable they either read the policy or ask followup questions. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:47, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think that's what this is all boiling down to: that this is based on a hope. That's a lot of upheaval to base on a hope for how things may turn out years from now. At best, it might ease the way from a few newbies, and yet it may also just complicate things for others. Largoplazo (talk) 02:00, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  "Tautological" is the intention and has someone actually read the guideline. "Notability" is just misleading, and the only way one could understand Notability is if they read the guideline. And you could just say "it doesn't have SigCov". Aaron Liu (talk) 01:51, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  The intention? It's intended to answer their question in a manner that gives them no additional information? To put them off by being unhelpful is intended?

  When it comes to renaming articles about countries, we do research to show that it's justified by actual usage. Likewise, it's no good to just declare that people will react in a particular way if we make a change to the name of a policy. Can you provide data that show that this change would appreciably increase the number of people who would read the guideline over the number who read it now when notability is explained to them? Without statistics, if the change were made, we'd have no way to know whether it was successful; and we have no basis a priori for anticipating that it will be. Largoplazo (talk) 02:06, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  If linked, many assume that notability just means fame, and that is common experience; this is definitely no problem in suitability, and if they ask again we'd answer "it doesn't have <aspect of notability not satisfied>. You can click the link to find out more!"
  If not linked, well even more people don't click on the notability link thinking you mean fame, which is way worse than the confusion of being told "it should be deleted because it's not suitable". I do not see how misleading would be more helpful at all.
  (Honestly, IMO I think this RfC would've worked better split—whether to add it as an alternative name and whether to move the page in 3 months.) Aaron Liu (talk) 02:32, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  If linked, many assume that notability just means fame, and that is common experience and then we tell them that they're incorrect, and we're either more specific or we send them to the page with the guidelines—except we probably already did that by linking the term the first time was used in in our conversation, and if we think they didn't follow it, then we tell them they should. This just isn't that hard, and it doesn't go away just by saying "suitability" instead of "notability". It's a minuscule problem compared with dealing with someone who sees the guidelines and still wants to debate them. If not linked is irrelevant because if you say it isn't suitable and don't link "suitable", the result is the same. That the link is necessary is obvious to anyone old-timer explaining things to a newcomer precisely because we know the meaning isn't straightforward. My fingers are thoroughly habituated to typing [[WP:N|notability guidelines]] and the like.

  Focusing on the word is really making a mountain out of a molehill. The actual mountain is people not understanding what the guidelines are telling them when they read them, or wanting to argue about them. This is as though someone, after observing scores of discussions on country talk pages about whether to change the articles' titles to reflect their new official name, and seeing how contentious they get, notices that the shortcut for the overarching guideline is WP:COMMONNAME. So that person, despite the fact that close to 100% of the grievance over those guidelines is about whether they should be the guidelines, or whether we should ignore the guidelines and should instead follow a rule of the debaters' own devising, thinks that if we change the shortcut to WP:COUNTRYNAME or WP:BASETITLESONUSAGEINENGLISHRELIABLESOURCES, that that will fix everything. In the case of notability, the effort involved in the very brief exchange involved in getting someone to the guidelines is almost nothing compared with the effort involved when the newcomer is overwhelmed by them or doesn't like them and doesn't want to follow them. Largoplazo (talk) 03:15, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  we tell them that they're incorrect We would skip that step. it doesn't go away just by saying "suitability" instead of "notability" Yes it does, as "suitability" has no "fame" meaning. As you've said, it would be a tautology, and thus would be devoid of incorrect meanings. I do not get why you think being a tautology is bad here. You'll find that e.g. WP:ImageUse and WP:ReliableSources are also tautologies, and we already have good shortcuts to the individual criteria for WP:N such as SigCov and Independent.
  CommonName is about names being common and is way more than just countries. Notability is not about including topics that are merely Worthy of note; remarkable; memorable; noted or distinguished or popular.
  is almost nothing compared with That's only because the latter effort is much higher, not that the former effort is small. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:17, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I, for one, read the guideline on Notability and was more confused afterwards than I had been before. I had gone into it assuming it meant "this subject is important and noteworthy" and came out thinking it means "this article has been properly sourced". Within Wikipedia, it means both, and that's why it's confusing. We need TWO terms, one for each. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 07:06, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose this non-solution. The colloquial meanings of "suitability", "eligibility", etc. are no more accurate than the colloquial meaning of "notability" as a description of Wikipedia-notability, so there is no benefit to this change, and significant cost to Wikipedia in the changeover of terminology and in potential future confusion over the difference in terminology between past and future. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:49, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  How would there be confusion between the old and new? Cause this will not remove notable and notability as it can still be used after the change, it would just be the alternative wording. And all the old shortcuts would still work cause they would still link to the same polices. Sheriff U3 23:02, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Because the old wording will still be around in 25 years of archived discussions, and if we change the wording then newer editors will think it means something different. And having a choice of alternative wordings for what should be a single concept is a recipe for confusion. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  I can look back at old archives now and find references to things that don't exist now. But that is to be expected. And how many times does someone go through the old archives anyways? I never have needed to look at old archives more then 2-3 years except when I was just looking to see what it was like back then. Plus the old wording in the polices would still be available for them to see through the page history. Sheriff U3 23:13, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  You know, WP:BLUDGEON might be coming into play here. Since you called through an RFC for an open expression of opinions, you might start allowing people to express their opinions openly, without trying to deny their validity in every case. Your experience with looking back at old archives is only your own experience; my experience as an AfD participant is that I regularly see re-nominations of articles whose previous nomination was years ago, and that it is important to understand the arguments participants were making in those older discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:05, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I'm not disagreeing with you about whether bludgeoning is happening here, but Sheriff, didn't launch this RFC, Mrfoogles did. Largoplazo (talk) 02:11, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support suitability or eligibility due to the confusion often caused by the difference between the meanings of the Wikipedia term Notabilility and the real-world term. Huggums^{537_voted! (sign🖋️|📞talk)} 23:08, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose ("eligibility" strongly, "suitability" plainly). Per my comments in the most recent prior discussion, I agree that there is a problem to be solved but I disagree that either of the proposed terms will on balance be an improvement over "notability". Thryduulf (talk) 23:20, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose - As noted by Pppery, the definition of "notable" includes being noted or worthy of note. If there are no reliable third-party sources of a topic, then surely it fails that definition because no one else has felt it worthy of note. This feels like a solution in search of a problem based on a pedantic interpretation of definition. The Wiktionary definition of wikt:suitability is Having sufficient or the required properties for a certain purpose or task; appropriate to a certain occasion and the definition of wikt:eligible is Allowed to and meeting the necessary conditions required to participate in or be chosen for something; what would be the "sufficient or required properties" or "necessary conditions" if not what is already required by WP:GNG or the various SNGs? If all we are doing is changing a word and nothing else, then is anything really broken? — Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 23:28, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  Because people have predefined what is notable so when they hear that word they think "but it is notable." Whereas with suitability they think suitable for what? What is suitable for Wikipedia? Plus notability does not really fit with Wikipedia's definition of what is notable. Sheriff U3 23:39, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  The goal of the change isn’t “what word is more appropriate” but “what word will convince newbies to read the guidelines or ask rather than asserting that Battle For Dream Island must be notable because it has millions of viewers”. The sufficient and necessary conditions are that multiple reliable sources provide significant coverage. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:49, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

  @Sheriff U3: You keep saying notability does not really fit with Wikipedia's definition of what is notable, which has become a WP:BLUDGEON you are trying to use in this discussion. If something is not covered in reliable third-party sources to a level acceptable to Wikipedia – which really isn't a large burden since even a single source can be sufficient to begin an article – then it already isn't notable, suitable, eligible, or whatever other synonym you want to use. These people are thinking "this is notable to me," when what is important is "this is notable on a larger scale."

  @Mrfoogles: The sufficient and necessary conditions are that multiple reliable sources provide significant coverage. This is already stated in WP:GNG. What exactly is going to change if this is approved?

  If the concern is that new editors don't read the policies and guidelines, then just changing the wording of those policies and guidelines is not going to fix that. What we need to think about is better education for new editors. — Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 01:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Ok will stop now. Thanks for letting me know. Sheriff U3 01:45, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  @Jkudlick, I was answering your question as to why it fit what the notability criteria are. As for what would change, see the comment just below. Mrfoogles (talk) 02:05, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Comment A lot of people are questioning whether this change is really needed, so I wanted to clarify the point. The idea is that "suitable for the encyclopedia" being based on coverage in reliable sources is more intuitive than "notable" being based on coverage in reliable sources, because some things seem to newcomers like they should be notable but aren't covered in reliable sources, which creates confusion.
  The WP:Battle for Dream Island and WP:Subjective importance essays illustrate the problem -- notability on WP is often confused for notability in life. Suitability for WP can't be confused for notability in life (subjective importance) because the word "suitability" (or for that matter, "eligibility", although I don't prefer that) inherently implies that it's talking about something specific to Wikipedia and you have to go read the guidelines. @David Eppstein the point isn't that it's more accurate as a descriptor, the point is that it makes newbies realize "Oh, I have to go read the guideline and something is specific to Wikipedia here" in a way that the commonly used word "notability" doesn't. Mrfoogles (talk) 00:18, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  E.g. some of the examples form the Subjective importance essay:

  • Keep It is the best-selling brand – Keeping up with the Joneses, 06:32, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Keep It is a game everyone plays – Challenge me, 06:32, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Keep It is a favorite recipe – Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, 06:32, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

  This would stop newbies from doing this, at least partially. Mrfoogles (talk) 00:21, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  [citation needed]. None of those problems would be solved by a new equally-vague name. I think if anything they would be made worse. In more detail: I believe "suitable" is much more likely to be interpreted as something like WP:NOT than like WP:N, leading to fallacious reasoning like: biographies are a suitable topic for Wikipedia, this is a biography, and so we should include this biography. It doesn't convey any of the sense of being significant enough that notability does (even though for most topics we measure significance in terms of media coverage rather than in other ways). And it also conveys a false sense of permanence: a non-notable subject could become notable in future, but a subject that is unsuitable is going to remain forever unsuitable. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:04, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I agree. Anyone who thinks "everyone watches this guy on YouTube" is a good notability argument would not be deterred by having to instead adapt to form a "suitability argument". ꧁Zanahary꧂ 05:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I doubt that. You wouldn't be able to say "they're famous that means they're suitable" as much as "they're famous that means they're notable". Aaron Liu (talk) 15:21, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Re-programming everyone to think and use the new term, and updating all the various Wikipedia-space pages to match, would be far more work than explaining things to a confused newbie once in awhile. I think Wikipedia notability is extremely complicated in general, and renaming it would not solve 99% of its complexity. Newbies would still be confused. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:33, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose fixing what ain't broken. It's by now well-established terminology for a well-established concept. Write an essay called "Notability means suitability" or whatever that you can point newbies towards if you think that would help with some task of which I am unaware. Carrite (talk) 01:09, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Strong support suitable per above. A very common newcomer misconception argument is "It's famous, so it's notable". "It's famous, so it's suitable" is much more of a leap and would strongly incentivize them to check out what "suitable" actually means on Wikipedia instead of assuming WP:N is just a list of guidance with metrics to help gauge how famous a topic is; by checking the page, they would see the lede and what our actual criteria are (including WP:Not and WP:Merge). And no, "suitability" is no more black-and-white than "notability". I believe enough that this will not cause chaos, as the transition would be similar to the "transition" from "sysop" to "administrator". Aaron Liu (talk) 01:48, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I also support wikinotability and weak support eligibility (weak as eligibility is a bit black and white). I still think suitability is the best, though; anyone likely to be deceived by the name while being unfamiliar with the policy would be in a "keep" position, not delete, as the former is nearly the only path for newcomers to be involved in AfD. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:11, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support Let's do it! How many hours have I wasted trying to explain to a well-meaning newcomer why so-and-so not being notable isn't a reflection on their worth as a person? Too many. Chetsford (talk) 01:58, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
  • After such a change, you would have to explain why a topic is not suitable or why it is not eligible. Why is band X suitable but band Y is not? The answer is that band X has been noted by reliable sources. Johnuniq (talk) 04:03, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

    Or Band X is eligible as it has reliable sources? Band Y is not suitable as it does not have reliable sources? Davidstewartharvey (talk) 12:45, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Just noting here that the Chinese Wikipedia community recently (~3 months ago) renamed their term (policy text title) from 关注度 (from enwikt: level of interest, notability) to 收录标准 (inclusion criteria/standard of inclusion) which meant that instead of saying something is notable or not, they are now saying whether an article meets the inclusion criteria. This was their discussion for anyone interested. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 04:29, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  inclusion criteria/standard of inclusion is a good alternative Davidstewartharvey (talk) 12:43, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  The problem is that while this is terse in Chinese, it's quite verbose and far more frustrating to type in English, so I doubt we could adopt it. It does show that others agree that "tautology" is not a bad thing, though. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:25, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  is inclusion criteria really verbose and frustrating to type? that's just two words compared to a single word. everything is Chinese is quite terse, but their term increased by one character too. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 03:10, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Yeah, there's a great propensity towards halving the amount of words needed to be typed. As someone mentioned below people usually don't even bother typing out WP:N in full. Look what I just did there instead of WP:Notability. (And one character in Chinese is nothing; notability→inclusion criteria is like adding 3 characters.) Aaron Liu (talk) 03:40, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  WP:IC or WP:SoC isn't bad. We have to type WP:SNG! Davidstewartharvey (talk) 05:41, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  WP:I currently links to the help introduction and has very little pageviews. I guess we could retarget that. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:18, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks for posting this one, I originally started doing this because I thought French had done something similar, but it turns out I was confused. Great to hear that Chinese actually has done it. Mrfoogles (talk) 22:23, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose: I'm not a native English speaker, but to my understanding "notability" sounds as a trait the subject already has (or not), regardless of our interpretations. "Suitability" implies that there is a set of rules to decide who is suitable and who isn't, and "Eligibility" implies that there is a jury who decide from their ivory towers who is elected and who isn't. And yes, there is some of that by necessity, but the big idea is to keep that to a minimum. The purpose of making notability be based on sourcing and not on our own judgement is to prevent the arbitrariness that would inevitably ensue.
  Also, Notability in the English Wikipedia is already a real-world thing in itself. It may also be argued that a newcomer may get confused by not finding the famous notability rule. This change would be similar to that time Elon Musk changed the branding name of "Twitter" to the meaningless "X" just for kicks. Cambalachero (talk) 04:33, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I don’t think the outside world having to change would be an insurmountable issue —- e.g. the Chinese Wikipedia successfully changed recently, and it worked out for them. Not as many people know notability as know Twitter Mrfoogles (talk) 22:25, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Considering that Wikipedia is blocked by the Chinese dictatorship and only the Chinese living elsewhere can use it, it does not seem as if they have such a large readership as Wikipedia in English. Cambalachero (talk) 00:25, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Taiwan is a country that exists and is full of people who speak Chinese. It’s not like the only people using Zhwiki are half a dozen immigrant grandmas in California who don’t speak English very well. Dronebogus (talk) 10:37, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose; there is no problem with "notability", which unlike the alternatives offered here conveys the importance of demonstrated relevance to the encyclopedia. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 05:36, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Also, "suitability" implies propriety, and we don't need help perpetuating the idea that Wikipedia should exclude topics that are vulgar, stupid, sexy, etc. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 05:39, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  That's how it sounds to me too. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:18, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Second that Dronebogus (talk) 11:38, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose I have made 12,000 edits over the years at the Teahouse, our main venue for assisting new editors. I understand the thinking of typical new editors. It is a myth that less experienced editors have an unusual level of difficulty understanding notability as opposed to other key Wikipedia concepts like verifiability, no original research and the neutral point of view. Most good faith new editors can understand these things by reading the corresponding pages or discussing them at the Teahouse, the Help Desk or in a discussion with a mentor. Those who are here instead to promote non-notable (or unsuitable) topics will claim not to understand as they push their personal agendas. I fail to see how "suitability" or "eligibility" would be significantly easier for good faith new editors to understand. Cullen328 (talk) 05:54, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Tweak to wikinotability. I admit it's a neologism, but I use it on pages like the Teahouse so that newbies can clue in that what Wikipedia considers notable is different from the general definition. It's definitely less wordy than "notability as Wikipedia defines it". The other proposed suggestions may fall afoul of the shortcomings notability has, and reworking policy pages and all mentions of the word notable and its derivatives will be time-consuming. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 06:10, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Also wanted to give Michael D. Turnbull a shoutout for being one of the other editors to use this. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 06:12, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I like the term wikinotability and may start using that myself. It definitely shows that what we use is not the true textbook definition. — Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 15:20, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Yeah, I also like that. At least moving this page to Wikinotability would alleviate, hopefully with way less controversy. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:26, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Maybe some time after this there could be an RFC on listing wikinotability as an alternative. Mrfoogles (talk) 22:26, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  This is probably the least terrible name change option; the others are 1:1 non-improvements or outright anti-improvements Dronebogus (talk) 11:39, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose any change. I'll still use wikinotability sometimes with new editors. Mike Turnbull (talk) 11:00, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, well-established jargon; if any change is made it should be something like "wikinotability" that clarifies it is the same thing (and that it is not something like "suitability" or "eligibility" that carries real world connotations not shared by the very specific meaning of "notability" on Wikipedia. —Kusma (talk) 06:22, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. The change would involve a lot of work in editing policy pages, confuse newbies while ongoing (which I'd expect to take years rather than months), and achieve little - whatever word we use, we'll have to explain its meaning. But I support Tenryuu's suggestion a little way above, I'll take to writng "wikinotabilty" myself. Maproom (talk) 06:30, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• General Oppose per other's comments. First, I'm not really convinced there's a problem that needs solving here. The term notability may be confusing to some at first, but generally most people get the idea after learning it, as did I. Also, not to pull fait accompli, but this term is already well-established jargon in the commmunity; as someone pointed out, there's at least twenty (20)years worth of discussion, pages, and other things already calling it notability. I feel the result will be constant confusion, even after the adjustment because of the two-decade run this term has had. I also take issue with the options suitability and elligibility as they don't convey the same meaning notability does. I should also note that the "not suitable for Wikipedia" is already frequently used in reference to WP:NOT. If we really, really want to do it, I'm perfectly okay with wikinotability as a name as it's already informally established in forums like the Teahouse and still conveys the meaning notability does. —Sparkle and Fade (talk • contributions) 06:41, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  • General Oppose After reading @Sparkle and Fade's comment above, I think I'd like to simply concur with him or her. Somehow I can't see a major need for change of the term, though I think suitability also has merit. If, however, there's a future go-round about changing notability to something else, I'd like to toss deserving of attention into the pot for consideration. It's from the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of notability.

