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Notability of foods

In many parts of the world, finding significant coverage in reliable sources for a food, food product,* or dish can be difficult. While in much of North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, food journalism and scholarship is common, that’s not as true in Africa and much of Asia and Central/South America or for regional cuisines that haven’t yet been “discovered” by New York or Tokyo food journalists. Complicating factors include transliteration, alternate names, and alternate spellings, all of which make online searching difficult, and culturally-related aversions to certain types of (and especially extremely unfamiliar) foods.

Example: Inyama Yenhloko, a traditionally ceremonially-important dish that, surprise!, is unlikely to appeal to the average English-speaking reader of food journalism. It has different names in different languages and can be transliterated in different ways. Foodies in Peoria or even Brooklyn are not likely to make this dish trendy. When I noticed it was about to expire and that the creator had wandered off, I did some more digging and got lucky, finally discovering a couple of additional names for his food. If I hadn't, it could have taken another 20 years for someone else to show up and try to create this article. Clearly a ceremonially-important dish in any culture is inherently notable, and from the beginning there was a credible claim of this ceremonial importance. We should just be accepting and tagging articles like this.

I’d like to suggest that we consider whether certain qualifications should be presumed to indicate confer notability, even without being able to show significant coverage. I was thinking along the lines of:

Proposed: a food item, food product,* or dish is presumed notable if:

1. It is credibly described as one of the national dishes of a country
2. It is credibly described as a traditional food historically eaten or as ubiquitous throughout a country/region or within a culture/religion
3. It is credibly described as a food traditionally served/eaten during or as important to a traditional ceremony/ritual
4. It is recognized by a national or international governmental body as culturally significant:
   • It is included in Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union
   • And similar
5. It is recognized by a notable NGO as culturally significant:
   • It is included among Ark of Taste foods
   • It is included among UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage foods
   • And similar
6. (Possible others?)

Support

1. As proposer —valereee (talk) 17:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)
2. I think that the proposer has laid out a compelling use case and criteria. Oppose arguments on the bases that sources are necessary seem to ignore that GNG requires multiple reliable sources with significant coverage whereas this proposed SNG would only require that a reliable source makes credible claims of the subject's importance, and is in keeping with the spirit of WP:NEXIST. Also, see my other argument based on my experience in NPP that I wrote in the discussion section. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:39, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   No, that's not what I said. I said, how do you write an article if the sources don't exist? WP:NEXIST says "Notability requires only the existence of suitable independent, reliable sources" But it does require them to exist. --Jayron32 18:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   Ok, and I think it's abundantly clear from the proposal that the baseline here is that an RS makes the claims enumerated in the proposal, which comprise a strong sign that further coverage exists even if it is not readily available online. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:43, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   It's not that they don't exist. It's that there aren't easily found at least two long articles about it in English. —valereee (talk) 18:46, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   How do you differentiate between a topic that has no sources at all, and a topic that has sources but they're very difficult to find? After searching exhaustively for sources, at what point do you eventually conclude that there are no sources? How do you know when you've reached that point? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 20:00, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   If there's no source at all (and I'm sure that does apply to some food items from less-studied cultures), we can't go there. We have to have some sort of credible claim of notability. But I haven't actually seen that at AfC for generic (rather than branded or marketed) food items -- either the article creator has provided some credible mention, or I've been able to find some credible mention myself like I finally was able to at the article I linked in the proposal. This isn't a proposal that we simply take the word of anyone creating an article. It's that in the case of foods that aren't from the English-speaking world + Europe + Japan, if the best we've got is RS mentioning it as (national dish, important in some cultural ritual, etc.) that we assume it's worth moving to article space and tagging rather than allowing to fall off the radar. —valereee (talk) 20:11, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   What makes foods so special? Why shouldn't we do the same thing for bands, for example? If there is a source that credibly says a band is cool and they play good music but otherwise there's no significant coverage in reliable sources, why don't we just create a stub, tag it, and hope that sources materialize at some point in the next 0-100 years? Surely there are bands from non-English-speaking countries that don't get much coverage in English sources and shouldn't be discriminated against, right? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 20:16, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   I answered this below but there's tons of information on the significance of food as a form of cultural identity (which is not the case for a random band, business, etc.).[1],[2],[3] SusunW (talk) 20:56, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   Are you suggesting that "random bands" like the Beatles, or Beethoven, or Billie Eilish have no cultural significance? Or random businesses like Sony, or Samsung, or SpaceX? I would argue that Led Zeppelin has more cultural significance than a Western Omelet. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 17:49, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   You know that I am not. Please stop. Cultural significance is significant. Inconsequential significance is inconsequential. SusunW (talk) 18:49, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   I know your edit summary said you were walking away, so I don't expect an answer. But my issue with your line of reasoning is that you're setting up false equivalences and unexamined shibboleths. Let's take "cultural significance/identity," for one. That's right up there with "national dish" as a term that can mean pretty much anything what a speaker wants it to mean, and the places where Wikipedia falls on its face is when we make guidelines/policies that involve subjective value judgments rather than objective facts. In this proposal, for instance -- as well as in your comments -- we see the value judgment that "cultural" is good and "commercial" is bad. You say that there is "tons of information on the significance of food" as a form of cultural identity, but not about random bands or businesses? Nonsense. A glance, using Scottywong's example, at Led Zeppelin's article alone lists eight books exclusively about the band, never mind other sources; that is far more extensive coverage than I wager has been generated about 90% of the putative "national foods" out there. One could make a case that the "national food" of (say) a Pacific island nation-state is more "culturally significant" than the music of Led Zeppelin ... it would just be a poor one and a losing effort. Ravenswing 22:37, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   I didn't set up the false equivalencies, Scotty did, as anyone reading the text here and below can see. I said that significance had to be verified in sources, to which he responded that I had said no sources were needed and that articles should not be written on verified significant foods, "uninteresting bands, uninteresting films, and uninteresting companies". It is clear he is highly intelligent, a tactical genius and an excellent debater. He didn't need your help and you got it wrong. To be clear my position is that we follow sources. If a group of sources that are independent and reliable say something is significant, it is per WP. The only discussion here is whether food that has been so verified can have a guideline that allows an article if there is no presently significant coverage. SusunW (talk) 23:27, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   Hrm. Were you under the impression that any one editor "owned" a line of debate, or that the "only discussion here" is on your terms and to your liking? That's about as shallow an assertion as claiming that something meets WP's standards of notability because there are sources which call it "significant." Well, so what? I wager I can come up with any number of reliable, independent sources that consider elementary schools, low-minor league baseball players, hometown fishing holes, nondescript country hills, ephemeral pornstars and pretty much anything else "significant." That editors are wont to push their pet hobby horses as "significant" is why WP:SIGCOV was put into place, and why the general trend WP-wide is to reduce the carve-outs, not create new ones. Ravenswing 01:43, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

