Wikipedia:Policy condensing/Notability

Relevant guideline pages

Relevant proposals

Suggestions edit

Most of these pages pretty much duplicate the general guideline, as any of them can be overridden by the basic "multiple reliable sources" mantra anyone who frequents AfD is familiar with. It would save a ton of space and confusion if all the myriad "special cases" were just merged into cropped-down subsections on the main guideline page. Those that are still in proposal process can still be marked as such. This should make it more clear that WP:MUSIC, et al., aren't the most important things when judging notability, and that WP:N still trumps the lot of them. I've seen a lot of people mistaking this. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 23:44, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

Wikipedia:Notability/RFC:compromise is an ongoing RfC about spin out articles, and the relationship between the general notability guideline and the subject specific guidelines. The result could have a significant effect on how to best proceed. A proposal to merge the SNGs with the main guideline was tabled. Vassyana (talk) 07:17, 16 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I find the main notability guideline overrated. There's a lot of discussion on what constitutes a reliable source to begin with and the page doesn't really go into detail about when references don't need to be indepedent. (It's perfectly fine to cite quotes from someone's personal website if they're relevant). Also, too many people consider a blog or network site unreliable without researching who wrote it. A blog written by Stephen Hawking is still going to be a reliable source to relevant science articles, regardless of its blog status as long as it has been determined the author of the blog is in fact who he claims to be (which often can be determined from links to and from official websites). Worse, a lot of deletion debates get either the nominator or someone else making a blanket claim the article is non-notable without explaining why at all (sub guidelines can give an idea what makes something notable if the sources to prove it exist) and "having multiple reliable non-trivial independent sources" is often interpreted as I can't find sources, so it's not notable. And whether a mention is non-trivial is also debated far too often. There's too little effort to find sources before something is deleted. I feel that before notability guidelines are set to completely rely on the main criterion WP:RS should be revamped. - Mgm|^(talk) 11:38, 9 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]