  Augnablik (talk) 07:39, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose No evidence that the work involved in a changeover would be worth the effort. Much easier to change AfD to discussion, and the community doesn't even want to do that. Jclemens (talk) 09:21, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. The advantage of "suitability" is that it is such a general term that you have to look up the specifics. The advantage of "notability" is that you get a clue/reminder as to what the criteria are, with the disadvantage that some newbies might be misled. On balance, I prefer the status quo. However, Sparkle and Fade's suggestion of "wikinotability" seems to me to have all the advantages without the disadvantages. And it could be introducted gradually as an optional alternative to "notability" when it is helpful to be more specific. JMCHutchinson (talk) 09:38, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I should note that I wasn't the first person to suggest wikinotability as a tweak... —Sparkle and Fade (talk • contributions) 10:16, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose "suitable" and "eligible" conceptually are "in/ex-clusive" in their implication, my concern is this treats Wikipedia as an object in itself, so we attach the status to Wikipedia and deem something relevant for in/ex-clusion. However, to me notability is more neutral, it centres the concern with the object of attention. To be somewhat simplistic, we're not a club seeking to keep the riff-raff out and let in the well-heeled. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 10:13, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose Notability is a continuum, some are obviously notable while others are barely notable. 'Barely eligible' doesn't seem right to me and I'm not convinced that less explaining would need to be done. Wikinotability I would say is fine for me. 115.188.132.65 (talk) 11:02, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose I think changing it to eligibility or suitability simply creates new problems. Suitability is vague and comes with a morality-based connotation that notability doesn't have. Eligibility sounds more bureaucratic and rigid. They're certainly not improvements enough to invalidate two decades of discussion of the concept of notability and the many, many pages that reference notability. I would also wager that a significant percentage of the editors who claim to not understand notability instead simply don't like the concept of notability, as it's interfering with what they want to do. Trying to solve complex problems through semantic shift are unlikely to work. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 11:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support in principle I have long thought, and argued on occasion, that 'Notability' is too misleading to non-Wikipedians, and was (as so often in the Sciences) probably an ad-hoc placeholder that has never been revisited: unfortunately the English language does not (to my knowledge) contain a word that fully and succinctly conveys what we have come to mean by it in Wiki-jargon. The best I can suggest is the phrase "sufficiently well documented", which is too long-winded. A neologism like "Docsuff" is probably not going to fly outside of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Question: have any different-language Wikipedias come up with a better alternative in their own language? Though probably not usable here, such usages might give us some further ideas. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.64.108 (talk) 11:47, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Earlier in the chain, I did see encyclopedianess from plwiki; a bit unwieldy in my opinion though. ✶Quxyz✶ 14:42, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Chinese uses a one-word form of “inclusion criteria” or something, apparently. Mrfoogles (talk) 22:28, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support either suitability or eligibility. While "notability" has been used for a long time, it suffers from the sunk cost fallacy: keeping it will cause more issues with newcomers in the future, who will not automatically understand it as an established term. Our target audience isn't the 20+ year veteran editors, but future newcomers, and every step towards making Wikipedia more accessible counts. I also disagree with the bikeshedding argument, as it isn't a "detail" distracting us from any bigger issue to solve right now, at least not more than any other proposed change in policy. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 11:57, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Sunk cost fallacy does not apply. If anything, the change would be the antithesis of the sunk cost fallacy as we are putting more effort into propping up a system. All we are doing is changing the name and hoping it fixes stuff. ✶Quxyz✶ 15:29, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as I'm failing to see the alternatives as necessarily better, and certainly not enough better enough to justify the massive amount of work required. There are a great many PaGs on Wikipedia that have names that sometimes lead to confusion with newcomers. I'm sure we've all seen people assume that Wikipedia:Neutral point of view means we should both sides a subject because that would be "Neutral". I've seen people assume that Wikipedia:Verifiability means as long as they post a social media link that claims to give proof that's fine. And so one with basically any PaG you can think of (which will probably have been misinterpreted based on a common English reading of its name at some point in this site's history). Unfortunately, its almost impossible to construct a PaG name in a way that it covers the complex mechanics underneath. I aslo think the same is true for the proposed "eligibility" (articles need to clear more than just WP:N to be eligible for a page: i.e. WP:NOPAGE, WP:NOT, etc.). Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 12:47, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Zanahary and other persuasive comments made above. Changing the name doesn't change the fact that our article creation criteria are not intuitive and require some willingness on the part of (i) new editors to read the guidelines, and (ii) experienced editors to explain things to the new ones. Cbl62 (talk) 13:16, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  To slightly elongate your willingness requirements for new and experienced editors, @Cbl62, I’d like to point out the need of Wiki documentation in general for good examples to clarify what would be and wouldn’t be X. Haven’t looked at the Notability documentation recently, but it’s a perfect term to pick as an example of Wiki terms in need of good examples. 😅

  And more just than one or two examples for particularly slippery terms like this one. Augnablik (talk) 16:59, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions Aaron Liu (talk) 01:23, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  That’s a nice resource I wasn’t aware of, @Aaron Liu, though I’d still like to see more good examples listed separately as well as good examples that show before-and-after repair. Augnablik (talk) 07:15, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose None of these necessarily better define the term and people will be just as, if not more, confused. If definitions are required one can always look at the policy page itself. I do not see any significant benefits of any new name change and the change from WP:N to WP:S or WP:E (both of which already have stuff there) will be painful or annoying at the very least. The backrooms of Wikipedia also do not need to be accessible. Not outright hostile, but it does not need to be clean for the public besides what is needed for us to edit and to not scare away newcomers. Swapping to E or S does not aid in that second part. Also, as a newer editor WP:N, especially GNG, was among one of the easiest policies to understand. ✶Quxyz✶ 14:40, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. What Pppery said. Gog the Mild (talk) 15:00, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't see the point. Eligibility makes it sound like an elite club, when actually having an article written about you is more often than not a curse. Suitability doesn't convey the same meaning to me (sounds like it would be about the article which is unsuitable and not the topic of the article). In a way it is good that this is not a term everyone uses every day, because the wikipedias version of it has a different meaning. Polygnotus (talk) 16:04, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support "Suitable" as less emotive than "notable", a term that provokes far too many upsets with editors who struggle with the idea that a person can be outstanding, but unfortunately entirely unsuited to an article because for whatever reason, their achievements haven't been written about. Elemimele (talk) 18:21, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose I share the frustration of explaining that "notability" has a Wikipedia-specific meaning to eager article creators defending their work at AfD. However, Largoplazo's mock AfD defense under the current name vs the proposed alternatives leads into Nat Gertler's point that notability can be quickly explained as having gained note from appropriate sources, while suitability, eligibility, and encyclopedicness evoke historical exclusion of "indecent" topics from encyclopedias, discouraging article creation in some areas from the outset. I like "inclusion criteria," drawing from the Chinese Wikipedia per 0xDeadbeef, but that would be best reserved as the title for meta page proposed by Masem. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 20:24, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose first, "suitability" and "eligibility" are still using those words differently than in common English. Second, this would promote the incorrect policy claim that "notability" is all that is required for there to be an article on a topic. As several other editors have already pointed out, there are other reasons (BLP policy, NOT) that a topic might not have an article. This is a lot of busiwork and cultural change for a net-negative impact on the encyclopedia. 217.180.228.155 (talk) 20:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  I don't see how we would be using these words differently.
  Calling it "suitability" would incentivize newbies much more to read what is suitable on Wikipedia (as opposed to thinking Notability just means fame), and it jumps out at you from the WP:N lede that WP:Not (which is also behind BLP1E) and WP:Merge also affect inclusion of a standalone article. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:32, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Although we use it as a term of art, rather than in the dictionary sense of the word, I don't think any of the proposed alternatives would be improvements. A new editor who is confused by being told that their topic isn't "notable" will not feel any better if we tell them that their topic isn't "suitable". --Tryptofish (talk) 20:39, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  Probably the full usage would be "suitable for enyclopedic coverage", if it helps. Mrfoogles (talk) 20:52, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  As opposed to "notable for Wikipedia's purposes". As noted by others, something can be unsuitable for encyclopedic coverage for reasons other than what we call "notability". --Tryptofish (talk) 20:57, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  That's more words than should be needed. Now if you turned it to wikisuitable to mean "suitable for Wikipedia"... —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 21:06, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  To add to the above, I think it's very optimistic to imagine that people will type out something like "This is not WP:Suitable for enyclopedic coverage", when, at current, most people don't even bother typing out the full word WP:NOTABILITY. Cakelot1 ☞️ talk 22:10, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose pointless. I don't know where the idea that there's some fundamental issue with the word notability has come from. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:09, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• oppose "Suitability" and "eligibility" have no intrinsic meaning, so this is just an invitation to re-argue what should be counted suitable or eligible. "Notability" by contrast is a genreally understoof concept, even if we have endless arguments over how far it extends.We do not need to make those arguments completely open-ended Mangoe (talk) 23:21, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

  One could say we invite people to re-argue over the long-term community consensus behind words every time we link to any guideline with words in it. The same community consensus behind "notability" would apply to "suitability". Aaron Liu (talk) 01:30, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support any change, but preferably "article inclusion criteria". During my work in WP:Articles for Creation, I saw many newcomers WP:CITEBOMB their draft because they believed the number of sources is a proxy metric for demonstrating the real-life importance of the subject, which is not the case. The term is best understood in its non-idiomatic sense, which is the "the quality of being able to be noted (in sufficient detail)", which the current term does not imply. I reject the argument that newcomers can just read the documentations; WP:N itself is already a few thousand words long, and the term sets an incorrect backdrop on which newcomers base their knowledge. It will take time for terminology to change, but it's best now than never.
  I do feel like this is a band-aid solution to a much greater ambiguity of the notability guideline. Most SNG seem to define "notability" as a measure of real-life importance, with WP:NPROF looking for high citation metrics, WP:NBAND the number of notable songs, etc.. WP:GNG is actually an exception in this case, in that it is looking for only quality sources to base an article on.
  I think the notability guidelines should include a section on their "spirit", i.e. the aim of the guideline. WP:WHYN achieves something similar to this, but it only applies to GNG, and only provides superficial reasons rather than the core philosophy behind the notability guidelines. Ca ^{talk to me!} 02:01, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Newcomers citebomb their drafts because draft reviewers tell them that they need more sources to make a convincing case that the article meets our standards for inclusion. The solution is to educate draft reviewers to use language that encourages fewer but higher quality sources, rather than more sources. This has nothing to do with what word we use for the inclusion standards. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:36, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  I agree that the tendency to citebomb can be corrected by clearer explanations, and that a name change will not be the panacea, but it would remove one of many cognitive hurdles in correctly understanding the nature of notability. Ca ^{talk to me!} 05:44, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Alternative if Suitability or Eligibility is not acceptable, should we use an Alternative term not just one word, such as per User:0xDeadbeef inclusion criteria or standard of inclusion which is what Chinese Wikipedia have changed it to, or maybe something like Notability Criteria. I'm not keen of Wikinotability as having a name up word again just fuels confusion.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 05:49, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• As I discussed in one of the previous big discussions on renaming this page, personally I think it's more important for editors to provide more complete explanations on the standards for having an article(*) than just saying that the subject fails WP:NOTABILITY, WP:NOT, or some other uppercase jargon. In practice, though, I think renaming this page to a longer name is the most likely way to initiate a transition to more newcomer-friendly communication. That being said, I also agree that renaming isn't enough on its own. The community needs to want to minimize the use of jargon. There are certainly times when it's reasonable to use a compact word or phrase to stand in for a certain concept, but many times jargon can be avoided with just a few additional words.
• (*) I used to use the phrase "standards of inclusion" (and suggested it as a possible new name for this page), but I changed since a subject can still be included in other Wikipedia articles even it doesn't meet the standards for having an article. isaacl (talk) 06:09, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think I like standards of inclusion or inclusion criteria because the implied standards of inclusion [as a standalone article] is way easier to learn. There are drawbacks of every option but I think IC is probably one of the best options in terms of not using jargon while naming the thing for what it is. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 06:31, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Some of the discussions in which I have been involved are about whether a person meets the standards of having an article, versus whether they should be discussed in another article. It's also not rare for some editors to point to the notability guideline when discussing if some point should be included in article, and so have to be redirected to even fuzzier guidance on due weight and encyclopedic significance. I'm not against a wider adoption of standards of inclusion, though. isaacl (talk) 07:19, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support any change; the current policy is not only confusing to newcomers, but can also leave them with a poorer image of us – I've seen the idea that Wikipedia views itself as an arbiter of what is and isn't notable more than a few times. The 5th most popular website in a world deciding that a topic isn't "notable" will always have certain connotations regardless of how much explaining is done. While people will always judge us for not putting things they like on the encyclopedia, renaming it will make the intent behind the policy clearer rather than leading people down the wrong track; first impressions are important.  novov talk edits 08:19, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Cambalachero. Everything can be misunderstood. Someone being told that their favorite topic is unsuitable or inelligible, or that it fails inclusion criteria, is not going to meekly say, "Oh, I see what you mean." The point about WP:N is that what is notable is not something we control—it is an external criterion. Johnuniq (talk) 08:42, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think the point was more about how saying something is not notable can be mistaken as a quality that exists beyond Wikipedia's specific standards. It is counterintuitive that something "notable" to someone isn't considered "notable" on Wikipedia.

  Inclusion criteria makes it clear that the rules are specific to the website, there isn't a commonly understood notion of what the inclusion criteria is, but people may have feelings about whether something is notable or not, before coming to the understanding that Wikipedians use the word differently. Renaming would ideally reduce the friction while learning these concepts. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Exactly. This is an unpleasant first introduction to the site, no matter how much explanation is given later. First impressions are important, and many people don't stick around beyond that.  novov talk edits 10:42, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Thing is, any unpleasantness stems from being told “we reject your article”, not from the terminology used to justify that rejection. If we switch to “eligible” or “suitable” the new editor will still be just as upset. They will say “what do you mean it isn’t eligible/suitable?… how dare you!” - and we will still have to explain why (“it needs to have been noted by reliable sources”). Blueboar (talk) 12:22, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  The status quo has additional unpleasantness because of the connotations of something not being "notable". I can connect the how dare you back to the word choice because of something along the lines of "you think [my favorite thing] isn't noteworthy? You think it is boring?" A comment that says "Delete - not notable" IMO sounds slightly more dismissive (with a negative connotation towards the article subject) than "Delete - fails inclusion criteria". 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 12:29, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose, non-solution in search of a problem as argued by Pppery and others. JavaHurricane 13:31, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose As I do not think the alternatives solve the problem, but (if anything) will make it even harder to explain. If they are not reading the policy or understanding it, that will not be solved by a name change. Slatersteven (talk) 15:01, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. Notability is the right word for what we evaluate. There may be other right words, but the proposals are not better, and do not fix the underlying fact that evaluating notability is a somewhat complex and technical endeavor. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 15:23, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support any change. "Notable" is a word in every day usage that means something completely different on Wikipedia, causing a lot of argument and confusion. "Mainspace stand-alone page criteria" or "selection/eligibility/inclusion criteria," or any choice that actually describes what it is, would be better than the misnomer "notability". It's a wiki-ridiculousness that just because something is notable doesn't mean it gets a stand alone page, but our guideline about what gets a stand alone page is called the "notability guideline." This is very confusing and it's long past time Wikipedia fix this. One of the worst arguments for not fixing this is "because that's how we've always done it," a generic argument that can be applied against making any change. Levivich (talk) 16:45, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think there's an argument being pushed that "how we've already done it", but more that because we've had it in place for so long there is a massive undertaking that would be needed to change not only on this page and the SNGs, but throughout all other P&G, which would be a significant undertaking, so any change has to be clearly shown that it is *that* much of an improvement to be done. Masem (t) 16:55, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support to "suitability" - I can't count the number of times on #wikipedia-en-help or at WP:AFC/HD that someone responded to a "this doesn't demonstrate notability" judgment by referring to the dictionary definition of the term, which is at odds with how we interpret the term. (It's also why I've begun using "eligibility" instead, as that's much easier to understand right away.) For those arguing this is a solution in search of a problem, this confusion is something me and other help-fora regulars see on a regular basis. The term needs to be changed to something that Joe Blow from San Antonio can understand more readily. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{threads critiques} 17:16, 6 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose both on the ground that WP:N is separate from WP:NOT and both regulate topic's eligibility for an article. Also, while notability indeed has a different connotation off-wiki, this also applies to suitability, which is often used to imply decency. Janhrach (talk) 18:06, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  And also, terms of art are unavoidable, and we even have more counternintuitively named ones. Consider, for example, the concept of policies. Who would say that [...] [T]he policy and guideline pages are not the policy and guidelines in and of themselves. The actual policies and guidelines are behaviors practiced by most editors. (WP:PG)?

  I know this is not a good argument against improving our terms of art, but I am trying to emphasize there are a lot of terms of art for newcomers to grasp, and that a single change, itself far from ideal, is not going to significantly decrease the count of newcomers who leave.

  Also, as Wikipedia grows older, we (or at least I, but I have seen others expressing the same sentiment) want more editors, especially newbies, to focus on improving existing articles over creating new ones. This means that notability will be becoming less newcomer-facing over time.