3. Support. As an example, I looked up Sikil Pak, (Sikil Pac, Sik'il Pak) sort of "Mayan hummus". (Totally delicious.) I find plenty of references which talk about it and provide different recipes for it[4],[5],[6],[7],[8] and even a chef's review[9], but significant coverage? Doesn't appear to meet it. On the other hand, it is a significant dish in Yucatan and has spread along with the vegan movement internationally. (One of the sources says that, but a chef in Croatia actually had me try his version to tell me why it wasn't quite right. He was roasting, but not charring the tomatoes. The smokiness is required.) SusunW (talk) 19:13, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   If a food has truly "spread along with the vegan movement internationally", then surely there would be some coverage about it somewhere. If there is no coverage in reliable sources, then what would you write about it? Here's a few that might help: [10][11] But you're right, there will be foods around the world that undeniably exist, and might even be somewhat popular in some cultures, but no one has found them interesting enough to write anything about. Those foods should not be covered in Wikipedia, just like uninteresting bands, uninteresting films, and uninteresting companies. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 20:12, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   Scottywong The proposal requires a claim of notability, thus, inherently requires a minimum amount of coverage to verify that claim. The problem is not finding mention in notable sources, it is finding significant coverage. And the assumption that no one has found them interesting enough to write anything about is iffy at best. I found hundreds of blog articles and recipes, but those don't meet our threshold for RS. SusunW (talk) 20:28, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   I would also argue that there is an element to food traditions and culture that does not exist for your examples above of "uninteresting bands, uninteresting films, and uninteresting companies", when those lose their popularity, whatever that may be, they pretty much cease. On the other hand, food traditions have been studied and there is plenty of of information about how they shape and fuse and become embedded in other cultures.[12],[13],[14] There are stories of how cultural traditions of food were kept alive in concentration camps[15],[16] and how when migrant groups like the Korean-Mexicans were stranded in Mexico, they lost their language, their ability to read and write Korean, but kept their food traditions.[17] Bottom line, a random band or business may not impact a culture, but food is often an identifier for a large group of people. SusunW (talk) 20:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   To be clear, your assertion is that things like music, art, and business has an insignificant impact on culture when compared to the cultural impact of cuisine? And therefore, because of this enormously outsized cultural influence of food over all other forms of art and human ingenuity, it deserves a privileged status when it comes to notability on WP? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 08:28, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   Please do not imply that I said or asserted something I did not say or assert. We weren't talking about broad fields of cuisine, music, art, and business. We are talking about how singular traditional food can identify a culture, but a single random band or business usually does not, i.e. kimchi, haggis, vs. X's garage band. SusunW (talk) 14:34, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   That's not a fair comparison. You're comparing an unremarkable, unknown garage band to an iconic world-renowned food. At least compare things that are on the same level. If you're talking about kimchi, you should be comparing it to a musical act like Lady Gaga or U2, or a business like Apple or Ford Motor Company, or a film like Pulp Fiction or Star Wars. If you want a fair comparison for an unremarkable garage band comprised of teenagers who have never recorded an album or played a live show, then compare it to the dish that a Mongolian nomad invented by mixing marmot liver with an old can of Chef Boyardee ravioli that he randomly found in the desert. The garage band doesn't deserve an article, and neither does the Mongolian marmot liver ravioli. This is why we don't need to make exceptions to GNG. If something is notable, then it will have been written about in reliable sources. If no one has written anything significant about it, then it's not notable, regardless of whether it's a band or a food. Food and cuisine is certainly a defining element of culture, but it is not the only defining element and it doesn't deserve any elevated status over things like music, art, business, science, technology, language, etc. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 17:01, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   No one is debating about adding Mongolian marmot liver ravioli or an insignificant band, etc. The proposal states that a claim of notability must be verified and that it must have verifiable cultural significance. If it doesn't then absolutely no article should be written. However, valereee's original example and mine, both fit the criteria of a food that RS have indicated are culturally significant. SusunW (talk) 17:24, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   I've added mention of sikil pak at Pumpkin_seed#Cuisine. There are practically infinite recipes combining various ingredients that can be found around the world, and it's absurd to suggest automatic notability for the mere assertion that something is "traditional" or "significant" in one place, without significant coverage. Maybe this is in fact notable, but like many specific dishes it's better to cover in context of its cuisine and ingredients. Reywas92^Talk 21:54, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

   @Reywas92, recipes don't count toward proving notability. For me, what I've learned over my time working on food articles is that if I google a dish and a gazillion recipes come up, the dish it quite likely notable and it just needs someone to search in the country(s) of origin's language(s) using the correct spelling(s) and alphabet(s) and dish name(s) to find the sources. They're there, but I'm an English speaker. But a gazillion recipes don't prove notability. If you're suggesting a gazillion recipes should prove notability, I'm listening. —valereee (talk) 00:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

   Thanks for adding sikil pak to pumpkin seed Reywas92. However, I am unsure why it would be better to cover in context of its cuisine and ingredients. Is that in a guideline or just your opinion? On the assessment of recipes Valereee, I did not use them in my example above. It could be argued that if there are hundreds of recipes in RS on the web that is an indicator of notability, but like you, I don't think it proves notability without a clear statement of same. SusunW (talk) 14:34, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

4. Comment: With something like this, it would be more helpful to create a guide to sources for editors. Where would people find sources for these things by country, etc. Pool the knowledge in one place, then at articles, and at AfD editors, would have something to refer to. (see also, [[18]] I don't know if that is any good, but with all the interest in the English speaking world regarding cooking, it seems like you could find some such things worthwhile). Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:51, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• Support per @Valereee and SusunW. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:20, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support Because everything behind the scenes at Wikipedia is madness and bizarre judgment calls with justifications invented after the fact, we have "SNGs" that bear different relationships to "the GNG", which we pretend defines the concept of "notability", even though the page Wikipedia:Notability says it doesn't. Some SNGs operate in parallel to the GNG, while others supplement it with advice about the particular kinds of sources that are typically useful in that specialized area (e.g., WP:NFILM). This kind of guideline could work as the latter. "Hey, so you want to write about foods on Wikipedia? Thanks! Here are some places you can start looking." The SNG/GNG structure is a pile of quasi-legalistic post-hoc rationalizations, but hey, if we're confined to work within it, might as well make the best of it. XOR'easter (talk) 17:44, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support per proposal. Everyone knows that Notability GNG supersedes any SNG, because that's the difference between policy and guidelines. That said any SNG, and all SNG's, provide knowledge for those who are not familiar with the given topic so that they may understand what constitutes notability within that specialty. Just as not all notable people get an obituary in the New York Times, not all notable foods show up in the Betty Crocker cookbook. Montanabw^(talk) 18:24, 15 December 2021 (UTC) Expanded and corrected to note that GNG is a guideline too, the "when all else fails" fallback. WP:NOTABILITY is policy. From that page: "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) listed in the box on the right; and It is not excluded under the What Wikipedia is not policy. Montanabw^(talk) 18:32, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support seems generally fine. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:25, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Oppose

• This proposal has not made any case that WP:GNG is insufficient for deciding which food items are notable or not. --Jayron32 17:56, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Jayron32, in other cultures, food does not get the kind of attention it does in English-speaking, European, or Japanese. And there are transliteration and language differences. And there are cultural differences that make those foods likely to be ignored by the places where there is food journalism. That's why there's often limited coverage. —valereee (talk) 18:21, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Valereee: If you don't have reliable source texts, from where do you plan to get information to put in the articles you wish to create? --Jayron32 18:23, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  We tag the articles for sources and expansion. Now that they're actually findable by others, they can be expanded. —valereee (talk) 18:27, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Let's try this again: If there is no reliable source text for people to find, from where will anyone find information to put in the article? Like, if reliable source text does not exist, where does a person find information to write an article from? --Jayron32 18:36, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  It's not that there's no reliable source text. It's that there's nowhere near enough easily findable in English to get over the hump of multiple sigcov. It's not that the source is unreliable. It's that they don't feel the need to write six paragraphs on Inyama Yenhloko, which everyone knows is "famous." :) The sources are there. But as in the case of Inyama Yenhloko, there are no fewer than five names, some in languages that were not originally written language and which are therefore transliterated right from the beginning. —valereee (talk) 18:40, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Sources don't need to be in English. That's never been a requirement at Wikipedia. WP:NOENG states "Citations to non-English reliable sources are allowed on the English Wikipedia." If sources exist in other languages, GNG is met just as easily, with no additional hurdles needed to be jumped. Again, if the sources exist (in English, in any language) then GNG is met, and this guideline is redundant. If the sources do not exist, then you have nothing to get information from. If you have non-English sources, that's fine. They count exactly as well as English ones do. --Jayron32 18:44, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Jayron32, yes, but because of transliteration and multiple names (see the example I provided) it's hard to find by someone who speaks only English. We need people who 1. know all the different names and 2. know the various transliterations and spellings and 3. ideally are on the ground in Lesotho or Guanghzhou and have some familiarity with the food. —valereee (talk) 18:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  (Sorry, didn't mean to ping you yet again!) —valereee (talk) 18:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, but none of that is a notability issue. Notability is merely about deciding whether or not there is enough reliable source text from which to write an article. The technical aspects of translating information from other languages is an unrelated problem as to whether or not those texts exists, and its not particularly unique to food. --Jayron32 18:52, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, but English speakers aren't going to find that coverage easily, and if we don't make it easier for non-English speakers to realize there even is an article...seriously that Inyama Yenhloko article could have been created FIVE times under different names. We wouldn't even know someone had tried to create it multiple times with possibly enough sources cumulatively to be clearly sigcov. —valereee (talk) 19:03, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  That seems like a non-sequitur. How does this proposal make it easier for people to find such coverage? It doesn't direct them to the sources? It doesn't provide any translation services? It doesn't seem to actually be useful for anything you are claiming it will be. The article you keep citing already exists and easily passes WP:GNG, so this proposal would not have changed anything. --Jayron32 19:16, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  It makes the article, with its tags, more easily findable by non-regulars at enwiki. The article I keep citing exists because I spent a huge amount of time on the draft and also got lucky to discover multiple additional names for the dish which allowed me to find just enough coverage to make it clearly notable, and I did so just before it was likely going to be deleted. We can't depend on that. I knew, based on long experience, that this dish was very likely notable, and that if I plugged away long enough I might -- might! -- be able to prove it, and I was willing to go that distance. Two people had previously declined it. —valereee (talk) 19:25, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Welcome to writing articles. You've just described the process every person has to go through when writing any new article. There's nothing special about food that makes it any harder or easier. --Jayron32 19:36, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  1. It's from a culture that does not traditionally have a written language 2. There are multiple languages involved 3. None of those languages is English 4. Transliteration and the resulting spelling variations and probably most importantly, 5. Subject is not only of zero interest but is actively offputting to many English speakers.

  This last is very typical of food, much more so than with other subjects. Most English speakers find the idea of boiled head meat actively disgusting, so: no food journalism. That leaves only academic writing. No, this is not the same as any other subject. —valereee (talk) 19:48, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Americans think it's gross, therefore it's exempt from the coverage requirements everything else is subject to" Reywas92^Talk 20:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  No, Americans (and other markets to which food journalists sell their pieces) think it's gross, therefore American (and other English-language) journalists don't write about it. Reywas, I get that you're deeply skeptical here. All I can say is Detroit-style pizz has multiple multiple sigcov, and it was only invented in 1943 or something. Inyama Yenhloko is a historical dish associated with ceremonies and was traditionally served only to men. Does it really track that Detroit-style pizza is more notable? Or is it just more written-about in English-language journalism? —valereee (talk) 23:50, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  It's not "associated with ceremonies". It says they will slaughter a cow and have beef for special events like funerals and weddings, but then only the men have the head. There's no description whatsoever of what practices and rituals there are around eating the head in particular, what customs the men partake in when they eat the head meat, how the head relates to the event, or anything else. The source doesn't even specify which among these many ways one can cook the head that they use, possibly because that's not even a consistent practice. "Inyama Yenhloko" merely means "head meat" and is not a specific dish! This is maddeningly vague, so yes I'd say Detroit-style is absolutely more notable because that's a distinct dish, not an ingredient that has a variety of translations and recipes. I've already made a few edits to the article and it needs a lot more. Reywas92^Talk 03:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• Strong oppose You lose credibility when you say something is "inherently notable" regardless of sources. If something "is credibly described as one of the national dishes of a country" then you apparently already have significant sources that would pass GNG, so what's the point here? If something "is credibly described as a traditional food historically eaten or as ubiquitous throughout a country/region or within a culture/religion" then it then you apparently already have significant sources that would pass GNG, so what's the point here? "is credibly described as a food traditionally served/eaten during or as important to a traditional ceremony/ritual" is hopelessly vague. With "inherent notability" – forget significant sources! – How are we to know the significance of such "ritual" and the importance of whatever dish to it, and why would the notability of the ritual be inherited by such a dish at all? Is the case in this example merely "weddings and funerals"? Protected geographical indications include many specific varieties of products that merely allow for a particular label but do not necessarily indicate that the type of food or dish itself is distinct and warrants its own article, even if many or most are. If there's isn't significant coverage for something, it shouldn't have its own article, end of story. Put it in an article about the ritual it's involved in, put it in a list of dishes of a certain type or including a certain ingredient, but no one should be making articles without substantive coverage. Sure, you found something that isn't "trendy in Brooklyn", but you found significant sources and improved the article, a process no different for this food than for literally any other subject one can write about. There's no argument given at all that this is needed. Reywas92^Talk 18:08, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Reywas92, the argument is the example I gave of a food item that, if I hadn't noticed/dug some more/got lucky/fixed, we would have deleted the draft unpublished, and since it took 20 years for someone to try to create this article, maybe it would be another 20 before someone tried again. But once it's created, it's findable by people other than the creator. Being called a "national dish" does not automatically mean there's significant coverage easily found in English. It's similar to what we might do for someone who played in a major league sport at a time/place there wasn't comprehensive sports coverage. —valereee (talk) 18:19, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  And? Aren't there countless drafts made by new users who aren't familiar with notability and sourcing guidelines on every topic that regularly get AFC declined or deleted? What the heck does "it took 20 years for someone to try to create this article" mean? There are hundreds of new articles every day that weren't already made in the last 20 years, that doesn't mean we need to throw away the low, low standard of significant sources. This being a food item or from another country doesn't mean it should be exempt from those. Since this article gives multiple names, multiple recipes, and multiple ways of eating (it is street food sold at taxi ranks or "ceremonially-important" food?) cow head, I'm questioning if this is even a specific notable dish, or just how cow head is eaten in Southern Africa more generically – i.e. is "Inyama Yenhloko" a name for something uniquely notable or just a translation? Reading through Offal, I'm a bit surprised there's not a Head as food article similar to those for several other organs, and I could imagine this being merged there! I'm sure you can find descriptions of heat meat preparations and culinary history from Latin America, from the Middle East, from Asia with several names, but that doesn't mean each one of them is independently – and certainly not inherently! – notable. Reywas92^Talk 18:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  But @Reywas92, this is a dish that if it were a US dish would have had an article twenty years ago. It's ceremonially important, like Haroset, which has had an article since 2005. —valereee (talk) 18:44, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  The vagueness of "ceremonially important" is just laughable and I'm done with this. The source here says "When a cow has been slaughtered for a ceremony or an occasion, women are not allowed to eat inyama yenhloko, the cow’s head." So what's ceremonially important about it? Indeed, beef is eaten on special occasions! In this culture women can't eat the head, but I certainly don't see any reason why it's inherently notable to have an article on it, screw significant coverage! That source doesn't even mention this being a specific dish, rather just being the head! Don't give me dumb OSE arguments. Maybe that had an article because it's a name for a recognized concept with plenty of significant coverage on it, eaten on a specific holiday, rather than just a translation for "cow head". Reywas92^Talk 19:02, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Aight. If you don't see something so ceremonially important that half the population aren't even allowed to eat it, then yeah, I'm clearly not going to persuade you. :) Best to you. —valereee (talk) 19:07, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose: There's been a philosophical thread floating around Wikipedia for quite a few years now that if there's some putative excuse for a subject to lack significant coverage in reliable sources, the provisions of WP:V and the GNG are waived in its favor. This curious notion is not supported by Wikipedia notability guidelines or core policies. The only credible answer to "Oh, but food doesn't get the attention Over There than it does here" isn't "Well, we should make an article up on it anyway, because, well, hrm, reasons." It's "Then a Wikipedia article on that food item cannot be sustained." Since damn near every significant culture and nation has a "Cuisine of Upper Slobovia" article (and thankfully so, because I refer to them quite often for my work), they make perfectly good repositories for those regional foods and drinks where sourcing is lacking for sustainable independent articles. Ravenswing 18:43, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  So we get at AfC an article about Chicken Kazakh (or whatever), and the only source is to the government of Kazakhstan mentioning, "Chicken Kazakh, the national dish." I look for it to write that article, and there's just nothing but recipes. Hundreds of recipes, which I know from experience means this dish is notable. But I can't prove it with recipes. I can't speak Kazakh, and I don't even have a keyboard for Kazakh. There may very well be a book on Chicken Kazakh, in Kazakh. But I can't find it. And certainly every country's national dish is notable, no? And someone somewhere must be talking about it, but probably in a different language and using a different keyboard. So if we move to article space, someone who does speak Kazakh can now find that article, which they can't easily while it's in draft space. —valereee (talk) 19:01, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  If you have issues with what is or is not at National dish, be my guest, but we don't need silly hypotheticals or exemptions from such basic expections of significant sources. Reywas92^Talk 19:09, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Okeydoke, let's talk a concrete case: Inyama Yenhloko, which is what made me finally decide we needed to do this. It has two different names, one with two spellings, one with three spellings, and there's transliteration to deal with. I'm an English speaker unfamiliar with this food item. If I could have noted the credible claim of notability, moved to article, and tagged, it's quite likely someone who know the item, speaks the language, understand the transliteration, could have much more easily (and with much less expenditure of editor time) found the needed sources. —valereee (talk) 19:40, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Then the answer is that it doesn't get a standalone article until someone with the interest and the skills to ferret out significant coverage in reliable sources puts the effort in to do so. Where we differ, I judge, is that I don't deem it a horrible calamity for the en Wikipedia to lack a standalone article on said dish.