  – Janhrach (talk) 18:32, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  Less “newcomer-facing over time” if there are, at the same time, fewer people doing notable things … 😙 Augnablik (talk) 00:27, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose We've been using the word "notability" for 20 years. Its a term of art at this point. The fact that it may have slightly different meanings in colloquial usage is meaningless. As for "reduce newcomer confusion", all that will happen is we'll have two different terms for the same thing and newbies asking, "Why is this article suitable but that article is notable?" Just pick a word and stick with it, and we've done that already. RoySmith (talk) 19:16, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

  After the 3-month transition period, we would Mrfoogles (talk) 22:30, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

• Comment Perhaps it's just how I grew up, but am I the only one who is used to "suitable", or, more specifically "not suitable", being much more associated with morality or social acceptability? I might say something like "that movie isn't suitable for children", "that's not a suitable skirt to wear to a job interview", "the social worker decided she wasn't a suitable mother". Telling a newbie attempting to write about something from one of the many underrepresented parts of the world "that's not a suitable topic", or telling somebody trying to write an article on themselves that "You're not suitable" (which this would inevitably be abbreviated as)... I can't see that ending well. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 02:35, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Personally it's not a universal connotation I have about the term. I frequently refer to the need for sources that are suitable for demonstrating that the general notability guideline is met. I don't perceive that it connotes the sources are morally or socially acceptable. It spares me from constantly writing "significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from multiple reliable sources". isaacl (talk) 03:04, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support eligible. It's probably a gargantuan effort to shift this community, but "eligible" is explicitly self-referential in a way "notable" is not and much more accessible to outsiders and new users. There are many reasons why something could be "notable", and those only casually involved may think of those. "Wikipedia accepts notable topics. This topic is notable, it's a new way to tackle this software problem." The resulting "That new method is not notable" issues have been covered by others above. Eligible does not have these connotations, instantly connoting that there is a set of expectations, and that these will be defined by the project. If users will argue about specific points of eligibility, that's an improvement on arguing about the vague concept of notability. (Not a fan of "suitable", per others above.) There's probably smoother ways to on-ramp the idea than instantly starting a 3-month turnover, but the broad concept seems worth pursuing. CMD (talk) 04:13, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Eligible means "fit to be chosen". For instance, an athlete may be eligible for a professional draft, but that won't make them notable. I don't think it really has a meaning that is closer than "notable" to our Wikipedia inclusion standards. But really the only reason I'm replying is to note that what "eligible" always makes me think of is that Billy Bragg pun on "illegible". Not what we want our Wikipedia articles to be. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:02, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Articles that don't meet our standards aren't fit to be chosen. Of those fit to be chosen, whether they are picked (written) will depend on editors making those decisions. I do assume we want our articles to be legible, rather than illegible. CMD (talk) 05:50, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Every time someone has tried renaming a policy because xe thinks that it's the wrong word, it has been bikeshedding. There was an enormous discussion of replacing verifiability with attribution years ago, for example, and it was all of the same back-and-forth over the minutiae and losing sight of the fact that as encyclopaedists we do have our own jargon, just like other people in other walks of life do. And of course, whatever name is used, all of the same arguments end up applying. "attribution" would have ended up with a specialist jargon meaning, too. So will these proposals, here. They won't be what dictionaries say for the words, either. The simple truth is like every other occupation, there's a need for jargon. This particular jargon is at least rooted in the mainstream meaning of something being noted demonstrating that the world outwith Wikipedia considered it notable.
  And as a voice of experience of the last almost 25 years, I can report that people have tried other explanations in AFD discussions, and they don't stop people from complaining. Whereas noted demonstrating notable has worked a lot as a simple initial explanation over the years. As already pointed out, the jargon is readily understood in practice. For longer explanations, we already have a Project:Guide to deletion and a Help:My article got nominated for deletion! and a User:Stifle/Don't just say non-notable and lots more. Moreover, if you think that you're going to magically educate and dissuade every list of bad article ideas creator from having a bad idea with a word, you haven't experienced nearly enough bad article idea creators. ☺
  The reality is that our major jargon problem when it comes to new editors is not this at all, but the inpenetrable abuse of convenience navigation shortcuts in discussions, oftentimes as if they are actual words, and not even linked. That is far more divorced from everyday language than the fully-spelled out words like "verifiability" and "notabililty" are. You want a bold thing to make life better 20 years down the road? Try eliminating all of the "WP:NOTAWRD"s from discussions (including the ones that have already changed over the years, the ones that people mis-remember and thus mis-use, and the ones that capitalize words like "not" and "nor" giving them completely unexpected meanings that aren't even the same parts of speech) before even thinking of going after the things that are words that you can see in dictionaries.
  Uncle G (talk) 04:42, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support. The current rubric isn't working well, as too many OK articles are deleted at AfD. You know, at AfD I generally vote keep if an article has the Six Virtues: 1) It is a decent article, or can be made so. Reasonably well written, formatted, etc. It's not such a mess that we'd be better off deleting it and starting over. 2) And it is of reasonable length, at least a paragraph or so, if not more. It's not just a stub. 3) And the sources for creating this decent article are OK. They're sufficiently reliable to our standards for the material referenced. 4) And is likely that some non-zero number of people will want to read it, both now and in the future. 5) And it not incontrovertibly trivia or ephemera. 6) And it exists. It's not a question of "should we allocate resources to creating this article". Somebody already has.
  I guess another way to state the Six Virtues is "It is encyclopedic. It advances what we are trying to do here. It does not seem like it would be out of place in an extremely large encyclopedia. It is not a negative, it's existance is better than 404'ing people searching on the subject. In other words, it is suitable for an article here." I mean, we are here to bring information out of the darkness, are we not? To bring it into this system where it can be formatted and written and ref'd and mentally accessed in a consistant way, and searched for and found. In other words, to make the internet not suck (as to finding basic information on a subject). We are very big, and we can and do make things notable by having articles about them. That's not a bad thing. Herostratus (talk) 05:17, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose as bikeshedding. I would love it if we could develop the concept of eligibility or suitability as a replacement for notability, i.e. sets of arbitrary criteria for topics we can write articles on based on community consensus, which are recognised as such and not reified as an objective quality of the topics themselves. But changing the name alone will achieve nothing except generating a tonne of work and confusion. – Joe (talk) 06:51, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  It's bikeshedding to argue over the color of the paint -- painting the shed at all is common sense so the wood doesn't rot. jp×g🗯️ 19:41, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  The shed’s already painted, you just really hate the color. Dronebogus (talk) 10:33, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, the bike shed should not have "LIBRARY" or "OUTHOUSE" painted on it in large letters. jp×g🗯️ 09:51, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Entire rest of the argument aside, this is the most entertaining thread about bike-shedding I have ever read Choucas0 🐦‍⬛⋅💬⋅📋 12:25, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. The term "notability" conveys something about why a topic is or isn't appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia—it reflects that the criterion is tied to recognition in the broader world. This is more information than we get from "suitability" or "eligibility", which to me mostly communicate "we like having these topics in our encyclopedia". Ultimately, no matter what word we choose, it will have to act as a term of art, and so it will end up having project-specific nuances that aren't obvious from a plain-language reading and will need to be learned by newcomers. I'm not convinced that "notability" is more confusing than any other term we might use, nor am I convinced that either proposed term would improve on it along that metric, so I don't see the case for making this sweeping and work-intensive of a change. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 15:32, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support change, although undecided what that change should be. However, both suggestions would be a vast improvement over "notability", since what that means on wikipedia has become too far divorced from what it means in the real world and as a result, is the root cause of possibly the greatest time-sink of endless confusion and conflict on here, particularly in deletion discussions. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 15:46, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Support, although this is clearly doomed, so no sense writing a long wall of text that will not convince anybody or sway the result. But here is how it would go:

  "We do something very dumb, confusing and hostile to outsiders"

  "Ah, we should stop doing it."

  "No, because we did it for a very long time."

  Who gives a damn how long we did it for? We changed WP:Discretionary sanctions, and that was around for a very long time with a very large amount of formal process built around it. Also, we outlawed slavery, which was similarly around for a very long time (although the circumstances are clearly different). Personally, I suspect that nearly everyone would support it, inasmuch as it was agreed that they were the one who came up with the new term. jp×g🗯️ 19:39, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  So you’re saying a word, and a perfectly decent description of the concept of “what the base requirements are for a subject being given a valid article”, is the equivalent of slavery? This smells suspiciously like Godwin… Dronebogus (talk) 10:32, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Please read comments before responding to them. jp×g🗯️ 21:46, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  I did. The fact that you’re bringing up slavery at all to win an argument over synonymous terminology on Wikipedia is borderline offensive. Dronebogus (talk) 07:16, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  I used it as an example of a thing which most people agreed was bad. Do you disagree that it is bad? What is the objection here? jp×g🗯️ 08:25, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Support change to any of the proposed alternatives, with a preference for eligibility. I am not convinced by the arguments consisting of what is in essence an appeal to tradition, and of the "cost" of the measure. The very format of Wikipedia allows for in-depth changes and long-term thinking, so we should not try to fossilize things more than they do naturally. If there is a way to improve something, even though uncomfortable, then we should do it and not cede to natural conservative impulses. I also disagree with the argument that it is pointless to improve some of the jargon we use, because some jargon is inevitable and there will always be a learning curve for editors; I would understand this if this was about a minor concept or acronym, but in this case we are talking about a core term with a long, documented and continuing history of confusion behind it. Aside from having grown into a meaning (in my opinion) radically different than common usage, the core problem behind the word notability is that it is unhelpfully self-referential, looking and feeling like a judgement call on a subject itself. Suitability or eligibility necessarily and naturally point towards the idea that a set of criteria exist, and I think the meaning of such words really matters, both for helping new editors understand the concept, but also for the way we collectively think about what it means for a subject to warrant having its own article. I would see such a change as a welcome first step of a larger process, involving a rethink and a grouping of all WP:GNG, WP:SNG, WP:ISNOT, WP:MERGE and so on, so instead of taking away from the current polciies and guidelines, it would help clarify them in the long run. As an aside, I had not thought of the moral connotations of "suitability" but I see the point made by others, and I do think we need to keep it in one word for convenience. Choucas0 🐦‍⬛⋅💬⋅📋 20:08, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose as the cure being worse than the disease. Yes, Wikipedia-notability and dictionary-notability are not quite the same thing. But they're close, so it's a useful clue. "Eligibility" makes it sound like an elite club ("Sorry, your dad is INELIGIBLE for admittance into the cool Wikipedia articles club"). "Suitability" is too vague - great, so what's suitable? Thinking about dictionary-notability at least gets people close, which suitability doesn't help at all for. SnowFire (talk) 22:55, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
• Neutral: I agree with fixing the confusion of our wikinotability terminology, but every new name is far too inventive for its own good. We don't need inventiveness. On Wikipedia, a guideline "is an accurate description of best practice". And currently, the best practice in terms of clarity is to link to this guideline as WP:Significant Coverage (or WP:SIGCOV). Shooterwalker (talk) 00:07, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Though the issue with SIGCOV is that that only applies with the GNG and maybe select SNGs. While the desire is to have significant coverage regardless of the topic's field, WP:N recognizes that for the purposes of developing an article, significant coverage may come later but based on merit and other factors set by SNGs. Which still fits with our wiki definition of notability. Masem (t) 00:22, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  I agree, and it still doesn't make it any less valid as a title. By the same token, WP:Neutral point of view expresses the desire to write Wikipedia from a neutral point of view, but the policy recognizes that this involves expressing multiple reliably sourced viewpoints. The title is only the headline, and "significant coverage" is a much clearer headline. Hence why so many editors use it. Shooterwalker (talk) 00:35, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  It is also a totally inaccurate and misleading description of certain SNGs, and therefore inappropriate as a shortcut for the concept of notability in general (rather than GNG more specifically). I regularly see this as a problem on declined drafts about professors, where the draft reviewer has told the drafter that they need to demonstrate notability through significant coverage in sources. In fact notability through WP:PROF is not achieved in that way, and these drafts typically fall into two cases: (1) they do not pass WP:PROF and more sourcing will not help, or (2) they do already meet WP:PROF but the sourcing is inadequate for WP:V. In this second case, changing the wording for notability will not help because notability is not the issue. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:55, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, that was my point. SIGCOV only is a fair replacement for the GNG but cannot readily extend to all SNGs, and thus falls into the same problem (trading off one benefit for at least one new problem). Masem (t) 11:57, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks for acknowledging that "WP:Significant Coverage" is a substitute for "WP:Notability" in many cases. I mean this in the most descriptive sense of the term substitute: most times where WP:N or WP:GNG comes up up on talk pages, it's nearly interchangable with WP:SIGCOV.

  I don't want to completely dismiss the concern about WP:SNGs, but it's a smaller and less frequent issue than the semantic confusion that "notability" is built on. The singular section about SNGs can be re-framed as "exceptions to significant coverage", or "considerations for specific subjects", or something else that summarizes the current section. Shooterwalker (talk) 17:50, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  I'm a bit confused; is there an argument that the wording change would solve the second issue? Aaron Liu (talk) 22:50, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  The argument is that Shooterwalker's suggestion of using "significant coverage" instead of "notability" to refer broadly to our notability criteria would be a bad idea because it is too specific to one particular type of notability criterion. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:12, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Verificability is not a notability criterion; it's an article content criterion. Pages that only fail V would stay in mainspace but with the badly sourced material removed (or even just staying there).
  I agree with your position against always replacing N with SigCov, but I don't see what you mean by emphasizing your second case and saying it applies to the idea of renaming notability in general. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:09, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Weak oppose In order to actually understand and apply "wiki-notability", a new editor still needs to read the vast swathes of guidelines that explain what it is in different scenarios. Having a more accurate word for this concept when they first encounter it seems to be a such a minor benefit that it won't justify the effort of implementing the change, and having untold numbers of historic discussions using different terms for the same thing. That said, I agree with the general principle that the current term isn't ideal. Scribolt (talk) 06:26, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  The current name could in fact be preventing many from reading it because they think it just means fame and that the page is about ways to evaluate fame which they don't need because the subject is already extremely famous. Aaron Liu (talk) 11:53, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Solution in search of a problem. -- Necrothesp (talk) 09:10, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, solution in search of a problem. Stifle (talk) 13:11, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, a solution in search of a problem. The first affirmative has failed to make a prima facie case there's a significant issue to correct. They don't like it for reasons. This and the other linked discussions don't bring us to any single point of agreement there are any significant harms to anybody. As of this datestamp, I see a minority of participants so far who support some sort of change. Many of those supporting have some agreement with the premise (that "notability" is a poor choice of descriptors) but most disagree we can change a major plank of our approach (by completely changing our phrasing) over a three month phase-in period. None of the mentioned alternatives avoids subjective bias quite as well as our existing (and distinctive) usage seems to have done for twenty-plus years. BusterD (talk) 13:34, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  This proposal is for gradually moving the page and replacing mentions of "notability" in PaG. Nobody can regulate which synonyms someone uses; we can only hope, and that many would use the old term is pretty much the same situation we find ourselves in when referring to ContentiousTopics (formerly known as DS). Aaron Liu (talk) 22:49, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Your opinion in this matter is highly valued. BusterD (talk) 01:16, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Sorry, I didn't mean to claim "my" was the important part. I've removed the last sentence of mine (which, for anyone who didn't see my comment, originally said "IMO this is not a good reason to oppose a transition."). Aaron Liu (talk) 01:29, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose In my experience, the major misunderstanding comes from the confusion of "notability" vs. "importance". When I was more active in WP technology articles, very often I saw "This is an important manufacturer of squiggles and the worldwide number-one supplier of polyfurcated thingamajigs. How come it is not notable for Wikipedia?" If we change the term to "suitable", the puzzlement will remain only it will change to "How come it is not suitable for Wikipedia?" - and our answer will be "See WP:SUITABILITY", right? Find 12 differences in it. :-) --Altenmann >talk 02:33, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, I don't think this is the magic bullet for new editor confusion it's been made out as. The other (non-notability) criteria mean it might add to the confusion. Other possible names can be considered, though. Toadspike [Talk] 06:53, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose Notability has a clear and concise definition which eligibility and suitibility lacks (I share SnowFire's opinion above that eligibility makes it seem like an elite club and suitibility is far too vague). If someone takes it as a personal insult, they are either not here to build an encyclopedia (as I imagine these issues manifest most of the time in cases where the editor has a COI or connection to the subject) or are not competent. Curbon7 (talk) 08:30, 9 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Pppery: "Notability" here is supposed to be an imperfect proxy for notability IRL, as determined by RS, and that is the reason for the term. The confusion would only be increased by moving away from it in favor of "suitability" etc.--MattMauler (talk) 12:01, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  No, it's so articles written can be verified, neutral, etc. There's no principle that Wikipedia should only include articles with notability IRL. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:53, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The standards for having an article are apart from the standards for an article's content. In the real world, subjects are notable for their importance or significance, which is a subjective value judgement dependent on the underlying principles being used by the person making the determination. Note one set of principles isn't necessarily better than another; they can just serve different purposes. (Those writing a sports encyclopedia might place a higher priority on including many sports figures, while those writing a more general culture encyclopedia might want to focus on those who had a significant impact on some broad segment of society.) In lieu of trying to define a set of common principles, English Wikipedia largely relies on the judgement about importance and significance by third-party sources, with some different metrics used for specific areas where the community thinks it's necessary. isaacl (talk) 17:05, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Indeed, but these guidelines exist so that an article complying with content policies (based on our scope) can exist, and not so that everything we include is notable IRL:

  The primary purpose of these standards is to ensure that editors create articles that comply with major content policies.

  Because these requirements are based on major content policies, they apply to all articles, not solely articles justified under the general notability criteria.

  Aaron Liu (talk) 17:24, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  In some hypothetical theoretical ideal world, maybe. In practice, GNG is used as a stand-in for importance, causing much cognitive dissonance in AfDs when topics with no apparent importance have significant publicity and causing AfD participants to make twisted arguments that certain forms of significant publicity somehow don't count because they're "routine". Most of the confusion among new editors that has led to the present debate is also caused by the same issue, in a different direction, when they think that a topic is important and don't understand that we are looking for a different thing, significant publicity.

  I think we would be better off with more SNGs that explicitly focused on markers of importance rather than publicity, like the now-gone SNG that gave notability to all Olympians, but that's a topic for a different debate. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:01, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Importance is not always a good measure for whether a topic can sustain a standalone article. Many Olympians have the problem that while can document their participation at the event, anything else about would require extensive searching and that's not an assurance that more than a couple bio points could be found.

  What also tends to be a problem is that editors feel that a standalone must be had for any important topic. There are other ways to cover important topics lacking in depth coverage, such as lists (along with redirects for searching), which would absolutely make sense for the case of Olympians from a given country. Masem (t) 18:11, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

Discussion re: RfC on change of name

I think this is the wrong way to go about attempting to change things.

• First write an essay to explain the concept to new editors, using terms that you think are an improvement. (You can use redirects if there is more than one option, but that may make the following steps harder). Make sure it's a comprehensive and useful summary, not simply an argument favoring a change of name, and work with other editors on this page to maximize the chances of success. There are existing explanatory essays, like WP:Notability explained, that can be used as a guide.
• When ready, leave a brief note at a few appropriate locations advertising the essay and explaining the rationale.
• If you're right, and the essay is in fact helpful (or can become so after additional input from others), then it will be a valuable improvement to the encyclopedia, which is the important part.
• After several years, it may even become the default way of explaining notability to new editors, and the WP editing community will view the two terms as synonymous.Then propose a change to the name of the policy, which at that point will just be an acknowledgement of what has already happened.