  But beyond that, c'mon. You don't speak Kazakh. I don't speak Kazakh. But Google Translate does speak Kazakh, quite well enough to us to assess whether a Kazakh source provides sigcov to Chicken Kazakh. And it works quite well in translating the relevant article on the Kazakh Wikipedia, which if with nearly a quarter of a million articles it doesn't have one on its alleged national dish, then that dish can't be all that important anyway. (And, hey, look: the Kazakh Wikipedia does indeed have an article [19] on the dish the Cuisine of Kazakhstan article considers the national dish ... which isn't necessary anyway, because it has a properly sourced article right here.) I am certainly going to Oppose any SNG proposal that seeks to override the GNG just because sourcing the relevant articles is more work than people want to put in. Ravenswing 19:53, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Incorrect. Kazakh is spelled with a different alphabet. Therefore English Google does not speak Kazakh. English Google speaks French just fine. But not Kazakh, or Chinese, or any language that needs to be transliterated. —valereee (talk) 23:52, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  You are plainly unfamiliar with Google Translate, where translations to and from Kazakh is one of the listed options. (Did you really think that the vast computing power which can handle translation from a foreign language would somehow be incapable of handling a different set of squiggles and marks than the Roman alphabet?) I wouldn't rely on it were I an academic researcher writing a scholarly work. But it's far more than adequate in giving us a fairly accurate notion of what a foreign language source says. Ravenswing 01:02, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Ravenswing, no, I'm very familiar with google translate and use it all the time to try to get a rough idea of what a source in another language is telling me about a subject. And often it is quite useful for certain search terms. But it's one thing to translate a text from Chinese or whatever to English, another to search for a Chinese term when the search term might be spelled differently, might be a completely different word, and is transliterated possibly from more than one alphabet. Please try to assume I know whereof I speak. I've been working with food articles for a while, and I'm quite good at it. —valereee (talk) 01:24, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  Perhaps I'm not understanding: Google Translate is able to translate Chinese, and seems to be able to translate the link to Kazakh Wikipedia. isaacl (talk) 01:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  Isaacl, it's not that google translate can't give us a rough understanding from Chinese to English. It's that searching in English doesn't always bring the Chinese stuff up because of spelling/transliteration/name differences. The problem isn't the same in both directions. —valereee (talk) 01:20, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  Well, Ravenswing was referring specifically to Google Translate, and not Google search. However, the challenges with translation to and from Chinese is not due to transliteration. Some of the challenges include differences in language concepts and structure, idiomatic differences, and homographs—various Chinese characters/English words can have different meanings based on context. Translating whole texts includes more context which helps. The same problems arise with any pair of languages, though some have less commonality between them. isaacl (talk) 02:49, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Isaacl, yes, but I search for a term, and I use translate to figure out what the results say. But I only get results from that search. Google translate doesn't go, "Oh, she's searching Inyama Yenhloko. She also needs to see Iskopo, skopo, skop, and inyama yentloko." And probably eight other names for the dish in other languages. Each with its own set of varied spellings, since again these are not languages that are written, and the terms have been transliterated, which always means there will be a variety of spellings in English. So when we're not searching on the right terms, or when we're searching with the wrong alphabet, or when we're searching with a different spelling, we still get nothing. I'm sorry, am I being dense? I have to use search before I can use translate. —valereee (talk) 03:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  I agree there can be a workflow issue when someone is trying to search for sources in an unfamiliar language, and it's even harder when the writing system and various language conventions (such as word modification) are unfamiliar as well. All I'm saying is that the issue is not that "English Google does not speak" languages with a different writing system, and I don't think that it's "incorrect" that Google Translate can translate web pages in languages with different writing systems. isaacl (talk) 04:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose - I'll generally oppose any notability guideline that pushes GNG to the sidelines and doesn't require it to be met. For the most part, most secondary notability guidelines are used as a shortcut to presume notability if certain conditions are met. In other words, if a band has a song that appeared on a national music chart, then it is presumed that there are sufficient sources to pass GNG, and therefore they are presumed to be notable. If a football player has played in a tier 1 professional match, then it is presumed that there are sufficient sources to pass GNG, and therefore they are presumed to be notable. For any of these topics, you can still challenge the notability at AfD and demand that someone actually provide the sources that are presumed to exist, and if they're not found, then the subject is deemed non-notable and the article is deleted. That's not what is proposed here for foods. This proposal is attempting to say that a food is automatically notable if it's considered a national dish, regardless of whether or not it passes GNG. That is a problematic way to construct a notability guideline, for the reasons that Jayron32 points out in his oppose above: if no significant coverage exists in reliable sources, then how are you even going to write an article? Automatic notability is problematic. It would be easier for me to support something like this if it were written in such a way that notability is presumed (but not guaranteed) under certain conditions, but GNG is ultimately the controlling factor. And in that case, I'd want to see some evidence that the conditions you've listed above are actually predictive of notability. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 19:54, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Scottywong, I've responded to your question in the discussion, didn't want to dupe it here except to ask what possible circumstance can we imagine that a dish would be the national dish of a country but not notable? I mean...if it's the country's national dish, it's by default that country's most notable dish. How is any country's national dish not notable? —valereee (talk) 23:17, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Because on Wikipedia, "notable" = "meets the relevant notability guidelines and/or the GNG." It does not mean "I think it's important" or "noteworthy." I am troubled -- if, after all these years, not surprised -- that anyone would have to explain this distinction to an editor of fifteen years' standing and nearly 50,000 edits. Ravenswing 01:15, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Ravenswing, I'm sorry you're troubled by that. Believe me, this is something I've thought about for a long time. We actually do have multiple SNG rules that are similar to this proposal, so it's not actually unusual to consider such a thing. —valereee (talk) 01:29, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  Here's one from WP:NBASE: Presumed notable if: Have appeared in at least one game in any of the following defunct leagues: All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, American Association, Cuban League, Federal League, Japanese Baseball League, National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, Negro Major Leagues, Players' League, Union Association. —valereee (talk) 01:33, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not unduly troubled by you having made the proposal; as you say, there are SNGs such as WP:PROF that are similar, so I agree it's no outrage that you've made this one. I'm troubled at the implication that you're unclear on what "notability" means in terms of Wikijargon. As far as your example goes, with no pun intended, you're off base. All the NSPORTS criteria come with the premise that those who meet them are highly likely to meet the GNG, and that the criteria are shortcuts to that end -- we're trimming and perfecting all the time on Notability (Sports), with the discussion above as an example. NO NSPORTS criteria, NBASE included, stipulates that they immunize players against needing to meet the GNG. Ravenswing 01:40, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Ravenswing, I've seen baseball bios sourced to a lineup. Seriously. A lineup, reported in the local paper, and nothing else. X played in Y baseball game in 1884. He played, so he's automatically notable. And he's apparently never been mentioned again, anywhere -- and I think it's quite likely he was never mentioned anywhere because if he was, someone would have dug it up because: American Baseball. So, okay. That's what we've decided, I'll accept it. But I take absolute exception to your accusation that I am unclear on what notability means because I think maybe we should treat foreign foods the same way as we treat American baseball players. And not even. We have thousands of baseball players here in the US. Most countries have maybe two or three national dishes. All I'm looking for is that we presume notability in these cases. —valereee (talk) 01:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  I've seen baseball bios sourced to a lineup. This is actually exactly how NSPORT bios work. An article can be in mainspace sourced only to something that verifies they meet a sport-specific guideline, rather than directly showing they meet GNG from the start. However, once notability is challenged, editors are expected to find multiple IRS with SIGCOV that validate the SSG's prediction the subject meets GNG. Given the proliferation of athlete microstubs and the overwhelming volume of these bios at AfD, it's evident this sort of presumption-based SNG has serious issues, particularly when an SSG isn't actually in line with the GNG. and I think it's quite likely he was never mentioned anywhere because if he was, someone would have dug it up because: American Baseball. I make this argument all the time at sport AfDs, and thankfully in the last year or so more and more admins have been disregarding the "keep meets NFOOTY"-type !votes and weighing the NSPORT guideline-based arguments (that GNG explicitly supersedes NSPORT) more heavily. We've managed to delete several NBASE-meeting players lately, including one that was a featured article. JoelleJay (talk) 18:53, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  Please note: I am not saying I think something like a single at-bat in a major league actually should confer notability. I am simply defending myself from your statement that it's "(troubling) anyone would have to explain this distinction to an editor of fifteen years' standing and nearly 50,000 edits". —valereee (talk) 01:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. Either something meets the GNG, and is thus suitable for an article, or has not and is not. We have articles on plenty of foods. There also will be some we do not, and should not, have articles on, because they don't pass the GNG. If they don't pass it, then reliable sources have told us that it is not worthy of noting (by not doing so), and as always, we should follow, not dispute or second-guess, what reliable sources say and do. When they don't provide substantial coverage of something, we should follow suit and not do so either. We have enough poor quality permastubs with carve-outs like "populated places"; we need to scale those exceptions back and ultimately remove them rather than adding more. The above argument that "surely a national dish is notable" doesn't wash—if it is "surely notable", finding in-depth references on it should be very easy to do. If those don't exist, then it's not notable. And there is absolutely nothing which should be considered "inherently notable". If it's notable, it will have been extensively noted. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 00:46, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose This seems like a guideline looks for a solution to solve. Unless it can be demonstrated that food articles that seem possible to source are regularly deleted, or as others have stated, where the GNG would fail here, this is unnecessary. --Masem (t) 01:40, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Masem (and I sincerely hope I'm not badgering, so please tell me if I am and I'll try to stop), see the example provided and its history. The draft, which was created by a newbie who wandered off, would likely have been deleted if an experienced researcher hadn't 1. noticed and 2. been willing to do the heavy lifting and 3. gotten lucky. That's what it took. I don't think we want to depend on those three things happening regularly. I sincerely do not believe this is a solution in search of a problem. I am very experienced in food topics, and I see this issue regularly with foods from countries represented by few editors. —valereee (talk) 02:30, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  That's exactly one case, and not sufficient for a pattern to require considering an SNG. --Masem (t) 04:29, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. I'm seeing no justifiable reason for bypassing GNG in this way. Sources being difficult to find, alternate spellings, being in non-English sources – these are very poor reasons. It is evidently possible to find the required sources, as the proposer has adequately demonstrated, with good (not "lucky") research. Also, the claim that one line stubs encourage expansion is a fallacy, and the clean-up work following mass-creation activity is far more time consuming; guidelines that promote such activity only serve article creation counters, not content creators or the project as a whole. If we don't have sufficient SIGCOV to build an article, the subject can still be adequately covered in a suitable broader topic article or list, with or without a redirect. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 12:09, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. The justifications given for foods deserving to join the very small set of GNG-exempt SNGs could be applied to just about anything...clothes, recreation, mythologies, rituals, people in general: all of these intersect with "undercovered cultures", but Wikipedia has always placed verifiability above subjective assessments of "importance" even if that means excluding some topics. If something hasn't been written about in multiple RS, it doesn't warrant a standalone article. There's nothing special about food that makes finding sources any more difficult than it is for any other subject, unless, as seems to be the case, you're starting from an assumption of there being "inherent notability" to every ceremony or tradition. Since this has obviously not been decided through either consensus or practice, it must be disregarded. I think Wjemather's point above about undersourced stubs is also very relevant: SNGs that allow creation of articles with only "presumption of GNG" refs only encourage unchecked proliferation by editors padding their stats, far outpacing AfD. This proposal is going even further than that to essentially remove AfD from the equation altogether, since meeting its criteria apparently means no significant coverage ever needs to be found. JoelleJay (talk) 18:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose, I am not seeing sufficient justification for this. Just because there are insufficient sources to establish independent notability does not preclude information cited to a single source or sources short of SIGCOV in other articles or lists etc. Cavalryman (talk) 22:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC).
• Oppose. GNG exists for a reason - it goes hand in hand with WP:V. An SNG should complement GNG, not toss it out the window. I think the proposer of this guideline is approaching the matter from a philosophy which is at odds with some of the core principles of WP:N, based on statements like: Clearly a ceremonially-important dish in any culture is inherently notable. This is far from clear! What about a ceremonially important dish the only record of which is in some Sanskrit manuscripts in the basement of a museum? If we're to write an article about a subject, it needs to be covered in reliable published sources. Colin M (talk) 00:56, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose- first, I'm not supporting anything that includes "Possible others (?)" because once it's approved someone will decide it needs to say something like "I think I've heard of it". The other problem I have with this proposal is that it would attempt to auto-bestow notability on topics for which you can find a source containing a bare claim that it's a national dish or whatever but nothing much beyond that- otherwise it would meet GNG and the point would be moot- and maybe a recipe in a cookbook. Well, that isn't enough to write an article. Reyk _YO! 04:19, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose On two levels. One is I don't even see a wiki-specific proposal. Like where would this go? Put SNG type material into the main wp:notability page? Create a new SNG? Second, a dish is too narrow of an item to essentially create an SNG for. That said, if a publicly named dish is widely prevalent somewhere in the world, and there is some info on it to write even a small article, IMO it is enclyclopedic and I'd like to see it in Wikipedia. If somebody wants to knock out a non-commercial dish for not meeting the strictest possible interpretation of GNG I think that they are taking it to an unusual degree. North8000 (talk) 21:47, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