--Sunrise (talk) 00:24, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• I tend to call it our [[WP:N|inclusion criteria]] and nobody's blocked me for that yet even though that's not the actually the name of the page so I'd agree people can probably just call it what they want to even without the RFC being successful. Alpha3031 (t • c) 10:52, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Nobody will block you for something so trivial, so don't read that lack of block as an actual endorsement. What about all the users who do call notability as such and were not blocked either? Cambalachero (talk) 11:14, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• I think this can safely be snow closed just because of the massive amount of !oppose votes (a very rough estimate is over twice the number of supporters). It’s highly improbable that a proposal this controversial and huge would ever get the level of support (I’d say supermajority at minimum) needed to pass. This needs a very long period of refinement and grassroots support building to have any chance of being adopted. Jumping to RfC was a recipe for failure. Dronebogus (talk) 11:44, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  That's fair; however I think there is an underlying theme in the majority of the !votes that our definition of notability is pretty flawed and confusing to newcomers, irregardful of the name change. Ca ^{talk to me!} 11:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  And i think even when you read many of the oppose votes, there is an acknowledgement that we need to make a change, but what that is i think is going to be difficult to agree on. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 12:00, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  …which still proves my point that this should be closed as premature and unlikely to ever reach consensus. Ironing out any sort of change to how we discuss and define “notability” would be a years long process probably requiring a dedicated wikiproject. Dronebogus (talk) 12:08, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  There is another thread regarding several other P&G that have titles that if new editors don't read that page, will have the wrong impression of what the actual P&G say (eg like with NPOV). That seems to be an issue that needs addressing first rather than focusing on any one page to address it, figuring out how to help new editors spend the time to read these core policies pages before editing. Masem (t) 15:03, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  So should we be actually rethinking the whole structure to make it easier to understand? We have Wp:N, Wp:NOT, GNG, SNG, NPOV etc. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:02, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  No, we should be trying to instill the idea that there are some terms of art words and phrases that an editor is going to see on a daily basis that they should familize themselves with before actually editing to understand what these mean in practice. We shouldn't be trying to change P&G to deal with editors that are refusing to look at P&G. Masem (t) 16:09, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  But isn't that part of the confusion as shown above in the discussions. We have multiple layers of rules, guidlines snd essays which confuse and contradict. As a new editor over a decade ago, I didn't really get what notability meant, and when several articles I created went to AFD I was upset and didn't edit fur a while. Since then as an editor i am frustrated by the madness of some of the sillyness which exists. Take WP:GEOLAND and the statement Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low. This is an issue with editors taking census as gospel that it that means it's legally recognised, but it is only in the US. Then you have pages of results, from elections to sports, which as per our own guidelines should not be in Wikipedia without independent refs and reviews - but we still have them and at AFD they get kept. Then there is the constant argument over stubs, and as per in this conversation editors not understanding the difference between GNG and SNG (WP:Prof). We should be looking at refreshing and simplifying what the rules. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 07:50, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Agree 1,000% with your closing statement, @Davidstewartharvey. And if “looking at and simplifying the rules” to deal with the “multiple layers of rules, guidelines and essays which confuse and contradict” can be done in addition to what now seems a clear vote not to change notability to suitability, it will be a win for all of us — no matter how we voted individually. Augnablik (talk) 08:12, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  I'm curious; could you link me it? Aaron Liu (talk) 00:39, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  On a related note, I actually had a partial draft of an essay explaining terms of art in general, and this comment reminded me of it. I have now finished it off and posted it at WP:Terms of art on Wikipedia. Improvements are welcome. Sunrise (talk) 07:41, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  Hmm, the only terms that seem to have a different meaning to me there are "notability" and "consensus". The other words mean what they mean. Aaron Liu (talk) 11:34, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

They're all examples of terms where I've seen these issues - i.e. new editors misunderstanding definitions, arguments based on attempts to apply dictionary definitions, and/or name change proposals. While they're all more or less descriptive terms for what the topic is about, how well it matches depends on perspective. For instance, the difference between the common meaning of "neutral" and NPOV's specific meaning is a perennial source of confusion, to the point that the connection to proportional representation is explained in the NPOV FAQ, at least two essays, and even its own section in NPOV. Sunrise (talk) 22:34, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

Makes sense. So "consensus" is the only non-notability term listed that doesn't follow the dictionary definition instead of merely being frequently misinterpreted, as with the common meaning of "neutral" (favoring neither pro or con in a debate) giving false balance would favor the overrepresented side. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:10, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

• While it is indeed improbable that such a change could only be enacted with a wide majority that is obviously not there, it does not mean that snow-closing the thread is a good idea. It is a complex issue and it is good to let the community express their view on it, especially now that it has been advertized on WP:CENT. We might want to come back to views expressed here if this question comes back in the future (and I am quite confident it will). Choucas0 🐦‍⬛⋅💬⋅📋 20:13, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  In the opening post of this Discussion section, Sunrise mentions writing an essay, and points to WP:Notability explained. That spurred me to think that that explanatory essay might be useful to help address the concerns that motivated the rename proposal in the first place. It's something that editors could link to when it needs explanation. It strikes me as maybe needing some revision, but it explains how we use "notability" to mean something different than what the dictionary says. That could help, and it's an alternative to a name change. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:28, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  I thought I understood what the proposal was, but now I'm not so sure. Just changing the name from Notability to Suitability or anything else isn't going to resolve the confusion. The confusion is that there are two basic criteria for articles: 1) that the subject has to be worthy of its own, independent article, and 2) that the information has been properly sourced. I could write an article about myself and have lots of great sources, but that doesn't mean that article should exist. OTOH, as it states in the guideline, "The absence of sources or citations in a Wikipedia article... does not indicate that a subject is not notable." There has to be a clear distinction between these two criteria, and currently there is not because they both fall under Notability. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 07:20, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  You've repeated this exact reasoning four times. That means it's harder to point out if you're wrong since one might read another comment rather than the one replied to, and that forks the same debate over the same debate across multiple threads. Aaron Liu (talk) 11:38, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

The problems is even Wikipedia experts and the observed reality all conflict with each other. My own observation/ "grand unification theory" :-) is at Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works A bit abstract/ structural so still a work in progress. Per the above I also started a WP:Suitability essay. North8000 (talk) 22:41, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• At the very least this should have started by voting on what the best replacement term for “notability” would be, if it was implemented at all (my vote would be “wikinotability” because it at least refines the meaning a little while not actually changing the core terminology) and then vote on whether to implement if (and only if) a consensus was formed on what the replacement would be. Dronebogus (talk) 10:42, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  Good idea on the "wikinotability".North8000 (talk) 23:44, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

  That was brought up during the Before at idea lab; there, nobody responded to it (save the proposer of the RfC who responded negatively). It would be pretty bad to start an RfC that doesn't have the possibility of changing anything and with so many options (perhaps even an open end) to choose from. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:20, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

  The best option still would have been an RfC on “what could we potentially change ‘notability’ to?” rather than “change longstanding terminology to something nonspecific y/n?” Dronebogus (talk) 07:20, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose nothing is broken. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 05:56, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Definition of "notability"

This article seems to be conflating "notability" with "sourced". We all know that articles should be well sourced. But just because statements in an article can be independently and reliably sourced, doesn't mean the subject is notable. Reading through this article, I'm more confused than when I started. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 22:22, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't conflating things so much as inventing its own idiosyncratic definition for the word "notable". If you pretend the words "notable" and "notability" don't already exist in English and resist the intuitive associations you'd make for those words based on the ordinary meanings of "note", "-able", and "-ability", it may help.

As for why it's this way, I guess it's because Jimmy Wales et alia knew the criteria they wanted to apply and didn't already have a word available for them so they co-opted an existing one. Largoplazo (talk) 13:10, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Yes, this guideline is about things being "sourced". For some reason, editors decided to call this guideline "notability", in the sense that something "sourced" is also "noted". There are perennial efforts to rename this guideline to be more clear, but it is hard to change something that has been in place for more than a decade. Shooterwalker (talk) 14:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

If I may chime in, notability isn't a yes or no question, instead rather a likelihood. Every subject appears as on a continuum. I prefer to use the phrase "sufficiently notable" or "sufficiently sourced to meet NOTE". A very good way of learning about GNG and SNG is to read or participate in WP:Articles for deletion procedures where such disagreement is hashed out in case-by-case using varying tagged examples. BusterD (talk) 14:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I agree. If a subject is noted then it is definitely and indisputably notable. If a subject isn't noted in practice, it could still be potentially noted in the sense that we just need to find the sources that note it. Hence notability. (I still think our terminology creates unnecessary confusion, but it's not completely baseless.) Shooterwalker (talk) 14:51, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

"Notability" is a characteristic of the topic, while "sourced" is a characteristic of the state of an article or draft at a moment in time usually called "now", Ghost writer's cat. It is quite common to encounter poorly sourced articles about clearly notable topics, where plenty of reliable sources offering significant coverage of the topic can be easily found with a couple of minutes of competent search engine work. Poor sourcing in itself is not persuasive evidence that the topic is not notable. Cullen328 (talk) 06:42, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@Cullen328 I agree. But I came here trying to find the criteria for whether a subject is worthy of its own article, then got lost in the lengthy explanation about sources. The editors need to make a clear distinction, using different terminology, between subjects that are noteworthy (i.e. deserving of their own article) but for which sufficient sources don't exist (therefore not notable) and those that have plenty of adequate sources but are not deserving. Right now, the "criteria for notability" is applied to both, which is why it's confusing. I could probably write an article about myself and provide good sources for all the information, but am I worthy of my own article? No. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 00:12, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Ghost writer's cat, in Wikipedia terms, there is no such thing as a topic which is noteworthy (i.e. deserving of their own article) that is not covered by reliable sources. Even the most lenient interpretations of special notability guidelines require some coverage in reliable sources, as required by the core content policy Verifiability. If you have received truly significant coverage in truly reliable sources that are independent of you, then you are eligible for a Wikipedia biography. Cullen328 (talk) 00:47, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

@Cullen328 Yes, I understand that. I should have been more clear above... where I wrote "for which sufficient sources don't exist" I meant they don't exist within the article. That is, the article hasn't been properly sourced. As this article notes, "The absence of sources or citations in a Wikipedia article... does not indicate that a subject is not notable." Ghost writer's cat (talk) 02:32, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

@Shooterwalker, I think I understand what you're saying, but it doesn't coincide with the definitions. The first line of this article states, "On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." They are using notability here to mean noteworthy, not "able to be noted". It even later states, "The absence of sources or citations in a Wikipedia article... does not indicate that a subject is not notable." But the very next sentence states, "Notability requires only that suitable independent, reliable sources exist in the real world." This is why it's confusing-- those two sentences, taken literally, contradict each other. (The second sentence is badly written; it's not conveying the intended meaning. The "only" is the problem—it should be deleted.) And since the article then goes on to discuss at length the value of sources, it loses the bigger picture of whether a subject is worthy of its own article in the first place. Ghost writer's cat (talk) 00:00, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

@Ghost writer's cat, "notability", or at least GNG, on Wikipedia is defined by a subject's sourceability. Although there can be more nuance, in general a subject cannot warrant its own article if independent secondary RS providing SIGCOV do not exist anywhere in the world. To actually establish notability, the subject (not the article) must have this coverage; however, that coverage does not necessarily need to be demonstrated, e.g. via citations in its wikipedia article, until the subject's notability is challenged. JoelleJay (talk) 14:40, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@JoelleJay I disagree on your first point, as the article clearly describes notability as being independent of verifiable sources. More to the point, if notability were defined as you say, then how is it distinguished from WP:Verifiability? Ghost writer's cat (talk) 15:31, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

"Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable, independent sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. ", So no, if there is no coverage, it's not notalbe. Slatersteven (talk) 15:35, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@Ghost writer's cat No it doesn't? Like, at all? On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable, independent sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. The test to decide whether a topic can be presumed to warrant its own article is by assessing whether the topic meets GNG or an SNG. GNG and many SNGs ultimately require IRS SIGCOV of the subject to exist.

Verifiability is a property of the information already present in a given article: it only requires that a statement can be sourced to a reliable source, and this source does not have to be secondary, independent, or SIGCOV. Notability (GNG) requires that the subject has received secondary SIGCOV in a reliable source that is also independent of the subject, but this coverage does not always immediately have to be present in the article. JoelleJay (talk) 15:47, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@JoelleJay Okay, and where most people are arguing over notability I think what they're really discussing is verifiability. I think they're confused. They're arguing that if they can produce reliable, secondary sources for the content, the subject is thereby worthy of an independent article under Notability. (This whole subject keeps going around and around... It's a chicken and egg thing. I don't care what WP wants to name things, I just wish the guidance were more clear instead of mixing the explanations. That's my only goal. But apparently the confusion is too widespread.) Ghost writer's cat (talk) 16:08, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

I do not think anyone who is arguing over "notability" actually means "verifiability". People who are saying a subject is notable based on being able to produce IRS SIGCOV in multiple sources on it are correctly demonstrating notability. Any source that can contribute to notability must necessarily meet "verifiability", but RS verifiably existing is absolutely not sufficient for a topic to be notable. The order of operations in article creation and retention of (GNG) subjects is: IRS SIGCOV found (or its existence at least strongly presumed) --> article created (with or without the IRS SIGCOV cited) --> notability challenged --> IRS SIGCOV identified and cited --> article retained. JoelleJay (talk) 18:20, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Suggestion about NOPAGE

I often find arguments about NOPAGE include something about how it is better for the reader for everything to be in one place instead of in standalone articles. While I can understand this perspective, I think it's also important to note that this can make it more difficult for readers to navigate as well. In my personal experience, search engines often don't include Wikipedia articles in the results if the subtopic is a redirect to another article, likely because of how SEO works. I don't think the average reader is relying on Wikipedia search for navigation. What are some thoughts from other editors about maybe saying something about this possible downside in that section? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:08, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

I don't think we write WP to worry about how search engines pick it up. There are some things we have placed the proper commands to request no indexing like user pages, but I dont think in terms of mainspace content we worry about how a search engine indexes it. Of course, when a topic is brought into a larger topic page per NOPAGE, we should have appropriate headers and anchors to be clear the topic exists on that page, which should help with search engine identification. Masem (t) 01:24, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

A different downside to merging smaller articles into larger ones, also not mentioned there, is the formation of articles that are packed with too much material making it difficult to find the one specific thing that one seeks. For me one that stands out is Chernoff bound, where the part I almost always want to refer to but have trouble finding is Chernoff bound § Multiplicative form (relative error). It's not even a very long article, just dense. No doubt others have examples that are less technical. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:26, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Obviously one shouldn't write an article just from the SEO implications but what I was talking about is when people invoke the spirit of Wikipedia:Readers first in merge discussions with the underlying implication that merging will always serve the reader best. The very first sentence of NOPAGE reads When creating new content about a notable topic, editors should consider how best to help readers understand it., afterall. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:32, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think guidance is necessary on creating separate articles in order to assist search engines (internal or external). I agree that putting everything into one large article may not best serve readers. I do think, though, that many editors are biased towards creating new articles, so I appreciate why Wikipedia:Notability § Whether to create standalone pages spends most of its text covering scenarios where including content in an existing article is desirable. I'm not sure if making the text longer with more examples of creating separate articles would be a net positive. isaacl (talk) 02:44, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm not saying guidance is nessecary to create separate articles that do not yet exist but I do think some counterarguments are good because this shortcut is used in contexts outside of that. I'm a bit tired of seeing merge discussions that everyone can agree meets GNG but is simply a short article because the possibilities of those could go on forever. GNG isn't a guarantee something deserves a standalone article, but GNG exists as a rule of thumb for a reason. A sentence or two emphasizing the latter (along with other concrete reasons not to merge) might be useful in preventing the waste of a lot of editor time. Examples give people ideas of when something does or does not apply. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:31, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

The search engine issue runs the other way too. I'm not sure how the algorithms work, but they don't seem to like to show multiple Wikipedia articles in the early results, so creating a new article will hide the others, even if the others have more information. CMD (talk) 03:43, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

But if someone is looking for something in particular, doesn't it make sense to show them what they're actually looking for? Maybe they don't want more information. If it's linked within the article, they can always seek it out on their own. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 10:31, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

That assumes the person is specifically writing exactly the words needed to find what they're looking for, which will often be a flawed assumption. CMD (talk) 17:32, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

My first comment was specifically regarding your suggestion of adding some guidance based on assisting search engines. There may be of course other improvements that can be made to the guidance on whether to create standalone pages. I'm wary of just adding more stuff to the section, but of course it depends on how it's done, including possible copy edits to streamline it. Perhaps you or someone else can draft a holistic example of how the entire section might be modified? isaacl (talk) 18:43, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

I agree that drafts of examples would be a useful idea but I'm at a loss for something that would be both simple enough and not ruffle too many feathers (aka something that hopefully everyone can agree is a good thing). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:06, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

IMO search engine concerns are low enough on a list of priorities that they should not modify normal decisions on these type of things. In short, IMO make the decision the normal way based on the normal considerations without being influenced by search engine considerations. North8000 (talk) 14:05, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

I'll also voice my opinion that search engines are a tangential concern. The goal is to write good articles, and covering things in context is often really helpful. Additional advice or counterarguments can be in an essay, not the official guideline. Shooterwalker (talk) 14:32, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

My point wasn't solely about search engines, though. If the goal is to just write "good articles", shouldn't counterarguments that also lead to that be included? It seems odd to me to just shoehorn that into an essay. Like the section as it's written could be perceived as contradicting other sections, which isn't a good thing for a guideline. What's to stop someone from nominating every start class article that meets GNG into a larger concept article? Discretion is important, but where people draw the line varies, hence why I think it's useful to provide more examples. I have similar frustrations about an entirely different thing over at Wikipedia talk:Categorization because whether or not a category is diffusing is often "someone decided that when it was created" vs "these are the circumstances where this decision makes more sense". I'd say NOPAGE as written is definitely less ambiguous than that situation, but it's still a bit too vague in my opinion. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:24, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

There's nothing stopping such a nomination, just as there's nothing stopping any particular editor turning each section of an article into its own discrete stub. However, the way the processes tend to play out, the second is going to be the more successful endeavour. CMD (talk) 17:36, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

I don't understand the last post. But as an observation, if an article has solid or even close to GNG compliance I never see discussions/proposals/arguments/ to upmerge it and I think that this rarely happens. And most of when I see it come up is where there's nowhere near GNG compliance and....most commonly is where the lower level article is either has promotional intent (e.g. individual song of a band or product of a company) or completionist work like "I'm going to make an article for each stop/staqtion on a train line" or "I'm going to make a stats-only article for each season of a particular sports team or each election in a particular district". Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:05, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

If it rarely happens maybe I've just been unlucky. But it's definitely the impression I've had in merge discussions. The circumstances you describe above make way more sense to me for situations where one should merge, so maybe this page should explicitly state that? Because I really have seen NOPAGE applied more broadly and meeting GNG not being enough if it's a start class article. I think there's a real detriment to doing that. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

I've heard that shorter articles are preferred by mobile users. That makes sense to me. Who's going to spend half an hour or more scrolling through a long article on a phone? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

"Directly and in detail"

Perhaps this guidance could have a clarification on what it means to be "direct". Since it isn't explicitly defined, some editors argue that nonspecific coverage of a group, e.g. "[6-person sports team] flew to [host country] and successfully defended its title in [tournament], with all players scoring points despite struggling in the unexpected heat", is also direct coverage of each individual member (or at least of any members mentioned elsewhere in the source). JoelleJay (talk) 14:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

That view is contrary to any reasonable definitions of the word "directly" and the phrase "in detail". I don't think we need to start defining ordinary words because some people make dumb arguments. voorts (talk/contributions) 16:22, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@Voorts, I agree, but I think the argument is that if all the details in the coverage of a group apply equally to each member, then it wouldn't be OR to state those details just in the context of one member in an article on that member... ∴ the clause so that no original research is needed to extract the content is satisfied... ∴ the "SIGCOV" part of GNG is satisfied... Obviously the intent of having SIGCOV, and its application in practice, goes beyond simply the requirement that a given source not need OR to use it, but I have encountered arguments in multiple AfDs, including by admins, where parts of a source that are talking about a group are claimed to be SIGCOV of one of its members. JoelleJay (talk) 18:34, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

I agree that it wouldn't be OR.