*“Food products” in this proposal does not refer to branded commercial products but to the generic item, such as chili crisp, not Lao Gan Ma. Commercial brands of a food item should be specifically excluded from this. —valereee (talk) 17:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

• Why, just out of curiosity? Ravenswing 18:51, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Ravenswing, why are we excluding branded commercial products? Branded commercial products typically need no such SNG. Commercial products always have a better chance of getting sigcov because they have people whose job it is to get them sigcov. —valereee (talk) 23:16, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

• You may be interested in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spicy Fifty, a discussion I closed a while back. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 17:49, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yeah, that's not an inherently notable drink. The IBA is a trade association, and the "Spicy Fifty" is a brand name designed to market a certain bar. It needs sigcov. This notability guideline should specifically exclude such items. —valereee (talk) 18:24, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

• What does "credibly described" mean? Does it mean that if a dish has one sentence in a reliable source describing it as a national dish of a country (and no other known RS coverage), it meets this SNG? -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 17:54, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  @King of Hearts, a reliable source describes it that way. Just because something is mentioned as a national dish does not mean that country has food journalism that would provide significant coverage. —valereee (talk) 18:19, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  What kind of article would you write on a topic that has a one-sentence description in one reliable source, and no other coverage anywhere? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 19:58, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  For me personally, I'd write as much as I could from the reliable source -- even if that was "Chicken Kazakh is the national dish of Kazakhstan." -- tag it for expansion/more sources, notify the appropriate projects, create links to and from reasonable pages, set a w-ping to check back in three months, set a google alert, and cross my fingers. :) But even a one-sentence stub is not a useless article. It encourages others to fill in the gaps. Creating is daunting, but editing much less so. If a reader searches and comes up with a 1-sentence stub tagged for expansion, I strongly suspect they're more likely to contribute than if they'd searched the term and come up with a blank and in order to contribute had to create. Article creators, even new ones who don't understand notability yet, are very valuable. —valereee (talk) 20:22, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  An option that completely works is to, in the article about the country, include the few sentences you can about the national dish and create a redirect for it (as redirects are cheap), and only expand out to a separate article if there's sufficiently more information about it. Way too many editors seem to feel that they must create separate standalone articles on a topic, and thus run into notability, when inclusion on a larger, more appropriate topic, avoids many of the questions around notability; and you still get a means to search for it too. --Masem (t) 01:53, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  And that is a great solution for foods for which there's an actual question of whether they are notable or not -- foods that don't fall into one of the above categories. But if a food would be easily proved notable if it had originated in any country that was well-represented among WP editors, but if it originates in a country where we don't have many, it's not? That's a problem, and it gets to the heart of some of the major criticisms WP gets from the rest of the world. —valereee (talk) 02:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  It's also probably worth noting that while "merge to more general article and develop there" is an important tool in our encyclopedic playbook, it's not always easily applicable; we may be missing said more general article, or it may be structured in a way that doesn't lend itself to discussing dishes in detail without throwing DUE out the window. For cross-cultural foods that are enjoyed multiple cultures, there may not be a single more general article to connect to. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:42, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• In my experience as a new page reviewer, the recommendations made here in valereee's proposal actually do square with GNG rather well (at least if "credibly described" is understood as "described as such by a top tier RS e.g. scholarly publication, reliable magazine articles in a publication relevant to either food or the region that the dish is from, or reliable news sources from the region that the dish is from"), but it takes a whole lot of legwork to actually prove that in practice. Regional foods are not an easy topic to research at all, as a lot of the best sources are not readily available online and those that are still require a combination of information retrieval, linguistic and cultural proficiency beyond what can be expected from the average enWiki editor. Adopting an SNG standard based on this proposal would save work and reduce unintentional newbie BITEing in a subject space that is not a high risk for abuse (especially with the applied exception for brand name goods). _signed, Rosguill ^talk 02:11, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  As an afterthought to this, it may bear noting that in my amateur experience researching and writing about food here on Wikipedia, scholarly articles on food often put a great deal of faith in sources that would be considered incredibly poor in other disciplines, including citing works of fiction for their references to dishes. Now, I emphatically do not think that we should consider being mentioned in a work of fiction as contributing to notability, but it bears noting that there's an epistemic precedent for putting faith in weak sources. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 02:32, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  One of the most frequent things I see is a newb creating an article like Yongfeng chili sauce, which was a student creation someone pointed me at when it was AfD'd. —valereee (talk) 02:45, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  My experience with seeing many new articles in sci/tech academic biographies (which is where I do most of my article creation) and discounting the self-promotional ones is that the noobs don't know about subject guidelines, often create articles on non-notable topics, and get bitten when those articles are inevitably taken to AfD. Adding a new specialized subject guideline for food won't help lead them to more-notable topics for their creations; it will just make additional bureaucratic rules for them to not know. SNGs have their uses, but making things easier for noobs isn't one of them. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:16, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  It doesn't directly help new editors, but it does indirectly. No, a new editor will not know to look up and rely on an SNG, but the existence of the SNG could easily be the difference between said new editor being welcomed for their contributions and finding themselves on the unfamiliar ground of AfD, where there's a good chance that the article will be deleted unless an experienced editor familiar with the subject matter happens to join the discussion. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:31, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

  In my experience SNGs also work badly for AFC/Drafts, where the new page and draft patrollers frequently are unfamiliar with all of the SNGs they might encounter and instead just directly defer to GNG, even in cases where that might be inappropriate. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:16, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  @David Eppstein, I wasn't trying to help newer editors. I was trying to provide some guidance to editors at AfC who were unfamiliar with food articles (and particularly unfamiliar foods). If a food can be credibly described as a national dish, etc., it's extremely likely the food is notable. I've never actually come across a food credibly described in one of the above ways that didn't eventually turn out to be notable. It's just that without someone expert, it can languish. And if it languishes long enough, it can be deleted. —valereee (talk) 20:23, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  I repeat myself, but: In my experience SNGs also work badly for AFC/Drafts, where the new page and draft patrollers frequently are unfamiliar with all of the SNGs they might encounter and instead just directly defer to GNG, even in cases where that might be inappropriate. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• The problem in the OP's case of Inyama Yenhloko was not a lack of rules which, per WP:CREEP, would not be read. Instead the primary problem was the AfC process in which the gatekeeping was done in a jobsworth fashion, without helping the primary editor or topic. The topic in question was turned down twice when review of those versions indicates that the topic had promise.