I'm not sure that there is a single, objective, universal answer. On the one hand, if something is said about two people, it's nitpicky to say this isn't directly about the two people. On very extreme the other end of the spectrum, we can source "All men are mortal", but we're not going to add "Sooner or later, he's going to die" to every BLP, nor would we consider that large group reference to show anything about the notability of any individual. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:47, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

It's going to be subjective but we pose this as being far from just a passing mention. The entire reference doesn't have to be focused on the topic in question but it should at least one paragraph devoted to directly taking that topic. Masem (t) 16:36, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Sure, but what does it mean for a paragraph to be "devoted to directly talking about that topic"? JoelleJay (talk) 18:23, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

I suggest that a paragraph is "devoted to directly talking about that topic" if it provides you with material that is incontestably suitable for a Wikipedia article about that topic. For example, if you have a passage about Bob's Big Business, Inc. that provides you useful encyclopedic information for an article on Bob's Big Business, Inc., then that's "directly talking about that topic"; if you instead have a passage that maybe namechecks the business but is actually talking about the widget industry in general, or about something tangentially related (Bob likes baseball; Bob's sister is a possibly notable lawyer), then that's not incontestably suitable for a Wikipedia article about the business, as editors could argue that Bob's love of baseball is about him, and his sister's career ought to be described in a separate article, Lee Lawyer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:53, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

That's how I view this too. See my essay WP:SPECTRUM. voorts (talk/contributions) 14:22, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

This is a good essay. I might not agree with 100% of it, but it explains why bright line tests aren't going to work. It's going to come down to what lets us build a unique non-stub article. Anything less is either ripe for deletion, or at best a merge into another non-stub article. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:38, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

IMO the main intent is we need the type of coverage of the topic of the article to build a real enclyclopedia article on the topic of the article from. "Directly" means the content is about the topic of the article. I think that that provides guidance for people who are seeking it. But maybe we should add " "Directly" means the content is about the topic of the article " to handle situations where folks prefer to not follow the intended meaning of "directly". Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:48, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

"Rebuttable presumption"

Pinging @Masem and @WikiOriginal-9.

I don't like exactly the wording of "assumption" but it appears that "presumption" is not favored, so taking to talk page as part of WP:BRD cycle.

"Rebuttable presumption" doesn't sound too deletion leaning, it sounds less clunky than "assumption, not a guarantee". At least that is my thought. What do you think? Aasim (話す（はなす）) 03:48, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Notability is a rebuttable presumption in practice, and language elsewhere in the guideline uses this term. "Assumption" is a bit too much of a simplification because it belies the fact that passing the letter of the text of a test like the GNG is not assurance that notability has actually been demonstrated, that's the "rebuttable" part coming in. Masem (t) 11:57, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

For reference, I assume you are discussing this edit: Although there can be times where it is warranted, I think part of motivation for using a term other than "presumption" is to avoid using a variant of the word being described ("presumed"). I think adding "rebuttable" is redundant with the clause that the established assumption is not a guarantee. isaacl (talk) 15:36, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

"rebuttable presumption" is a legal term, see presumption, that has similar apicability to how notability is practiced particularly with SNGs, hence why we have used it here. Masem (t) 16:17, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

The guideline used to link to Rebuttable presumption, which used to be its own, law-specific article until about 18 months ago. Conclusive presumption was also a separate article back then. These were blank-and-redirect moves after 24.5 hours' "discussion" at Talk:Presumption#Merge proposal, in which the now-retired editor says that he wants to merge them, and then says that he redirected them and would later add the contents (spoiler alert: he never did, though Dl2000 merged in the contents of Conclusive presumption).

A few months after that, @Espresso Addict removed the link to Rebuttable presumption from this guideline, on the grounds that the link was a redirect. This was discussed in Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 79#Do we need "rebuttably"?

The point behind "rebuttable" language is not to create or invoke a legal system, but to clarify that this presumption is not a conclusive/mandatory/irrebuttable presumption. For those unfamiliar with this language, a rebuttable presumption is something like "I saw Karp in the elevator, and he said it was np-complete." You could rebut that with evidence showing the person didn't see Karp, it wasn't in the elevator, he didn't say that, and/or that it's not actually np-complete. A non-irrebuttable presumption is "Dogs are prohibited on the premises. However, any dog trained to assist a blind member is hereby deemed to be a cat for the purposes of enforcing the ban on dogs". You can't introduce evidence that contradicts this definition, because no factual evidence can overcome the definition. The blind member's dog is not banned, because the ban itself says that the blind member's dog isn't a dog. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "we have used it here". Are you signing on as a joint author for the proposed change? (The longstanding version to which you reverted doesn't use the word "rebuttable".) I agree with WhatamIdoing that I don't think it's necessary to draw a parallel with a legal term of art. In my view, saying something is not a guarantee is clear without using jargon. isaacl (talk) 21:31, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

If you scroll down you can see. Sometimes diffs can be confusing. Aasim (話す（はなす）) 21:46, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

It would help if you would be a bit more specific about what you are proposing. I don't know where you are scrolling (the page history?). Can you write out your proposed change on this talk page? (And any specific explanation for "we have used it here"?) isaacl (talk) 04:10, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

−

* "'''Presumed'''" means that significant coverage in [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources|reliable sources]] creates an assumption, not a guarantee, that a subject merits its own article. A more in-depth discussion might conclude that the topic actually should not have a stand-alone article—perhaps because it violates [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not|what Wikipedia is not]], particularly the rule that [[Wikipedia:INDISCRIMINATE|Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information]].<ref>Moreover, not all coverage in [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources|reliable sources]] constitutes evidence of notability for the purposes of article creation; for example, directories and databases, advertisements, announcements columns, and minor news stories are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as [[WP:RS|reliable sources]].</ref> *{{shortcut|WP:SIGCOV}} "'''Significant coverage'''" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that [[Wikipedia:No original research|no original research]] is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

+

What this means: * "'''Presumed'''" means that significant coverage in [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources|reliable sources]] creates a rebuttable [[wikt:presumption|presumption]], not a guarantee, that a subject merits its own article. A more in-depth discussion might conclude that the topic actually should not have a stand-alone article—perhaps because it violates [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not|what Wikipedia is not]], particularly the rule that [[Wikipedia:INDISCRIMINATE|Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information]].<ref>Moreover, not all coverage in [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources|reliable sources]] constitutes evidence of notability for the purposes of article creation; for example, directories and databases, advertisements, announcements columns, and minor news stories are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as [[WP:RS|reliable sources]].</ref> *{{shortcut|WP:SIGCOV}} "'''Significant coverage'''" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that [[Wikipedia:No original research|no original research]] is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than just a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

Essentially this is what was supposed to be shown by the diff. MediaWiki failed at indicating exactly what changed. Aasim (話す（はなす）) 16:53, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what I understood was being changed in the diff. isaacl (talk) 08:59, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

IMO the actual longstanding version is the one that contained a link to Rebuttable presumption for 13 years, representing 70% of this guideline's existence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:46, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I was just quoting the edit summary. The initial reply said "language elsewhere in the guideline uses this term", thus stating that the term is in current version. I understand the guideline used to contain related language before. isaacl (talk) 04:09, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

The link (not always the word rebuttable, but always the link itself) was in the lead for 13 years. I haven't checked other parts of the guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

On notability and scientific churnalism

I am raising this issue here for comments since I see it as an issue that is coming up indirectly at AfD discussions and related questions of notability. It relates to what is called churnalism, which is the proliferation of reproduction of press releases from universities and companies. One example is the 58 articles listed here, mainly IMO because the Internet likes cats. (I am using that example as I don't want to denegrate the work of others.) I do not consider those 58 articles as WP:SIGCOV, it is WP:TOOSOON.

When it comes to BLP academic notability, churnalism articles are generally discounted or ignored, the key test is peer recognition. While I have often seen them ignored for proposed products or new science papers, I have also seen them invoked. I think opinions plus some general edits to the various notability pages might be useful. (Apologies if there is already material and/or an essay or three that I have missed.) Ldm1954 (talk) 11:49, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

N.B., there is an essay WP:CHURNALISM which is relevant, but not exactly on this. It could be expanded. Ldm1954 (talk) 12:27, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Think there is one existing aspect of notability that can already be used, in that a burst of coverage is not considered a factor for notability, but enduring coverage. Churnalism is not enduring.

The other factor that could be argued is that when there is clearly one primary source that dozens of other sources have reported on (this is not limited to scientific fields), those additional sources are ''not'' independent nor secondary coverage generally if they are just repeating the points of the primary source. (I have seen good secondary sources discuss the impact that the primary source describes in a larger manner, transforming that information, which is fine). We don't use primary sources for determining notability. Masem (t) 12:35, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for raising this issue. WP:CHURNALISM is an issue in many topic areas and I think it's inevitable that we'll need to confront it across the board. For now, I've only seen reactions on a source-by-source basis. The problem with that it fails to address the problem across the board. It also fails to consider that some sources do put out low-quality fact-checked reporting mixed in with low-quality clickbait for engagement. And that's going to become more and more the norm, as the journalism industry suffers economic hardship. Shooterwalker (talk) 23:37, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

It's already in the guideline: Wikipedia:Notability#Notable topics have attracted attention over a sufficiently significant period of time. Brief bursts of news coverage may not sufficiently demonstrate notability. It doesn't matter whether that's technically churnalism (e.g., a quickly copyedited press release) or just the thing that everyone independently decided to write about last Thursday (e.g., "Look at what she wore to the gala") and never thought about again afterwards. If it's only in the news for one week, it's not notable/doesn't qualify for a separate article. (Something that is only in the media briefly could still be appropriate to include as a paragraph in a larger article.)

I assume this relates to the dispute at Superwood, which the OP has sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Superwood, and the complaint the OP filed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Aggressive editing by CresiaBilli. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

While that is one example, I can think of many other instances in AfC/AfD/PROD from science press releases; as in the example I mentioned earlier, it is not hard to get 50 or so hits. As the other comments above indicate, I am not alone in my concerns. While WP:Sustained as you invoke is relevant, people have responded by claiming WP:Sigcov. I think the policy you point to could be usefully reinforced by being more specific, including mentioning churnalism. Ldm1954 (talk) 01:45, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

A bunch of articles reiterating a press release is not significant coverage, because those aren't secondary or independent sources. Masem (t) 03:12, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

SIGCOV is about how much (relevant) content the source contains. SIGCOV is not about whether the source is otherwise useful or any good. A press release, like any other type of source, can be full of useless fluff and have no SIGCOV. A press release, also like any other type of source, can also be full of relevant and encyclopedically appropriate facts, in which case it's SIGCOV (but still worthless for proving notability due to its non-SIGCOV failings). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:32, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

To expand: Press releases can be independent of the source. We tend to think of them as "buy our product" or "look at what I did", but that's not the only use.

To give a real-world example, the most recent press release from Consumer Reports (which prefers to call them "news releases") is https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press-releases/2025/05/consumer-reports-investigation-uncovers-krogers-widespread-data-collection-of-loyalty-program-members-to-create-secret-shopper-profiles/ The subject is a US retailer named Kroger and their privacy practices. Consumer Reports and their press release is WP:INDY of Kroger. It's still not proof of notability, but it's an independent source if you want to expand Kroger#Controversies.

What the OP is saying is that if Consumer Reports investigates a problem, and proactively provides information about the problem to the news media, then any resulting/related news articles should be ignored as worthless churnalism. I think you'll find that the role of press releases and publicity in the news is more complicated than that simplistic judgement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:41, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

Specific suggestion (wordsmithing possible). After the paragraphs in Wikipedia:Notability#Notable topics have attracted attention over a sufficiently significant period of time add:

Similarly, reproductions or close paraphrasing of press releases from, for instance, companies or other organizations (aka churnalism) does not count as sustained coverage. This is particularly the case because in most cases these are not secondary or independent sources.

My intent is to include some specific wording that can be used in WP:NPP, perhaps eventually be added to the tagging scripts. At the moment I argue that there is a gap.Ldm1954 (talk) 03:38, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

So... the answer kinda depends on what job you think the sources are supposed to be doing for us.

If your idea is "Wikipedia shouldn't have an article on ____ unless real-world, for-profit businesses thought that spending at least n hours paying someone to research the subject, because spending money on reporters' time is how the newspaper proves that it's really worthwhile and important content", then of course you're going to object to "shortcuts" like reading information supplied by the subject.

If your idea is "Wikipedia shouldn't have an article on _____ unless professional editors decided that ____ to give them space in their publication", then the method by which the article gets written becomes much less important. What matters in that model is that the editor/publisher chose to have something in their newspaper/magazine/whatever about _____. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

I've got no objection to the suggested wording, but feel that this is fixing the smaller problem (because scientific churnalism isn't really different to any other churnalism, on which we have policies already). The huge, huge elephant in the room of science and technology is the vast increase in barely-selective journals with dubious peer review, merging into the substratum of predatory publishing and paper mills. I'll give a specific borderline example, Kirtiraj Gaikwad, recently kept at AfD based on WP:NPROF#1. He produced 45 publications in 2024, and has produced 13 already this year. Two thoughts: (1) honestly, do you believe that a researcher can produce a meaningful, novel paper in little over a week? (2) if someone produces 45 papers per year and cites themselves in each publication, is it surprising that their publications are highly cited? This sort of thing runs a risk of drastically undermining the spirit of NPROF, with the risk that the non-academic wikipedia-world will eventually rebel, and argue that peer-reviewed output isn't evidence of notability because (1) there's good documented evidence that in many cases peer review is compromised or simply not happening, and (2) citations are so contaminated by non-independent citations (self-citation, and you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours citation rings with friends) that #C1 is fatally flawed. And I'd have to agree. Elemimele (talk) 12:05, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

That might be something that is covered by what are considered reliable sources under WP:SCIRS and WP:MEDRS , and works that are not reliable sources (including non-peer reviewed journals) do not qualify to demonstrating notability. However, this also feels like more a problem specific to NPROF in handling academics that publish in this fashion, since the criteria there are a bit different from GNG due to NPROF's predating of GNG. Masem (t) 12:17, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know NPROF came before GNG, I just sort-of-assumed GNG was the original gold standard and academics got a special dispensation. I think you're right that it's specific to NPROF and I'm grateful that Ldm1954 started this discussion (I don't want to derail the topic though). Academics are unique because we're assessed so heavily on the sheer bulk of our publication output, and because of the sheer volume of outlets to be assessed; I'm not sure how we can do it without overwhelming the reliable sources noticeboard. It's really hard to distinguish a lowish-impact niche journal respected in its field and genuinely peer-reviewed from a lowish-impact predatory journal that claims to be peer-reviewed and isn't (let alone from lowish-impact non-predatory journals with stressed editors who can't find any peer reviewers and therefore fudge the issue). Elemimele (talk) 13:05, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes, NPROF is handled uniquely both due to predating GNG and that in general academics are difficult to write about from a biographical side but their research is what gets the focus. But all that said, chugging out papers in non-peer-reviewed or predatory journals should not be applicable for that demonstration. But that's all under the focus of NPROF there. Masem (t) 14:30, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

This thread is interesting but confusing because it seems to be about very different topics. Some parts of it are about academics and that SNG. But even there it seems to imply that (mere) publishing of papers by the article's subject is a way to meet criteria #1 of the SNG but I don't see where that is in the SNG or on the noted example article/AFD. But then one of the discussed examples is about a product which is very different. North8000 (talk) 14:13, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

I may have side-tracked things from Ldm1954's original concerns about academic churnalism. But yes, North8000, mere publishing of papers by the article's subject is indeed deemed a way to meet criterion #1 because (1) the peer review process is take as indicating that the work is independently viewed as valuable by someone other than the author, and (2) high-citation is taken as evidence that it's made significant impact in the scholarly discipline. My argument is that paper-mills and citation-rings and even just splitting your work into hundreds of micro-papers in low-end journals make a nonsense of both aspects, and that this is very much akin to churnalism in that it's the creation of a very large number of near-meaningless sources. Elemimele (talk) 17:51, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

The Least publishable unit is rewarded by some systems, so it'd be surprising if we didn't see it. I thought I'd heard that (some?) citation metrics discount self-citations, though. (Or maybe that was just a proposal for how to improve metrics?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:26, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

Citation rings, as mentioned by Elemimele, are about getting others to cite you (and you cite them) so that the high citations are not self-citations. It can be difficult to distinguish these from legitimate but specialized subfields where everyone cites everyone else because that's all there is to cite in the subfield. But in the occasional case when dubiously inflated citations are suspected in an academic AfD, my experience is that it is typical to look for other indicators of academic impact and other WP:PROF criteria instead. A recent example (ending in delete): Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Roshdi Khalil. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:41, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

Churnalism: can we please return to the issue of churnalism, and leave citation metrics to WT:NPROF. I think I saw in the comments a concensus developing for adding something like the text I gave. Yes? Ldm1954 (talk) 07:32, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

Not hearing any disagreements, I have been bold and added two sentences (slightly ce) to the text as I indicated above. Ldm1954 (talk) 13:58, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

I've shortened the addition, because half of what you wrote wasn't true, especially since press releases can be Wikipedia:Independent sources, and their problem isn't the lack of independence or being primary; the main problem with a press release is that it's self-published – a problem that completely goes away when The Daily News independently decides to write an article about the subject of the press release, no matter how badly the article is written (including, but not limited to, copying large chunks out of a press release).

I also wonder whether churnalism ought to be handled as a problem of "multiple sources". The guideline says "Similarly, a series of publications by the same author or in the same periodical is normally counted as one source." This is the main problem with churnalism: it's basically the same source.

On the more general question, I am doubtful that we need this in the guideline, and I predict that including it will cause problems. Specifically, just like we occasionally have editors exceed the intent of various rules – a frustrated editor declaring that they're hereby WP:CHALLENGING every single uncited sentence in every single article, or POV pushers declaring that all sources supporting the other POV are unreliable, or deletionists declaring that no _____ (fill in the blank: current events, influences, children, websites, small businesses, etc.) is ever notable – I expect we will see an increase in the number of AFD noms and delete !votes that baselessly assert that every source is mere churnalism and therefore banned by WP:N. (How does the nom know it's churnalism, you might ask? Well, first of all, no true source would ever bother writing about that kind of unimportant subject, second, everyone knows that true sources only write criticisms instead of the positive facts related in that source, and third, it's obviously UNCIVIL of anyone to question my omniscience. I just know, okay? And you will never, ever convince me that I'm wrong.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Non-prescriptive SNGs

I noticed that the subject-specific notability guideline for boxers (WP:NBOX), is not actually a notability guideline at all—it just defers to WP:SIGCOV and lists some properties that a boxer whose coverage will meet SIGCOV enough to satisfy notability requirements may have. There are tons of SSGs like this, and I don't understand why they exist. If SIGCOV exists, then this guideline is not necessary (as we don't consult SNGs for indications that a subject has good signs in their favor that a search for significant coverage will be fruitful before searching), and if it does not, then this guideline only serves as something for editors to trip over and misinterpret in defense of non-notable boxers at AfD. Where is the utility? I believe these sorts of "guidelines" should be retired. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 07:54, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

NSPORT doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not helpful at all. The sport-specific sub criteria at NSPORT is just leftover stuff from before WP:NSPORTS2022 that wasn't "participation based" (all of the participation criteria was removed). None of the individual sport guidelines have been updated with replacement criteria so we're pretty much just left with skeletonized guidelines that offer unhelpful advice like likely to be notable if they've been inducted into the hall of fame. The greatest hockey player ever, Wayne Gretzky, doesn't even pass WP:NHOCKEY. The NBOX guideline, in particular, is too strict now. You have to be ranked top ten in the world to be notable. There used to be a lot more criteria at NBOX but it was removed due to NSPORTS2022, so the only thing leftover from before NSPORT2022 is that top ten stuff. I've been seeing people cite NBOX to delete stuff, like at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emiliano Vargas, which is silly. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 08:08, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

The NBOX guideline, in particular, is too strict now. You have to be ranked top ten in the world to be notable. It is neither strict nor lax; it simply isn't. It does not make any prescriptions about notability. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 08:13, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

I know but people cite it like it does, so it existing in its current form isn't helpful. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 08:16, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

The point is to encourage editors to do a proper WP:BEFORE search, and thus limit the number of AFDs in the topic area.

By noting criteria where it is likely that SISCOV exists, we are essentially telling deletionist editors: “Hold on… there should be sources for this person/topic… BEFORE you nominate this article for deletion, please triple check that sources truly don’t exist.” Blueboar (talk) 11:32, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

As well as to encourage editors to do a better job of sourcing an article on an athlete before they rush to create the article. Masem (t) 15:40, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

By noting criteria where it is likely that SI[G]COV exists, we are essentially telling deletionist editors: “Hold on… there should be sources for this person/topic… BEFORE you nominate this article for deletion, please triple check that sources truly don’t exist.” – it doesn't have that effect at all. We still have deletionists making mass noms for topics meeting NSPORT with almost zero BEFORE (I've been accused of "playing games" on more than one occasion for asking e.g. "what BEFORE did you do for this pre-internet gold medalist at a major international competition?") and if anyone says to keep while referencing NSPORT they are chastised by the aforementioned deletionists. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:29, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

But they already have to do BEFORE! ꧁Zanahary꧂ 17:47, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

One side note. The defacto meaning of the SNG is that if you meet it you can bypass GNG / sports basic. So it's not correct to say "You have to be ranked top ten in the world to be notable." In reality it's "If you are rated in the top ten in the world you can bypass GNG/sportsbasic. North8000 (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

I disagree slightly… I don’t think it is a case of “bypassing”. We would still need to supply a source to verify that the subject is indeed “in the top 10” of their sport… and that in itself should qualify as significant coverage.

It’s more a case that when a subject passes an SNG, it is almost guaranteed that the subject will also pass the GNG. Yes, there are extremely rare situations where a subject might pass an SNG, but NOT also pass the GNG. However, we don’t write Policy/guidance to cover extremely rare circumstances. When one does occur, we can discuss and reach consensus to apply Ignore All Rules. Blueboar (talk) 15:41, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Regarding the first part of your post. That just requires meeting wp:ver for that factoid which can be done without GNG sources. Regarding the second part of your post I'm going to give a confusing answer which appears to self conflict. I agree with you that the guidelines say that, and I think that it's important that they say that. In essence that the SNG's are mere predictors of GNG compliance. I also still assert that operatively / defacto, meeting a SNG criteria allows it to bypass GNG (and in sports cases sports basic) evaluation. What reconciles it is that they are all inputs into the decision process of the fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem. The items that you point out are highly influential in that process.

If you get into other SNG's, there are clearer cases where it's sufficient to clearly pass a SNG where it's pretty clear that the subject could not pass GNG. For example, a very small town or settlement under n:geo or academics under the academic SNG. Sincerely North8000 (talk) 16:27, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

In reality it's "If you are rated in the top ten in the world you can bypass GNG/sportsbasic. – I 100% agree that's what it should be. But in reality it doesn't have that effect. Instead, if the topic isn't top 10, its "delete because fails NBOX" – now if the topic is top 10, its "delete because while the topic meets NBOX, a 30-second Google search in English on this 1960s Iraqi boxer didn't find anything, so clearly the subject is not notable". BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:33, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your post. I'm skeptical of your statement that what I said is not the case. The proof of the pudding is: Can you show me a case where a subject clearly meets the SNG but where it got deleted anyway? I mentioned this as the proof of the pudding because the rest of your post can be taken as "somebody said otherwise". "Somebody" can say anything including clearly wrong stuff. I'm also skeptical because this is flat out contrary to what WP:Notability says which is that meeting either GNG or the SNG is sufficient. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 17:33, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

From the past week: Kindie Derseh Kassie & Kinde Atanaw (I think); and also recently, from the top of my head: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lee Yeon-woo, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shahanuddin Choudhury (arguably – and subject has been identified in modern times as Bangladesh's best athlete of his era), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Konstantinos Lolos, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kouami N'Dri (and editors are fervently arguing against including any details about him anywhere), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rabieb Sangnual, many others. We've deleted Olympic medalists before (some gold): I can try to dig some of those up if you like. BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:21, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. @BeanieFan11: I don't have enough Wikiminutes to to a thorough deep dive on 7 articles /AFD's. I did scan all of the them. There's one common theme there which I didn't think about. Which is that in general they also said that they did not meet sportsbasic, and that that is a requirement of meeting the SNG. I view sportsbasic as a sort of "GNG lite". I was wondering which of these is the case regarding your post / view?

1. Just responding to my claim
2. That if they meet the sports-specific they should not be required to meet sportsbasic
3. That in general, they did also meet sportsbasic but got deleted anyway.

If you have on case which best illustrates your thoughts, that would also be useful for the discussion. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 21:08, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Personally, I think we should have it set that someone who meets the sports SNG bypasses GNG/SPORTBASIC. There are subjects that have accomplishments I think are worthy of automatic inclusion (e.g. Olympic gold medalists). Regarding SPORTBASIC, we actually have deleted articles both passing the SNG and SPORTBASIC as well (on the basis that "fails GNG"), see e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adam Cooper (soccer). BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:16, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

@BeanieFan11: Thanks. I think that sports are the highest drama area of wp:notability and that it would be good for all concerned to do some work on it to reduce that. My view of how wp:notability works in practice is at Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works. I think that sports is unique in these respects:

1. Routine or semi-routine coverage is less meaningful because generating a huge amount of it is more of a form of entertainment rather recognition
2. Sports is more prone to "stats only" articles which is not what an enclyclopedia does. I'm not thinking about athletes, I'm thinking about "scores from the XYZ tournament" or "results from the 2005 season of the XYZ team"
3. A major change a few years ago means that a larger amount of current articles don't meet the current standard. (I.E the previous "did it for a living for one day" standard) Wikipedians are more concerned about new articles than purging old ones, and would probably be OK with a slow motion moderate triage, but not with unleashing some big deletionist effort.

IMO the best standard for sports (and middle of the road for the current community) is sports basic. Which is sort of GNG-Lite. It would probably let only a portion of professional athletes through, which I think is about right. We gotta remember that while wp:notability is somewhat about recognition it's also about having the material from which to build an encyclopedia article, which requires in-depth coverage. So the article is more than a stub or just turning some factoids into sentences.I think it would he fine if that if some very high bar specific SNG criteria are met (like Olympic Gold medalist) to bypass even sports basic but that would be a complex job to work out. For example, in your last example, the scope of the competition pool for coach of the year and how prominent of an issuing organization. BTW, on your example, as a NPP'er I probably would have passed it as an edge case. I can't see the article to know the full situation but for whatever reason some prominent reviewers (including one who leans towards inclusionist) chose a stricter GNG type standard rather then the GNG-Lite standard of sportsbasic. And maybe on even these that clearly meet a high bar SNG they should wait until a source with some in-depth coverage is found so that it can be a real article. Long story short, for all sports, I'd be an advocate for a "GNG-lite" "sportsbasic" type standard. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:20, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

My biggest issue with how NSPORT works right now is what are we supposed to do when it is exceedingly clear SIGCOV exists, but the editors at AFD don't find it. As an example, we once had a subject who was identified as one of the greatest Niger athletes ever (and his accomplishments proved it -- multi-time Olympics, one of their only Olympians ever, and national records still standing decades after his career if I remember right) and then later one of their greatest coaches before his tragic death at a young age. No Niger newspapers were searched and we deleted the article because he "failed GNG". But does anyone seriously think none of the newspapers in Niger would cover their possible greatest athlete and coach, either for his Olympic participation, national records or his tragic death? We recently had a similar example were someone was identified as one of the greatest Sierra Leone athletes and a "household name" there. We deleted it again, despite no one looking in newspapers (where the coverage almost certainly would be). We also had a few days ago someone who was the first Olympian ever for Mauritania -- their only medalist at the African Championships ever in any sport. No one made any effort to look into Mauritanian sources and it was deleted. As I mentioned above, Choudhury arguably met NATH and was recognized as the best Bangladeshi athlete of his era (i.e. best of 100 million). No effort was made to search Bangladeshi sources and, once again, it was deleted. At the moment, anyone can nominate any number of sports articles for deletion with zero BEFORE, demand that "you show ME the coverage NOW" – and unless someone like myself spends substantial time searching and finds sources on e.g. an accomplished pre-internet, foreign-language subject, it will be deleted. Does that sound like how NSPORT should work? BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:59, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

I think that from a process standpoint we see things differently. It's true that (source-dependent) wp:notability is based on whether or not suitable sources exist. But whose job is it to find them? IMO that is the main job of starting article is to find them and put them in. When I start an article, I put in GNG sources before I write the first sentence of text. And the creator can't be troubled to look for those, why should thye be able to unload that job onto an overloaded NPP'er or a AFD participant? North8000 (talk) 17:44, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

IMO that is the main job of starting article is to find them and put them in. When I start an article, I put in GNG sources before I write the first sentence of text. – Which brings us back to the original question: if GNG is needed to be proved from the very start by the article creator regardless of passing NSPORT, why do we have NSPORT, and of what use is it? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:25, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (sports) § Basic criteria isn't a light version of the general notability guideline. It places various bullets points from Wikipedia:Notability § General notability guideline into context for sports. The intent of the sports-specific notability guidelines is to defer to the general notability guideline (and has always been since its inception). The confusing aspect is that many saying "per WP:NBOX", for example, aren't really saying "per the sports-specific notability guideline for boxing", which includes deferring to the general notability guideline, but are saying "because the athlete meets one of the criteria listed in the boxing section". For better or worse, English Wikipedia's decision-making traditions means that editors are free to make achievement-based arguments for having an article on a specific topic, even if in broader discussions, a consensus had been reached for using the general notability guideline. isaacl (talk) 17:15, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

I used the term "GNG lite" mainly because of the "at least one" wording. North8000 (talk) 17:48, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

As you may recall from the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports) § Lead and nutshell need updating, the last bullet point in the "Basic criteria" section isn't a criterion for determining if a topic meets the standards for having an article. It's a documentation requirement, added after the 2022 request for comments discussion. (In my opinion, it belongs in the "Applicable policies and guidelines" section.) The first sentence in the sports-specific guideline makes it clear that deference is to the general notability guideline, and the "Basic criteria" section points to this notability page as the main page. isaacl (talk) 18:01, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

IMHO in practice I think it is. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:17, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

"editors are free to make achievement-based arguments for having an article on a specific topic" Not anymore. If you do enough of that, you'll get topic banned like Habst. !Voters at AfDs nowadays want to see the sources regardless if it passes a sport-specific subcriteria. However, an AfD nom that only says "Not meet WP:NBOX" is perfectly fine apparently even though NBOX means nothing. Being top ten in the world is a very high bar. It's a pointless guideline. It doesn't do its job of indicating where coverage is likely to exist. Obviously top 10ers and hall of famers have coverage (the sky is blue also). Wayne Gretzky doesn't even pass the skeletonized NHOCKEY. The sport-specific criteria are just deletionist tools nowadays. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:11, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Most of our SNG are framed that the criteria are rebuttable presumptions of notability as to allow an article in mainspace to exist about that topic and given the time and visibility in mainspace needed for the article to develop to a point where the topics notability, based on the GNG, can be shown without question. There's no deadline to show that but if editors are struggling to show sources exist over a good BEFORE search and multiple AFD, that's a good reason that the initial presumption has failed and the topic is actually not notable. So the criteria of SNG are supposed to be conditions where a topic that meets them likely has had or will get significant coverage in future sources; the best example of this would be academic prize winners like the Nobel, where such laurets will get new coverage due to winning the prize if they didn't have an article already. But this in the field of academics where there is little coverage in the first place (which is why NPROF is as it is). When it comes to sports there is an overwhelming abundance of coverage for most after the mid 20th century, that it would seem absolutely unnecessary to require special SNG criteria except for more niche sports and for athletes from more remote countries (eg while one for Olympians makes sense), as otherwise a successful athlete, like Gretze, will easily meet the GNG (though that brings up making sure to filter out routine coverage like box scores from actual biographical material) Masem (t) 19:28, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

You're preaching to the choir. The point I have made above is that it is inappropriate for people to cite NBOX, and other skeletonized post-2022 sport criteria, as a deletion rationale. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 19:35, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

If they are saying that such is per se a reason to delete (vs. a reason why the SNG way in can't be used) the top of WP:Notability clearly says that they are wrong. That meeting either the SNG or GNG satisfies wp:notability. (I know that some people say that, just like some people say that the earth is flat  :-) )North8000 (talk) 20:30, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

As long as they are saying the reason to delete is both the failure to meet NBOX *and* the GNG (and any other possible SNG a person could meet), that is a valid reason. But to only rest a AFD on saying NBOX is not met is definitely wrong. Masem (t) 20:40, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

The editor in question wasn't making an argument solely based on "X should have an article because they did Y", but "because X did Y, there must be appropriate sources meeting the general notability guideline". Because the sports-specific notability guidelines defer to the general notability guideline, I agree that failing to meet the listed criteria for a given sport is not a reason to support deletion. The criteria were written to be highly accurate predictors of suitable coverage, and not to be highly accurate predictors of the lack of suitable coverage. isaacl (talk) 04:47, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

I wouldn't say sports basic is GNG 'lite'. It's just the GNG but with a few clarifications for sports related articles. Dege31 (talk) 15:03, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

So let's say we zap the whole SNG and replace it with GNG lite. In general terms the criteria would be to meet both of these (would need more specific wording):

1. Multiple prominent sources included that provide some type of coverage. Since nearly all sports figures in question have this, this is just the criteria which provides the basis for "GNG-lite" #2
2. At least one GNG type source included.

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:30, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Your wording requiring sources to be included is a huge and non-consensus change to the general notability guidelines, which currently (despite the misinterpretations of many AfD participants) only require that the sources exist. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:13, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

This is only a requirement in the SNG for using the SNG, it does not modify GNG.North8000 (talk) 20:23, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

The whole problem that sparked this debate is people using the SNG as an excuse to delete articles that would otherwise pass a WP:BEFORE-compliant use of GNG. Because your rewording goes counter to WP:BEFORE, it does not address the problem. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:39, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes, we only require sources to have identified. If there's a block of refideas on the talk page not yet included in the article, a BEFORE check needs to verify those exist and provide the appropriate sig coverage. Masem (t) 20:57, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

IMO "identified" is 99% as good as "included". and 10,000% better than just claiming they exist without identifying any and instead using recommended process arguments (e.g. wp:before) to beat up people (including the too-few active NPP volunteers) instead of finding sources. North8000 (talk) 23:11, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

If we have to explicitly say what we mean by "identified", in that there should be a wikitext published pointer to sources either on the talk page or in AFD nominations, if they have not yet been I used, then we should do that. We do not want editors to wave their hand at a Google search result and claim sources E ist, but we don't want to penalize an editor that spent time to find good sources and document them but hasn't the time to incorporate them into the article. Masem (t) 23:22, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Agree.North8000 (talk) 00:37, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't agree with the "GNG-lite" concept. I think amongst those who aren't arguing for an achievement-based standard, the general notability guideline in its full form continues to be strongly supported. isaacl (talk) 04:32, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

I for one would be arguing for an achievement-based standard but I think in this discussion it's pointless; there's no chance of regaining consensus for that any time soon. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:57, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

I agree with you. But I cannot see that ever gathering traction. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 08:12, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

• SNGs play multiple roles. On one hand, in general they suggest (or presume) which subjects should have enough SIGCOV to create a stand-alone article. In this scenario, editors who want to delete an article should bear a burden of illustrating that SIGCOV does not exist. We also recognize, with some SNGs, that either SIGCOV may be applied differently, or in the rare occasion, verifiable information may be sufficient for a stand-alone article. On the other hand, SNGs can tighten up GNG standards (see WP:NCORP, WP:YOUNGATH, or even the discussions about local elected officeholders, which frequently show a desire for even more SIGCOV). But, all of this discussion really indicates that there will always be edge cases on which subjects should have a stand-alone article. --Enos733 (talk) 21:04, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

  No SNG "tightens up" GNG. GNG or SNG are parallel pathways to notability, such that a corporation that fails NCORP but passes GNG should not, by policy, be deleted at AfD. This is widely regarded as a bug by some people who have failed to even attempt to change the relevant guideline text to conform with this interpretation. Jclemens (talk) 03:20, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  The last big discussion a handful of years ago which led to the current language on WP:N on SNGs affirmed that a policy like NCORP can put tighter source requirements for a topic area than what the GNG allows. eg SNGs can also provide examples of sources and types of coverage considered significant for the purposes of determining notability, such as the treatment of book reviews for our literature guidelines and the strict significant coverage requirements spelled out in the SNG for organizations and companies. was definitely the language that fell out from that discussion (see Wikipedia talk: Notability/Archive 71 and Wikipedia talk: Notability/Archive 72, the RFC was on that second page). Masem (t) 04:02, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  None of that matters until and unless A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG) is changed to allow it. This core guideline, WP:N, is the umbrella under which all other notability issues are understood. If there's a proposal to change N to make SNGs primary and GNG only applicable to topics that aren't covered by an approved SNG, I'll oppose it as a bad idea... but also abide by global consensus. Jclemens (talk) 06:50, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  Except that is not what NCORP does (become primary over the GNG). NCORP still allows a business that meets the GNG to be considered notable, but places additional concerns of what sourcing may be allowed to show that the GNG is passed to avoid COI and promotional material, by necessity of being an encyclopedia. Masem (t) 12:08, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  No, promotional and COI material is never acceptable for GNG, as it violates independence, so NCORP adds nothing to the GNG. Jclemens (talk) 01:14, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

  Given the very long discussion that was had years ago at NCORP to establish their criteria, the editors there clearly saw that the GNG did not go far enough to place caution for sources that could be seen as promotion when it came to companies and similar ventures. For example, NCORP's WP:ORGIND goes well beyond the base test of independence that we would use to evaluate a source under the GNG. For example, I don't think the GNG goes anywhere as far to address intellectual independence, whereas this is a key test for NCORP. Now mind you, I would love to see NCORP's tests brought up to the GNG as to have that stricter requirements across the board, but I know when I've suggested bringing AUD up to the GNG, that was met with heavy resistance. Masem (t) 04:37, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

  @Jclemens, I think that editors have such different view of what constitutes "promotional material", that any statement about whether promotional material is WP:INDY falls in the not even wrong category. For example, would you say that an article in a daily newspaper that says ____ won a well-recognized award is "promotional"? Some editors would, especially when ____ is a commercial business or a category of person seen as self-promoting (e.g., politicians). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

  No SNG "tightens up" GNG.