A particular problem with food topics is that they get confused by issues of language. Inyama Yenhloko is just "head meat" in the Zulu language while skop is Afrikaans – a contraction of skaap kop which just means "sheep head" in that language. But this is the English language wikipedia and so we should be preferring English titles – titles such as head cheese, sheep's head food, etc. Cooking the whole head of an animal like a cow or sheep is far from unique to South Africa and so we should be starting with a general overview of the topic rather than assorted local variations and the foreign language names for such dishes.

Now, please let's hear from Northamerica1000 who has written numerous articles about food.

Andrew🐉(talk) 22:37, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I was pinged here, but have not formed an opinion at this time regarding all of this. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:45, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• I think it would help for the proposer/supporters to give a few examples of notable food articles they think would get deleted at the moment, or were already deleted, despite notability or later being proven to be notable. Then, explain how the proposal would avert this loss. Essentially, is this affecting food articles more than other articles, and would this proposal effectively stop that? There is one example given, but it's unclear if this is just a mishap or part of a bigger problem. Dege31 (talk) 15:51, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

  Meh, probably not worth the research time, given the amount of opposition there is. I can live without this for now, and I'll start a list of such articles as I come across them. —valereee (talk) 17:27, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Fuzziness in notability, standalone, and article content descriptions

There is some fuzziness, in my opinion, in what WP:N has to say about three overlapping subtopics, namely: 1) topic notability in general, 2) standalone pages, and 3) other page content. In particular, the boxed summary at the top fails to match the content of the body. Beyond this, the page doesn't adequately provide a user with a specific question in mind with a clear roadmap of how to navigate the page in order to address the reason they came to this page in the first place.

As far as mismatches or fuzziness, consider these excerpts:

1. The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic should have its own article. – top box ("nutshell")
2. Sometimes, a notable topic can be covered better as part of a larger article. – WP:PAGEDECIDE
3. The notability guidelines do not apply to contents of articles or lists – WP:NNC

There seems to be a clear mismatch between 1 and 2, which goes beyond the fact that the nutshell is a very brief summary and thus things may have been omitted due to brevity. In the case of 2 vs. 3, that works adequately for the synthesis case (creating new content; see below) but not as well for the analysis case.

What brings users here, and how might this page be used practically? Imho, two top reasons would be synthesis and analysis. What I mean by this, is:

• synthesis: people come here for guidance about what to do with their incipient idea. Do I make an article out of my idea? A subsection somewhere and a redirect?
• analysis: existing content is being questioned: essentially the Afd/merge question. Is this content a #2 or #3 type?

These are the two major use cases that come to mind; there may be others (please add them).

The page is complex, and in theory already deals with both the synthesis and analysis questions, if you can thread your way through the page and fish it out, but that's not so easy, especially for a newbie.

I'd like to see us improve this page, first by resolving apparent mismatches and fuzziness as noted, and second by adding a roadmap targeting users coming here with a specific type of question. Possibly a floated box, titled perhaps "What brings you here?" followed by bullet items for the major use cases, and a paragraph or so summarizing the use case with on- and off-page links as appropriate.

This comment was inspired in part by SMcCandlish's comment in this discussion about failure to consider merges in Afds. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:28, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

There are some broader and clarity-related question which you are also raising which should be discussed, but I see no logical conflict between the above 3 regarding wp:notability. Operatively, wp:notability is a requirement of a topic that must be met in order for it to have a separate article. #1 is a statement of this, #2 is sidebar advice that does not conflict (but might confuse), and #3 just explicitly refutes a common misreading/misstatement of #1. North8000 (talk) 20:43, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah. Maybe try this to resolve potential confusion: Sometimes, a topic that is notable (could have a stand-alone article) can actually be covered better as part of a larger article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:36, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Agree. I agree there is a problem with the language, a problem with “should” vs “may”. The nutshell should read: “… The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic may have its own article”. The notability guideline does not speak at all as to where a compound topic should be one or two articles. SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:40, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Edited, here. SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:42, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Comment I see the conflict being with 2 and 3. I also see 2 conflicting with WP:WHYN. I think SMC's suggested rewording should be applied to 2 to resolve the conflict. Clearly, 1 is supported in the body by 3 (as noted by N8000) and in the lede as well as by WHYN and other various places, so it should remain untouched to preserve continuity. I think the problem is with PAGEDECIDE. Thank you to the OP for pointing this confusion out. Huggums537 (talk) 04:29, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Sports venues

The essay about the notability criteria for "sports venues" is quite reasonable and, if turned into a guideline, would assist significantly the sorting of related articles. I suggest we promote it. -The Gnome (talk) 17:11, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

• Whenever a new SNG is proposed, I like to ask what purpose it serves. Does it 1) provide an alternative to GNG; 2) tighten GNG; or 3) clarify GNG? WP:NPROF is an example of 1; the criteria are completely different from GNG and a professor can qualify for an article by meeting either PROF or GNG. WP:NORG is an example of 2; the non-local RS requirement exists solely for organizations and not any other type of subject. WP:NBOOK is an example of 3; the first point is a targeted restatement of the GNG, while the other four points are basically saying that if RS show that the book meets certain criteria, then such coverage is inherently WP:SIGCOV. Unfortunately, WP:NSPORT is currently a mess and is rather vague about its own purpose. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 18:02, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• And I suggest we don't promote it. It's not remotely reasonable. All manner of village pitches have hosted a "professional" soccer match. All manner of small colleges (that nonetheless play NCAA sports) have tennis courts or lacrosse fields that would qualify -- or at least, their partisans would claim they do -- under this essay's provisions. Nor is it necessary. There already is a notability criterion that serves every sports venue extant: the GNG. Meet it and the arena likely qualifies for an article. Don't meet it and the arena likely doesn't. I can see no purpose to this essay other than enshrining tens of thousands of new sub-stubs, about which nothing is known or said other than "This is the home pitch for Miskatonic University's Fighting Cephalopods lacrosse team. It was built in 1866 and the stands seat 150." Ravenswing 21:11, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
• IMO we should be requiring compliance with GNG for sports venues. Recent experience (e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Robinson-Hale Stadium) shows many favor keeping articles on small venues even in the absence of any WP:SIGCOV. Cbl62 (talk) 21:29, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
• Agree GNG should apply, although it doesn't work that way. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Health and Physical Education Arena was kept because it is a NCAA Division I stadium, without regard to coverage. The refs in the article are all a collection of "this event happened there" type things. MB 21:53, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
• That essay uses too much "inherited notability" without rational of why an arena where notable teams would play would be notable by default. I can see this for professional sports and their home stadium, but at the level of college and minor league sports, this may not be true. I think the GNG (and anything from WP:NBUILD may provide) would be correct. If there are arena guidelines that are specific to sports, then they should likely be made into NSPORTS rather than a separate guideline, but I think this would need a long way to go to get there. --Masem (t) 22:02, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
• Any new or updated sports notability guideline must be calibrated to GNG (better than the existing one if an update). This essay is not, so I'd have to strongly oppose promoting it. _wjemather^{please leave a message...}
• WP:NSPORTS is fairly widely disputed already. I think that we should have a proper discussion, which would almost certainly need to be an RFC, about it before even thinking about creating more guidelines in related areas. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Here's the problem with that, IMHO. As we all know (and heck, I'm a NSPORTS editor), the resistance to tightening up any set of criteria at NSPORTS is massive. We've seen struggles over such as WP:NCRIC and WP:NMMA take years, and I'm pretty astonished that we actually managed a few months ago to tighten up WP:NOLYMPICS. Any change is going to have to be sport-by-sport and incremental; a RfC to change NSPORTS generally would swallow the energies of many dozens of editors for weeks on end, create a lot of ill will, and fail all the same.