  This is one of those things that's true on paper, but not in reality. It isn't even limited to NORG. NNUMBER also 'tightens up', so to speak, the GNG. Should it be this way? That's a different discussion. In theory, they are just supposed to be applications of the GNG to these topics. But in practice, they are used to enforce different, and stronger standards than the 'bare' GNG.

  In fact, the NORG page more or less says it does 'tighten up' the GNG: the general notability guideline with a stronger emphasis on quality of the sources. Dege31 (talk) 21:15, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

• I don't understand the utility of retiring them either. In your examples, noone cited NBOX alone, but as due diligence that all relevant notability guidelines have been checked. Dege31 (talk) 15:08, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

Workable achievement-based criteria?

A common point in this thread is lamenting the lack of workable achievement based SNG provisions for sports. Some folks said they doubted that such could ever achieve a consensus. I think that this maybe true only in the sense that nothing big and complicated can ever achieve an overall consensus in Wikipedia. Some assume that there is a large "deletionist" crowd regarding sports articles. I don't think so. Taking me as an example, I was opposed to the previous "did it for a living for one day" standard and am also against the large amount of "stats only" "articles" being created, but that's where my opposition ends. And as an active NPP'er I would welcome a suitable achivement-based SNG. A good realistic way to start would be to frame out the concept and try it with one sport (maybe boxing). IMO the main "framing out" items should be:

1. A relatively high (but not un-usably high) bar. This is based on realizing (but not saying) that this is (defacto) criteria for bypassing GNG so a high bar is appropriate. (So we're bypassing the debates about it being a bypass :-) )
2. The top of the WP:Notability says that GNG is always available as a "way in" even if it doesn't meet the achievement-based SNG provision, but it looks like this needs extra emphasis. In that part of the SNG we'd note that it's quite common for a sports topic that does not meet the achievement based criteria to be wp:notable because it meets GNG. So say that "does not meet the (achievement-based) SNG criteria" is NOT a reason to reject an article or nominate it for deletion.

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:17, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

As long as the achievement is one that assures non routine significant coverage follows, then those are fine. For example, winning the Heisman Trophy is pretty an assurance one's college football career has been discussed in depth. But if someone suggested an achievement such as a quarterback that gets over 400 yrds total pass g in a game that would be a problem as that's just a record and no indication f significance of the player (though most qbs in NFL will be notable by other means) Masem (t) 19:30, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

if someone suggested an achievement such as a quarterback that gets over 400 yrds total pass g in a game that would be a problem as that's just a record and no indication f significance of the player – doesn't indicate significance – really? I don't think I've ever seen anyone who's thrown an NFL pass not have abundant SIGCOV. Limiting to things like Heisman winners are way too strict and unreasonable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:37, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

But throwing 400 yards in a game can be taken as a achievement but certainly not a indicator of significant coverage. If we are adding achievement based SNG critiera, the achievement should be a career-spanning facet. Maybe there are stats that do that, but the bulk of such significance is goi g to be by awards given for a career rather than a single game or season. Masem (t) 20:19, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Why does it not indicate significant coverage? I guarantee you there is not a single person who has thrown that many yards in an NFL game without extensive coverage. And a substantial number of notable NFL players don't receive major awards. BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:25, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm talking significant coverage, not routine. Now the NFL might be a bad example, but my point is that any SNG should be looking for achievements that either assure there was significant non routine coverage in the past, or will generate such. Sports is an iffy area due to how much routine coverage exist alongside non routine, but comparibly, someone winning the Nobel likely will get new sources about them because of the general lack of coverage of academics, non routine or not.

There may be Stat based career achievements we can use, such breaking hone run records or scoring more that a certain number of points on average in basketball games, when we know those stats, and reason how the player broke those stats (non routine sig coverage) would make sense.But a Stat like most games played I would not expect such a case. Masem (t) 22:45, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

The current sports-specific notability guideline already says Please note that the failure to meet these criteria does not mean an article must be deleted; conversely, meeting any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept. People continue to ignore this portion of the guideline when they use it to support their arguments for or against having an article. isaacl (talk) 22:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

• Try proposing any addition at WT:NSPORT and you'll see the "deletionist crowd" I've talked about. Anyway, if you're looking for a boxing SNG to propose, tell me if this sounds reasonable: (i) win a medal at the Olympics or (i) win a medal at the North American, South American, Asian, African or European championships or (ii) be ranked top 10 in the world. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:35, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

  The first one is already a part of NSPORT. Dege31 (talk) 20:04, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

The problem, I believe, that anything lighter than unusably high would fail to achieve consensus. I think it's probable a proposed criterion like "Subject is likely to have significant coverage if the subject won multiple world titles in X category of sports with developed coverage of these events" would be implemented, but that's just common sense. There haven't been any non-trivial expansions since NSPORTS2022, while further contractions easily achieved consensus, 'for a reason', so to speak. Dege31 (talk) 20:39, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

• @BeanieFan11: Sounds like a good start. I'd be willing to help give it a try. But IMO it should be specific on the sanctioning body of the championship and the body that ranked them in the top 10? North8000 (talk) 20:41, 7 July 2025 (UTC)
  • Personally, I'm liking it less the more I look at it (more reasonable to me would be top 15 + continental medals + Commonwealth Games / Pan American Games medals + IBA World Boxing medals + African Games / Asian Games medals + something like top five at Olympics) – but the top 10 selectors would be the same as currently listed, and the championships would be the African Amateur Boxing Championships (or maybe African Games, or both), Asian Amateur Boxing Championships, European Amateur Boxing Championships etc. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:21, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I do not think a stats-based measure would find consensus. However, there may be reasoning behind an receipt of award/honor system. I think that some criteria that could be utilized are medalling at an Olympics (and through discussion, sport-by-sport medals at world championships), induction in a national hall-of-fame, honored as an all-star, or setting a world record (or league-specific record). While this set of criteria may not help at the margins, where our disputes largely exist, but it could help clarify in the context of sport, what is a well-known and significant award or honor per WP:ANYBIO. - Enos733 (talk) 21:33, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

The problem is not so much finding a standard above which there is agreement for an article, but a standard below which there is an agreement not to have an article. The problem with agreeing upon an exclusion standard is finding agreement on what type of sports figure should have an article. Most editors interested in sports support having articles about top-level professional athletes as they make up a very small percentage of general population and thus represent an elite level of human performance. (The same, of course, could be said about other groups like top-level professional musicians. But there isn't an obvious way for non-subject matter experts to identify the top-level professionals in most areas.) Some people think only sports figures with a societal impact should be included. This would drastically limit the number of sports biographies and would cause a lot of dissatisfaction, though. Sports historians might support a middle ground where athletes with a significant impact on their sport have biographies. This would tend to have a bias to fewer biographies on newer athletes, as a percentage of athletes of the same cohort, which I think will also be dissatisfying. These are also subjective measures and are very context-dependent. A Japanese baseball star might have a great effect on Japanese society, while having no effect on the sport of baseball as a whole. Thus the best approach the community has agreed upon so far is to rely on the general notability guideline as an exclusionary standard. isaacl (talk) 22:32, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

A "floor" for an exclusion in an SNG would require a structural change of the entire wp:notability system. On another note, me being a dummy on sports might be a help here. How about an SNG that 1/4 of professional athletes meet? North8000 (talk) 14:30, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

The sports-specific notability guidelines already use achievements to indicate sports figures that have a strong likelihood of meeting English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. So in my view, your suggestion is essentially to re-examine the criteria to see if there are additional highly reliable predictors that can be added, or if some current criteria isn't sufficiently reliable. I agree it's something that the interested editors for a given sport may want to do. Regarding your suggested threshold, though: for the most popular professional sports, setting a line of x% of the top-level professional athletes will be an arbitrary one. A lot of athletes below that line meet the general notability guideline. So there isn't a lot of incentive for interested editors to come up with criteria that won't apply most of the time. isaacl (talk) 18:30, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

NLIST for List of X in <country> lists

For complex or cross-category lists (like List of X in <country>), NLIST currently states: There is no present consensus for how to assess the notability of more complex and cross-categorization lists (such as "Lists of X of Y") .... A few/some editors might take this to mean that the notability of a List of X in <country> list may be assessed in some way other than by X in <country> meeting WP:GNG or WP:SNG. This makes sense in theory, buuut in practice, editors seem to overwhelmingly prefer to assess notability only by X in <country> meeting GNG or SNG (cf table). Imo NLIST copy should prolly reflect this apparent consensus for at least this sort of complex/cross-cat list, as it's frustratingly vague/unclear at present imo, but I'll only leave this here for record's sake. - Asdfjrjjj (talk) 04:43, 16 August 2025 (UTC) Asdfjrjjj (talk) 04:43, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

This is a very interesting point that you've hit on in a what is notable sense, is it that list of items in country constitutes an X of Y list or an list of X alone and something that I was debating myself as we discussed in a previous AfD. I agree that some more clarity might be beneficial. Going through the list, I was expecting the keep/delete outcome results to follow what might be considered "large or popular topics" but it doesn't seem to necessarily follow. Thank you @Asdfjrjjj for doing some of the ground work in collecting a list of these cases. Bobby Cohn 🍁 (talk) 22:13, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Asdfjrjjj, mostly, when I see editors asking questions about this general subject, I find that they are looking at the list as if it were an ordinary article. However, lists serve two separate functions on wiki:

• article content – helping readers learn more about X
• navigation – helping readers find the article they're looking for

Almost all "List of X in <country>" articles are the navigation type. They exist for readers who say "I don't know what the name of that is, but I know it's an X in <country>, so let me scan down this list – Ah, there it is!"

The relevant guideline is Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates.

The last time we seriously attempted to work on explaining notability of lists (over a decade ago), we didn't finish the job. This is one of the things that we didn't find wording to explain. There are some significant m:inclusionism vs m:deletionism factors involved. Also, some editors have a gut reaction to a "List of" page (because it superficially looks like an "article") that they don't have for a Category: or WP:NAVBOX that contains exactly the same information, so they're happy to have a "Category:X in country" and a navbox template for X in country, but as soon as it's a List of exactly the same thing – well, now you have to prove to them not only that the list is accurate and verifiable, but that there are lengthy sources carefully analyzing this group of X in that specific country, because now it is an article (in their eyes) instead of a way for readers to find articles (especially the ~67% of readers on mobile, and therefore who don't see categories or navboxes).

I realize that AFDs over this can be frustrating because there's no clear Official™ Written Rule, but please use common sense, and encourage others to do the same. Maybe some day we'll gather our collective energy and figure out how to explain the difference between a navigational list and a content-focused list, and then tell editors to leave the nav lists alone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:47, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

A few thoughts on this…

1. In some cases, these articles started out as a “list of X” article where all X are notable. However, as that list grew it was deemed appropriate to split it into several sub-articles (by Y)… and someone decided that the Y should be “by country”. If they had chosen some other Y (say alphabetical) no one would question the notability of the list. In such cases, perhaps the solution is to go back to square one, and restructure the set of sub-articles using a different Y.
2. Perhaps we need a better way to distinguish navigational lists from informational lists. This could be done by renaming purely navigational articles as “Index articles” (as in Index of articles on X or Index of X in Y. Meanwhile, informational lists could continue to be called “Lists” (as in List of X etc). We could then write distinct guidelines for “Index articles” vs “List articles”.

Very preliminary thoughts. Blueboar (talk) 13:18, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

IMO the dilemma is because I don't think that the issue can be solved using our existing framework. The reality is that even if a list is pure OR (a creation of the editor) and there is no independent coverage of the topic of the article (the overall synthesized creation) we often generally accept it as OK; i.e. not excluded by notability rules. If we wanted to work on this we'd probably need to start by acknowledging that decisions about notability incorporate other criteria (such as degree of enclyclopedicness) besides the notability guidelines. Then criteria that measure degree of enclyclopedicness could be utilized. One measure might be how close RS's come to making that compilation even if no source actually did it exactly. Another would be likehood that someone would come to an enclyclopedia to find that list.

On a separate note, Blueboar's idea would be another element of a good start. North8000 (talk) 12:53, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

I feel like that's exactly what the second NLIST paragraph (for informational or complex or cross-category lists) might've been meant to carve out - the intersections of some categories (X of Y) seem so fundamentally encyclopaedic that even w/o that particular intersection existing in IRSs, it'd still be of value in an encyclopaedia. But at least for intersections involving geographic entities (eg X in <country>), that doesn't really seem to be the majority opinion in AfDs.

Partially agree with Blueboar re point 1 - I was also thinking of these List of X in <country> lists as basically all being one giant List of X, just split along geographic lines for manageability. Did not really consider notability of individual list members though, as I feel I've seen a bunch of X in <country> lists where that's not a membership criterion. Not sure re Blueboar's point 2 - dunno how often editors confuse info vs nav lists, but might be seen as WP:CREEP to require differential naming, maybe? - Asdfjrjjj (talk) 19:15, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

We have some "index" articles, e.g., Index of Internet-related articles.

I've been wondering if the solution is a new template, along the lines of {{disambiguation}}:

We could add some CSS-based text with instructions about sourcing requirements (e.g., "Unlike Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages, inline citations are permitted on this page. However, please do not remove uncited entries unless you have a reason to believe they are actually wrong"). [I base the last sentence on the fact that an entry in a 'list of fruit' that has no citation is not Wikipedia:Likely to be challenged by any reasonable person, when clicking on the entry takes you to a page that says 'This is a kind of fruit'. I grant that there are about three-quarter million registered editors here each year, and that in any group of humans that large, there will be some unreasonable ones.] WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:34, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

To editor WhatamIdoing: looks really good! Seems a bit more elegant than differential naming for nav vs info lists imo - Asdfjrjjj (talk) 22:12, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that looks like a good idea. Maybe not the "big fix" but a good idea. North8000 (talk) 17:58, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

How much bureaucratic procedure should we put around this? Boldly create the template and start using it, or have a big conversation/RFC or two first? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:59, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

I like it and think we should be bold. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 20:27, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

I like the template for lists that would unambiguously be navigation lists. That said, I am not sure that the template helps resolve the question of when a cross-categorization list should be created - as I do think we should err towards requiring some sort of independent reason for the list, rather than the cross-categorization being original research. - Enos733 (talk) 20:47, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

So, I think you mean that WhatamIdoing's idea looks good but you don't want it to be a substitute for continuing to work on the broader question. If so, that is also my thought. North8000 (talk) 11:58, 21 August 2025 (UTC)

Correct. - Enos733 (talk) 16:35, 21 August 2025 (UTC)

I have created Template:Navigation list. I think it could be improved from a technical POV (something similar to the Template:List of lists might work), but this is working now, at a very basic level. Please consider adding it to the most basic, boring, plain, no-hope-for-serious-expansion lists you see. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:12, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

For example: I would recommend against putting this on List of fires in Egypt, because that's a "content" list (with sentences and paragraphs). I would recommend for putting it on List of diseases (A), because that's a "navigation" list (a simple bullet list, with maybe a short description). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:16, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

List of List of X in <country> AfDs in 2025.

List of complex or cross-category List of X in <country> AfDs in 2025, with some exclusions.

Date	Link	X	country	NLIST?	Description
17 Jul 2025	AfD	incidents of civil unrest	Belize	Yes	delete result; 1 editor noted cross-cat notability; 2/3 editors wanted X in <country> to be notable
1 Aug 2025	AfD	World Heritage Sites	Scotland	No	keep result
28 Jul 2025	AfD	e-commerce chains	Nigeria	Yes	delete result; 1 editor noted cross-cat notability; 1/2 editors wanted X in <country> to be notable
26 Jul 2025	AfD	DuMont Television Network affiliates	US	No	delete result
24 Jul 2025	AfD	movements	Wales	Yes	delete result; 1/1 editor wanted X in <country> to be notable
20 Jul 2025	AfD	home improvement retailers	UK	Yes	delete result; unclear on NLIST
20 Jul 2025	AfD	artists who reached number one	New Zealand	Yes	delete result; 3/3 editors wanted X in <country> to be notable
30 Jun 2025	AfD	straight-winged jet fighters	USSR	Yes	delete result; unclear on NLIST
15 Jul 2025	AfD	Channel 51 digital TV stations	US	No	delete result
2 Jul 2025	AfD	gangs	Australia	No	redirect result
8 Jun 2025	AfD	hospitals	UAE	Yes	null result; unclear on NLIST
23 Jun 2025	AfD	incidents of violence against women	Spain	No	delete result
16 Jun 2025	AfD	Carex species	Canada	Yes	delete result; 3/3 wanted X in <country> to be notable
6 Jun 2025	AfD	endemic flora	Indonesia	No	delete result
6 Jun 2025	AfD	airlines	Pakistan	No	keep result
21 May 2025	AfD	mass escapes from POW camps	Germany	No	delete result
10 Jun 2025	AfD	cinemas	Estonia	Yes	keep result; 2/2 wanted X in <country> to be notable
29 May 2025	AfD	major projects	Tunisia	Yes	delete result; 1/1 wanted X in <country> to be notable
9 May 2025	AfD	state welcome signs	US	Yes	delete result; 7/7 wanted X in <country> to be notable
3 May 2025	AfD	MRT and LRT lines	Singapore	No	null result
9 May 2025	AfD	fire departments	Philippines	Yes	delete result; unclear on NLIST
3 May 2025	AfD	Michelin-starred restaurants	Andorra	Yes	merge result; 1/1 wanted X in <country> to be notable
20 Apr 2025	AfD	foreign exchange bureaus	Uganda	Yes	delete result; 2/2 wanted X in <country> to be notable
6 Apr 2025	AfD	animated films in the public domain	US	No	keep result
8 Apr 2025	AfD	deadliest traffic accidents	Canada	Yes	keep result; 3/3 wanted X in <country> to be notable
6 Apr 2025	AfD	films in the public domain	US	No	keep result
19 Mar 2025	AfD	film chronicles	Albania	No	delete result
3 Mar 2025	AfD	highway rest areas	N Korea	Yes	delete result; 3/3 wanted X in <country> to be notable
11 Feb 2025	AfD	mountain passes	Turkey	No	merge result
8 Mar 2025	AfD	schools	Netherlands	No	keep result
25 Feb 2025	AfD	fire departments	US	No	delete result
9 Feb 2025	AfD	treaties	Turkey	Yes	keep result; unclear on NLIST
15 Feb 2025	AfD	mutual-fund families	Canada	No	delete result
1 Feb 2025	AfD	cities, towns and villages	Maldives	No	redirect result
21 Jan 2025	AfD	airlines	Lebanon	No	keep result
22 Jan 2025	AfD	Caravanserais	Iran	No	merge result
10 Jan 2025	AfD	hospital fires during the COVID-19 pandemic	Romania	Yes	delete result; 1/1 wanted X in <country> to be notable
29 Dec 2024	AfD	diplomatic relations	Ireland	No	delete result
30 Dec 2024	AfD	investment banks	Uganda	Yes	merge result; 1/1 wanted X in <country> to be notable
23 Dec 2024	AfD	accounting schools	Pakistan	No	delete result
21 Nov 2024	AfD	wars	S Korea	No	keep result

References

Does Notability only apply to article topics or details and sections within an article?