    Unfortunately, I think the only real way out is to hop in a time machine to when the original NATHLETE was created, and remove the following shibboleths from Wikipedia's zeitgeist: that playing in just a single "fully professional" match conferred unshakeable presumptive notability, that "professional"/"fully professional" were synonyms meaning top-flight competition, and that "top flight" equally referred to the National Football League or the Premier League on one end and playing in the four-team soccer league in a microstate. Lacking a time machine, we've got what we've got. Ravenswing 07:24, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

    Unfortunately, I think the only real way out is to hop in a time machine to when the original NATHLETE was created, and remove the following shibboleths from Wikipedia's zeitgeist: Don't forget the second sentence in the lede, which has single-handedly tanked numerous AfDs due to editors not understanding it applies solely to an article's claims to notability and does not mean the SNG "confers" notability! And somehow the bolding also makes editors think that sentence overrides the one before it. Uggh. JoelleJay (talk) 17:59, 5 December 2021 (UTC) JoelleJay (talk) 17:59, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

    Maybe there would be more success if people stopped referring to things as "struggles" and started discussing them to reach consensus, which involves listening to and evaluating other points of view from your own. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:33, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

    Heck, the use of the word "struggles" is pretty mild -- much stronger words would be more accurate. I'd wish for that myself, but you've been around for a long time and have been active at AfD -- we both know that for too many editors, the word "consensus" means "everyone does it my way or else it hasn't been established." Ravenswing 01:54, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

• I oppose promoting this essay to a guideline. The WP:GNG should be the relevant guideline unless there is strong evidence that a more specific guideline is required. If a venue does not meet the GNG, then brief, well referenced encyclopedic information about the venue can be included in the articles about the notable teams that played there as their home field. "Easy passes" of notability should be discouraged. Cullen328 (talk) 08:11, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Sports venues proposal

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.

---

In fact, here's the proposal I'd like to set forth to put in NSPORTS ... call it WP:NARENA:

As with teams and clubs (see WP:NTEAM), sporting arenas, stadia and other venues do not have presumed notability, and are expected to demonstrate notability through meeting the general notability guideline. Since notability is not inherited, the notability of a sports team does not imply the notability of a venue in which it plays.

What do you folks think? It's pretty much the same wording as with NTEAM, which is already a part of NSPORTS. Ravenswing 03:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

• Works for me. Maybe a link to NBUILD somewhere? JoelleJay (talk) 04:11, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

  I wouldn't, myself. NBUILD/GEOFEAT's been often cited in these discussions, only to be overborne by the claque shouting that athletic stadia are presumptively notable by consensus, because reasons. The less we give an out to weasel-wording the better. Ravenswing 05:34, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

• The wording looks fine, but isn't this more likely to fall under Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features)? North8000 (talk) 05:48, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

  Perhaps, but the issue is that the sports fans just plain ignore guidelines such as GEOFEAT, and as other editors mention above, routinely claim presumptive notability through the sports clubs that play in said arenas. Plunking such a guideline into NSPORTS would rectify that. Ravenswing 07:04, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

  I agree that something needs to be mentioned in NSPORT itself, editors will find any way to exempt their pet topic from notability requirements so the more explicit and direct an instruction, the better. JoelleJay (talk) 18:03, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

  Support North8000 (talk) 18:54, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

• I agree with this wording. It looks a bit like the discussion about the notability of schools that went along the same lines. A divisive RFC in 2017 (often ignored to this day) was necessary to break the common nonsensical idea that school were notable because they existed. I sometimes make photos of local sports grounds but by no way I consider those small "arenas" as notable. The Banner talk 19:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
• I support this addition. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:49, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
• I Support this addition. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC).
• Looks like a good addition to me. XOR'easter (talk) 23:02, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
• I've come around to view the notability of sports venues more in the light shone by the remarks in the discussion I started above. So, I support the wording proposed by Ravenswing. -The Gnome (talk) 18:47, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
• Weak support Ultimately, the vast majority of professional sporting venues (including minor league venues in countries where that's a big thing) are still going to be notable. Even Division I college basketball and (American) football venues are mostly going to be notable. The issue lies, as Ravenswing pointed out, with the fact that the current essay also includes college lacrosse, tennis, etc. venues which are generally (with some exceptions) less notable. With the same caveat that applied to the aforementioned schools RfC that this should not lead to mass AfDs, and the understanding that many of these venues do in fact pass GNG, I can support this. If this is going to lead to mass AfD nominations of notable venues, I fear it will do more harm than good, and the fact that some seem to be equating the notability of a Division I college basketball arena to that of a college tennis court is troubling. Smartyllama (talk) 20:09, 6 December 2021 (UTC) Given that some editors are taking this guideline as a license to launch mass AfDs of venues which pass GNG, despite this discussion not even being closed yet, I must switch my !vote to oppose as it seems like I was too optimistic regarding the effects of this guideline. Smartyllama (talk) 22:20, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Erm. There's been no "mass AfD." The three AfDs that were filed citing this came from RfD, where consensus held that the redirects needed to be restored and taken to AfD for resolution. Ravenswing 22:39, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    But there were multiple AfD's just before this conversation [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] Now in the new AfD's you are pointing NARENA just to make your actions more legitimate, despite de fact that it was just introduced (by yourself), without even this discussion being closed. So, we are likely to see more AfD's, especially if there would be no one to defend this articles. Olos88 (talk) 02:23, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

    Weren't you among those advocating that those three redirects be taken to AfD? Why, yes, you were: [31] Ravenswing 02:37, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

    Of course, otherwise you would delete it even without AfD. Olos88 (talk) 07:49, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

    That would ring less hollow if I'd sought to delete a single one of those articles. Which not in a single case did I do: I sought to redirect them. Ravenswing 08:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• I support this addition. Cbl62 (talk) 01:39, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
• I also support this addition. The GNG applies here. I wouldn't object to some additional guidance about how to incorporate trivial coverage about these venues, whether that's in an article about the relevant place, or about the relevant team. Shooterwalker (talk) 19:45, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Eh, I expect that venues unsupported by the GNG could be readily described in a sentence or two, either in the relevant municipality's article or that of a particularly prominent team playing there, and handled by a redirect. Ravenswing 00:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
    • I agree with that. I'll leave it up to other editors if that adding that to the guideline will help reduce the number of disputes. Shooterwalker (talk) 02:06, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support - very clear and will hopefully resolve any disputes moving forward Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 18:05, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
• Hmm. This has gone only five days, but so far has unanimous support. Time to post it, I think. Ravenswing 11:39, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  Would it be better to make WP:NVENUE and WP:NSTADIUM now redirect to this guideline instead of the essay that they currently redirect to? Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 12:11, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yep, I'll take care of that. Ravenswing 17:55, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

• Support Sensible addition. --Jayron32 13:36, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support, seems legit.Cinadon36 13:43, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
• Comment Why don't we accept WP:NVENUE as a guideline? Not specified rules would lead to discussions like this [32] [33] [34], where notability of top level football venues, that even hosted international games or national cup's finals, is being questioned. According to WP:NFOOTBALL, every single footballer that play at this venues is notable, so deleting articles about stadiums would be disproportional. Olos88 (talk) 16:33, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  So two things with your comment Olos88: 1) The existence or non-existence of any particular guideline here does NOT preclude anyone from questioning anything. AFDs will still happen, and there is literally no way to set up rules ahead of time that would cause them to not happen. You'll note that every one of your examples was an overwhelming keep, which is fine, that's why we have discussions. We should not try to reduce them in number or prevent them from happening. Discussions like this are important to the process of writing Wikipedia, and consensus building discussions should be encouraged not discouraged; regardless new guidelines don't stop that anyways. People will always interpret those guidelines in their own ways. 2) Even if the guideline could somehow stop that, this one wouldn't, since it is essentially saying "Go with the GNG", (which is what we should always do anyways!), and it doesn't grant any special exceptions. --Jayron32 17:04, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  If we have NVENUE as a guideline, then it would be pointless to open such AfD. I would like to point out also, that right now the AfD's come down to discussions whether someone is able to provide some GNG-satisfying sources (with numerous WP:THREE refering) and whether the provided sources really in 100% passes GNG. This is not an essential notability discussion. In the book "Obiekty sportowe Łodzi" (S. Glica, M. Jaskulski, 2014) for example we have in-depth coverage about almost every single sports venue in the city, which could lead to everyone of them having separate article, while at the same time it is hard to prove notability (or notability by passing "GNG") of some Yugoslav or Serbian top level football venue. This small example shows, how random it could be whether the venue deserves to have an article on en-wiki or not (according to GNG rules) and that this is for sure not the best way of determining the notability. Olos88 (talk) 17:44, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  Here's the answer to your questions: (1) Notability is not inherited on Wikipedia: to quote, "No subject is automatically or inherently notable merely because it exists: the evidence must show the topic has gained significant independent coverage or recognition ..." (2) Notability requires significant coverage: "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject ..."