Throughout my five years editing on this website, I have seen so many instances of a detail, sentence or section being removed from an article, even through it was verifiable with citations to reliable sources, under the rationale of "not notable". Even one item in a table with several others was removed under this reason. There are so many of these that I can't possibly remember the dates of these events and give you diffs as examples. This is all despite the fact that this page opens with the following: "On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." Can all of us set the record straight? User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 21:47, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

If you're referring to lists, some lists only include notable items. Regarding articles, perhaps the editor who removed content was referring to WP:DUE and misusing the word notability. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:56, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

When editors say "not notable" they don't always mean "not WP:NOTABLE". I may say I'm "involved" in a situation, even though I couldn't be WP:INVOLVED as I'm not an admin. If there's confusion between the common meaning, and the WIKIPEDIA meaning, of a word the best idea is to ask for clarification. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:34, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Not simply list articles, although that's happened a few times. Individual sentences in articles proper, more often than not. Words do have multiple meanings, sure, but I'd imagine WP:Notability being such a 101 concept of this website that if an editor was experienced enough, they would get what the word means if mentioned on the site. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:04, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:I WP:WOULD WP:ALWAYS WP:ASSUME WP:THEY WP:MEAN notable unless WP:THEY WP:SAY NOTABLE. Assuming that WP:A WP:WORD WP:ALWAYS means WP:ITS WP:UPPERCASE WP:REDIRECT WP:SEEMS WP:LIKE WP:A WP:BADIDEA. There are so many uppercase redirects for common words I think we sometimes get lost in the wordsalad and forget they have a common meaning, and that hampers communication. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 03:07, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia “notability” only applies to whole topics. Unfortunately, “notability” is also a plain English word with a different meaning.

“verifiable with citations to reliable sources” is not sufficient for inclusion. Not everything verifiable gets included. You’ve not used the words “secondary source”. Why not?

Lists are particularly vulnerable to attracting WP:LISTCRUFT. Verifiability and reliability are not enough. The requirement is that others have demonstrated interest. “Others” implies independence, from the source, the author, the publisher, the funder, and Wikipedia. “Demonstrated interest” means secondary sources exist; mere repetition of data is not good enough.

Where a whole topic is not in question, go back to the policy underpinning WP:N, which is WP:PSTS. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:21, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Personally I wish we could drop WP:PSTS down to an essay, it's probably one of the most misused pieces of policy we have. It's mainly an excuse for people to label something they don't like as "primary" to dismiss it instead of actually discussing the merits of inclusion of some piece of information. But too many people who edit in controversial areas like to take advantage of that, which is why they got it into policy in the first place and I know it's not likely to ever actually go away. Anomie⚔ 01:26, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

"it's probably one of the most misused pieces of policy we have. It's mainly an excuse for people to label something they don't like as "primary" to dismiss it instead of actually discussing the merits of inclusion of some piece of information" I don't know if I've ever encountered exactly that, but the closet thing I could think is is a bunch of users in WP:WikiProject Songs and WP:WikiProject Albums calling year-end lists in music magazine and publications "self-sourced" to them, even though they count as secondary sources and that's not how year-end rankings work or what self-published is... That's a reason why I'm not a member there anymore... that and other reasons. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:16, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

“self-sourced” is serious and goes to WP:SPS, and has nothing to do with primary/secondary source classification.

Self-published sourced can’t contribute to the test of “others”. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:31, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

My point is that these sources were not "self-sourced" or self-published, but users on the WikiProject were acting like they were. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 11:58, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

It sounds like they were wrong. SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:08, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:PSTS is intellectually fundamental to what it means to be an encyclopedia. People misusing primary source, note an article link, is a different matter to be responded to on the merits of it being a primary source or not. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:28, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:PSTS is just a heuristic for differentiating the types of sources that probably have useful context and analysis from those that don't, which unfortunately a lot of people have convinced themselves that it has some intrinsic Truth to it (or at least act like it because they can misuse it to more easily win arguments). Often enough they don't even agree on whether something is actually "primary" or not, e.g. WP:VPIL#AfDs on current event articles.

But I know I'm not going to change those people's minds, at least not without far more effort than I have the energy to put into it, so I generally just make the point once if I see a discussion where it's relevant and then disengage. Anomie⚔ 14:27, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

When I mentioned a table, I was talking about a record charts table in an article primarily about a song. Not an actual list page. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:05, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

They probably meant that the chart itself is not notable. Lists should not be indiscriminate, and chart notability is a useful rule of thumb for inclusion in a charts table. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:19, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

This was a European Hot 100 Singles chart, but for commercial performances of songs by artists outside of the country they signed the record label in. It was also published in Music & Media like the main chart. It was no more or less notable than the other one. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:23, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Well, then I have no clue what that editor meant by saying it was not notable. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:27, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Yyyyyyyyyep. Me neither. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:37, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I think they meant “not notable” as “not worth noting”. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:51, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I DO mean secondary sources, though. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:06, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

If you mean “secondary” sources, it’s good to mention it. Secondary sources, assuming independent and reliable, or reputable, is very strong justification for inclusion, under both WP:PSTS and WP:DUE. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

"Not everything verifiable gets included". When it comes to articles topics, absolutely, but if what it's just part of an article with a topic that HAS had its notability established with secondary source coverage in other areas? What if it's a production section entirely sourced to a DVD commentary or WP:INTERVIEWS? User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:08, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Sourced to the DVD commentary, or Wikipedia:INTERVIEWs? That’s a very good question, and I am very sure that there is not simple answer that can be given in general. I think the answer comes down to judgement of independence. Commentaries and interviews may or may not be independent. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:39, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

That's true, but everything in a production section is facts about the making of a film. That is different from judgements and opinions by an outside party which is what WEIGHT really applies to. If it's just a section of that but not an article being created, is that really OK? I would imagine it is because the making of a movie, album, or video game is an expected section as determined by each WikiProject's respective MOS. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 11:55, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Unless it is a list, no. It might not always be WP:DUE, though. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:05, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

That is a much clearer rationale to use. User:HumanxAnthro (BanjoxKazooie) 02:11, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Very heavy weather being made of this! It is well established that "notability" ONLY applies to the whole article (or list). Within articles WP:DUE is the relevant policy. But many don't understand this and confusingly use the wrong term. Johnbod (talk) 03:18, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:DUE, “Due or undue weight” is very important, but usually it goes to weight, or balance, not to the extreme question of whether something deserves no mention at all. Where something is argued to be not worth the briefest of mention, I have seen the most convincing argument to be that inclusion of the information would be WP:OR, that is, there is not a single independent secondary source for the content someone wants to add. Either there is no secondary source for the information, or there is no independent source of coverage. I have in mind mainly commercial topics, and data about a company’s business statistics. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:50, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Was going to say just that, no notability does not apply, undue does. Slatersteven (talk) 12:26, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

None of the above are wrong, I would just add that I think sometimes we as editors get sloppy and see a statement added with poor sourcing, or clear lack of weight, and remove it as "not notable", which is more true to the non-WP version of the word and likely not meant to evoke WP:N's meaning. I haven't really seen any editor try to remove a section of an article for failing WP:N-notability, so I think when one sees the wording "not notable" being applied to a section of an article, assume the editor meant "not DUE" or similar aspect. We all should be more careful in using "not notable" given the possible confusion but also I wouldn't be trying to policy this as I'm sure most editors are using as shortcut speech and not evoking WP:N standards. Masem (t) 12:37, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

We should also change the title of this guideline, but don't hold your breath for that rationalizing to happen. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:54, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

That's been multiple WP:PEREN attempts, just that there's really no good single word that replaces what WP:N encapsulates, in addition to the procedural disruption it would cause (the amount of effort to correct throughout P&G versus the value). It leaves us with situations like this case, but which should be easily explained if that confusion comes up, and us experienced editors should be mindful of casual use of "notability" when not actually referring to WP:N Masem (t) 12:59, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Such a rationale is unconvincing, there is not 'one word' insistence to a guideline or policy title. Nor are we unable to handle change, we are a wiki, although inertia is strong. And editors (we designed it this way) will always have different experience levels. --Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:14, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I find it helps to differentiate between “Notable” and “note-worthy” (or “worth noting”). “Notable” relates to the article subject and whether we should have a stand alone article on that subject. “Note-worthy” relates to information, and whether we should mention it in a specific article. Blueboar (talk) 14:26, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm just saying we've tried multiple times to find alt wording for "notability" and no single term has been found that has the simplicity of what "notability" is not only at WP:N but across all current SNGs, particularly in considering that it would be a sea change in terms how to reflect it in P&G. If we found a magic word that everyone agreed was far superior than notability, I'm sure we'd want to do that, but we've yet to come to any consensus on other alternatives. Masem (t) 18:04, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Masem, have we actually made any attempts to change the title of this guideline, or have we only talked about how nice it would be if we'd done it in the past, and then never actually tried to change it?

@Blueboar made 2010 suggestion to rename a policy, and that was successful, so in principle we could actually rename this.

(Maybe we should split the GNG out to a separate, stand-alone page first, though.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

there's been actual multiple discussions on what term to use instead of notability, but no single term ever gained consensus to get to the next stage of the implementation. Masem (t) 11:56, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

In the most recent one that I remember, we talked about changing the first sentence/paragraph to introduce a second term, e.g.,:

• (current) On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article.
• (future) On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants a separate, stand-alone article.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:48, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Just search "rename", in the archive box and I see at least six distinct attempts in the first few results. Masem (t) 17:27, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't know what you are considering to be an actual attempt, but you may recall participating in two extensive discussions: Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 56 § Renaming Notability and earlier this year, Wikipedia talk:Notability/Archive 84 § RfC on change of name. isaacl (talk) 23:09, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

The recent one was about 70% against renaming the page, but glancing through it, I see nobody saying that we shouldn't change the first sentence to say something like "On Wikipedia, notability is the article inclusion criteria, which editors use to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Because notability is not an inclusion criteria. it gives the wrong impression to what notability is meant to do, as we don't have any inclusion criteria guidelines anywhere. Its about when a topic has enough information for when a standalone page makes sense, or otherwise the topic should be included elsewhere where it may be appropriate. Masem (t) 13:15, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

What's your definition of "inclusion criteria"? For example, some editors might see it as "criteria by which we decide whether this individual fact can be included anywhere in any part of any Wikipedia article". Others apparently do see it as meaning "criteria by which we decide whether it makes sense to have a separate, standalone page for this subject". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:59, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Notability vs. inclusion criteria

I see that Wikipedia:Inclusion criteria links to this page on Notability. The bar for content inclusion must be lower than the bar for article creation under WP:N, but I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a written policy or guideline ("P/G") for inclusion (or am I missing something?) Maybe the criteria are, unfortunately, dispersed across many other P/G pages, such as WP:RELEVANCE. At the very least, I think this page should have a section distinguishing content inclusion from WP:N, and pointing editors in the right direction. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:09, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

You may be looking for WP:Neutral point of view#What to include and exclude. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 06:51, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

What exactly is the scope of NOPAGE?

I've been wondering what the exact scope of WP:NOPAGE is supposed to refer to. Is WP:NOPAGE supposed to be a reason to delete content or determine whether something should be included in another article? I think that the examples provided in the guideline are narrow in scope and refer to topics in which standalone pages would require too much background context and repeat content. However, I have seen it interpreted in different contexts as a reason to remove notable content altogether. Katzrockso (talk) 14:28, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Such as? Slatersteven (talk) 15:30, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Slatersteven, I intentionally didn't invoke examples because I'm attempting not to relitigate any prior discussions had about the topic, I was just trying to gain a better understanding of editor consensus on the guideline and its scope. Katzrockso (talk) 22:27, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Then I cannot say if this is a real or imaginary problem. Slatersteven (talk) 09:43, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

I assume it's Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Andrée Bertoletto, which might make a good study for how badly some of this guideline is understood. See, e.g., the claim that the subject "fails NOPAGE" (which isn't technically possible) or the assertion that "(old) local news" doesn't count as SIGCOV. We really need to put a definition of SIGCOV into this page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:01, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

NOPAGE is basically IAR for deletionists. Somehow citing NOPAGE for something that passes GNG is okay, but citing IAR to keep something gets you in trouble. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 21:37, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes and in this specific scenario I'm confused by the application of the guideline. I didn't want to bring up the specific example because I am not trying to forum shop. Katzrockso (talk) 03:07, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

The descent down Graham's hierarchy didn't take long to start, I see... The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 16:33, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that was the discussion in question. Katzrockso (talk) 02:02, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Katzrockso, I've pulled the RFC tag, as you don't need sitewide notifications going out for this. This is a high-traffic page, and folks can answer your question without needing the RFC infrastructure to alert them. As a starting point, I'd like to suggest that you glance over WP:UPPERCASE, to get an idea of just how wrong Wikipedia editors can be about what the "rules" say. Just because someone gives WP:NOPAGE as their excuse for doing what they believe is best doesn't mean that NOPAGE supports them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks @WhatamIdoing, I tried to put a RfC on that page because I didn't get any responses after a couple days. Apologies for the mistake. Katzrockso (talk) 21:52, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

It's not a big deal, and starting an RFC is actually a reasonable thing to do if you don't get any responses.

When you say above that other folks have used it to remove content altogether, are you saying that they're blanking a ==section== of an article, and giving you an edit summary that mentions WP:NOPAGE? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:52, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

They're redirecting an entire article to another one, merging no content and citing WP:NOPAGE; WP:BLAR. But I'd rather not digress on specific examples. Katzrockso (talk) 03:45, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

If I created an article that contained some unique information, and someone BLAR'd it instead of WP:Merging it, and they gave me NOPAGE as their rationale, then I'd assume this person was saying that they believed that Wikipedia should not contain that unique information anywhere at all. NOPAGE would be, at best, a very partial explanation, and I'd expect a fuller discussion to involve assertions of WP:UNDUE detail or that it had some Problems that may justify removal.

If I created an article that only duplicated information in another article, and someone BLAR'd it to the article that contained that exact information, and they gave me NOPAGE as their rationale, then I'd assume this person was saying that they believed that Wikipedia should have one big page with everything instead of multiple small pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

• WP:N states that passing GNG or an SNG does not guarantee that a topic will necessarily be handled as a separate, stand-alone page. Editors are to use discretion to determine whether the subject is deserving of a stand-alone page. To me, I think of the example of someone who may be profiled a handful of times in a local paper, perhaps because they won awards at a county fair, or maybe because there was some coverage during the subject's life and the subject did happen to have a staff-written obituary written after their death. Objectively, those subject might pass GNG, but the question falls back on whether the subject is "worthy of notice" for a global encyclopedia and deserves a stand-alone page. --Enos733 (talk) 21:49, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks, that's a great example that I didn't even think about (so I guess this is tangential to my broader focus of the initial inquisition). I guess the question in regards to the scenario you're putting forward is if someone were to create an article on this individual that satisfies the GNG, is there some underlying need to delete or merge away the article? Let's move away from the example of the county fair, as that seems that it could be quite ROUTINE coverage and not exactly unambiguously qualify under the GNG. Say a person was profiled in their local newspaper as a result of their small business (e.g. a flower shop, a massage parlor) and later received a staff-written obituary, as you described. The information that could conceivably fill the article per the available SIGCOV is limited to some biographical details and the functioning of their business, perhaps including a short history of the business as well. The subject is notable, the article is well-written and sourced and has no reasonable opportunity for expansion. How would we apply "editorial discretion" to such a page? Katzrockso (talk) 02:15, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

  Mostly via unwritten rules. There's no need to delete or merge away the article, but different people will show up with their own preferences/biases about what "should" be in Wikipedia. A lot of the underlying arguments in such cases are in Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions (e.g., "a local flower shop is not important"), but AFD regulars are usually pretty good at finding an excuse that sounds more acceptable. That is, my real reason might be that I think having an article about a local flower shop is beneath Wikipedia's dignity, but I would never post that at AFD; instead, I'd say something about how the sources we've found are too short to constitute WP:SIGCOV, or that they're all WP:PRIMARYNEWS (except for this or that paragraph, which I ignore), or that the local newspaper isn't WP:INDY, or something like that. And, of course, if the subject is something that I think Wikipedia needs, I might interpret things another way: Yes, the sources are short, but they're more than Wikipedia:One hundred words, so that's okay. Yes, most newspaper articles are primary sources, but there is this or that paragraph of secondary/analytical content, which I emphasize. Yes, it's a local newspaper, but it's insulting to say that those journalists are more beholden to their advertisers than any other newspaper.

  And so on. Wikipedia is run by humans, and sometimes humans make a decision first and then look for reasons to justify it, rather than the other way around. For the source-citing equivalent, see WP:FETCH. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:49, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

  No disagreement here of your analysis based on what I've seen in online discussion-based platforms over many years, but I think it is a very unsatisfactory resolution to a very important question. This seems to run into issues with WP:NOTPAPER if we don't have clear guidelines for inclusion/exclusion, which notability is supposed to (at least in part) address. If there is disputes regarding inclusion/exclusion of an article, WP:POINT suggests that people who want an article to be included "explain why the subject meets inclusion criteria" and those who want an article deleted should "bas[e] [their] argument on policies and guidelines". Giving facially P&G-based arguments that are in fact a mere reflection of the 'arguments to avoid' seems to eschew these suggestions altogether. I'm not sure if there's a good solution, and I defer to your expertise on this question, but it just appears to me to present an overarching problem. Katzrockso (talk) 08:43, 4 October 2025 (UTC)