  Asking such questions is what the deletion process is for, and there is no guideline or policy on Wikipedia immunizing any subject from needing to demonstrate both verifiability and notability. As you can see above, a unanimous consensus of editors agreed that athletic venues should not be uniquely -- and against longstanding practice everywhere else on Wikipedia -- immune to these requirements. The best way of determining the notability of a subject is simple: source the article. If you cannot properly source an article, the answer isn't that you need to come up with some chicanery to justify keeping it; the answer is that the subject is not notable. Ravenswing 18:11, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  GNG is just a general guideline which is necessary in such big project. Surely it is not always the best method to estimate the subject's notability (which I've tried to prove in above comment). That's why we are also establishing subject-specific criteria, like it was done with the footballers for example. Olos88 (talk) 18:22, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  Actually, you're mistaken if you think that footballers (or any other athlete) are immune to the GNG. The very first line of NSPORTS is "This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia." That's how we establish -- or fine tune -- notability criteria at NSPORTS; we gauge whether or not a particular element accurately measures whether an athlete who meets it is likely to meet the GNG. Ravenswing 18:26, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  Well, technically you are right. I wasn't aware of that. On pl-wiki it works in the other way, which, I think, makes much more sense. Practically it means, that all SNG's should be treated as essays (for example, stating that players who have played in Albanian First Division are "likely to meet the general notability guideline" is just wishful thinking). Also, it means that every stub can be easily deleted. Establishing subject-specific guideline for sports venues would be therefore wasting of time. Olos88 (talk) 19:00, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Olos88: GNG is the perfect standard for an encyclopedia. In order to create articles, you need text. In order to write text, you need reliable, independent sources. GNG just says "if you don't have enough source material, don't write an article. If you do have enough source material, you can". There is literally not a single article that can be properly written if there isn't source material to cite. We don't need anything else. --Jayron32 19:20, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  I can also write a completely relevant article about stadium (what I'm doing for years on pl-wiki), based on multiple sources, of which no one of them is 100% compatible with GNG. But if coverage provided in this discussion, or expanding Stadion Milan Sredanović still meets objections, then my presence here is pointless... Olos88 (talk) 19:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'm rather surprised you were unaware of the GNG, @Olos88:; I've only cited it, linked to it and expounded upon it several times over in discussions over the last month or two in which you were involved. In any event, the various national Wikipedias have their own standards, their own interpretations and their own consensuses on many practices -- if you plan to continue editing the en-wiki, you need to be familiar with the rules in place here, the same way that we would be expected to conform to the rules of pl-wiki, were we to edit there. Your presence here on the en Wikipedia is only pointless if you feel you cannot edit according to our policies and guidelines; you are, of course, the best judge of that. Ravenswing 21:27, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Simply not needed, we have WP:NBUILD to which Masem has noted above. This policy already covers the issues of notability, what is being proposed here is just convoluting what we already have in place for an SNG. And this edit here [35] Needs to be removed as this hasn't had a closed consensus. Govvy (talk) 15:29, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Given the updated wording (That stadia do not have specialized notability guidelines), I think this still aligns with NBUILD though it would be good to add reference to that to the above. NBUILD still basically says for manmade commercial buildings, effectively GNG must be met. --Masem (t) 15:57, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Well, with fourteen Supports, and you the only one who's registered a formal objection in a week's time, upon what basis do you claim there isn't a consensus? Ravenswing 16:08, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    You cannot introduce a new proposal with limited participation and no advertisement to the relevant WikiProjects. GiantSnowman 16:15, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    Just as well I notified the Notability (Sports) talk page then, right, that being the relevant page? Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(sports)#Proposal_for_a_sports_venues_guideline Ravenswing 16:53, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    You mean a fairly inactive talk page? Yep, great, very useful. GiantSnowman 19:53, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    Is that a joke or something? Nearly 500 edits since September isn't "fairly inactive." In any event, it -- and this one -- are the proper talk pages dealing with sporting notability guidelines. To quote User:Seraphimblade from the most recent knockdown-dragout RfC there, "nor should notification of a Wikiproject be required to do—well, really anything; Wikiprojects hold no special authority at all." Ravenswing 20:11, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    It's absolutely relevant when you use your new guideline to try and AFD a heap of articles relevant to a WikiProject... GiantSnowman 20:47, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

    Alright, now you're just being disingenuous. You know full well that those three articles -- scarcely a "heap" -- were at Redirects for Discussion [36], where consensus held that the articles should be restored and taken to AfD. And it's especially disingenuous when you voted yourself for that result. [37] So how is it you now have a problem with a result you advocated? Ravenswing 22:45, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

• Support. Sensible addition. Consistent with, and complimentary to, other relevant guidelines such as NBUILD, which does not cover the full gamut of sporting venues. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 20:20, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Ravenswing, How does half a dozen supports add up to fourteen? Govvy (talk) 20:36, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

You need to count them again if you think there are only six supports prior to your oppose (not all are bolded). _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 21:21, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

(nods to Wjemather) They certainly add up to fourteen if you actually read the words of this section, instead of spending a few seconds looking for boldface text. Ravenswing 18:53, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

• Support, I think this would be a useful addition. Suonii180 (talk) 21:39, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
• Opposed - It is highly likely that any sports venue that passes the proposed criteria would also pass both GNG and NBUILD. Thus the proposed criteria are superfluous. Blueboar (talk) 22:06, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

  The proposed text doesn't include any criteria—it says that sporting venues are expected to demonstrate notability through meeting the general notability guideline. isaacl (talk) 23:10, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose per Smartyllama. Ludost Mlačani (talk) 08:27, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose per the above comments, and its already covered at WP:NBUILD. Maybe that needs tweaking instead? Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 10:41, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
  • As discussed above -- and a sentiment with which several of the Support proponents agreed -- was that simply put, the rejectionists ignore GEOFEAT/NBUILD, which furthermore is written in rather a mushy tone that makes its halting criteria relatively easy to ignore. You've no doubt noticed that NSPORTS comes under a lot of heat for letting too many articles slip through the cracks, and the general trend has been to tighten the criteria up to be more in conformity with the GNG. The sentiment above was strongly in favor of doing so for sports venues; I made a proposal in that spirit, and that proposal has been met with a strong consensus in its favor. It is no more unreasonable to put in stronger criteria covering sports venues (as separate from GEOFEAT) than it is for NSPORTS (as separate from WP:BIO) to continue to exist. Yours is the only new comment in a week, and this has been open for over two weeks now. It's time to close it up. Ravenswing 14:05, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  I've notified several more projects who would be interested in this for more input. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 14:40, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  Interesting. Why just the cycling, cricket and Olympics projects, in addition to Oppose supporters also alerting the footy project (the more so in that there are both recent [38] and historic concerns about your canvassing)? And what new sentiments do you seek to gather that already haven't been voiced above? Ravenswing 15:00, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'm active at those projects, and sports venues are part of those projects too. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 15:54, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. StickyWicket (talk) 17:08, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support the addition to NSPORTS as NGEO is often over looked or ignored in sports related AfDs. The phrasing is not exclusionary, which seems to be the main argument in oppose statements. However, I would recommend adding a direct link within the text of NARENA point to either NGEO or NBUILDING (or both) such as ...stadia and other venues do not have presumed notability per WP:NGEO... or similar so as to not appear to be contradicting NGEO. It's the same reason WP:NTEAM exists despite being similar to WP:NORG. Yosemiter (talk) 18:50, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
• Support Instead of closing this, I'll give a rebuttal to the only convincing oppose argument, to make that easier for the next person. Said argument seems to be that this would be redundant and therefore would be WP:CREEP. The first part of that argument seems to fail in the face of evidence, as there are many examples where, indeed, participants in AfD discussions (which are, no matter the topic, supposed to be about WP:GNG and WP:NOT, not about other arbitrary criteria such as number of games played or who played there or something else) are arguing along lines which this proposal would clarify. Of course, that isn't a problem unique to sports venues or even sports (although the archetypical example is indeed the countless cases of "passes N[SPORT] without actually meeting GNG"). The fact that it is a problem which does extend to sports venues, and the fact that there is currently nothing about sports venues here (a place where people would logically search for guidelines about sports venues), does seem to indicate that something should be done about it.

The second part of that argument does not seem coherent to me. WP:CREEP would certainly be a concern if sports venues were so infrequently the subject of dispute or AfDs that the time spent on this would be a bureaucratic waste. Given the large number of AfDs that actually exist, that's clearly not the case. In addition, the proposed addition is not anything new (unlike, say, some other proposals like this one). It is just a very brief mention of the most relevant information that editors coming to this page would expect to find, in the absence of more definite criteria: namely, that sports venues are subject to GNG as everything else (as also already stated in the very first sentence of NSPORTS: This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline,), and that notability is never inherent but requires verifiable evidence. Editors worried about CREEP would be wiser to take into consideration that pretty much the whole of NSPORTS is redundant to GNG anyways, but then there's a very valid reason why these pages exist (and no, it is not the mere fact that simply deleting it would not be a feasible solution, although yes, it probably needs a fundamental rewrite, but that's a whole different matter): to help clarify the matter, and to centralise the information (so that all of the most important points about sports and notability are on one page). I'll also note that the fact that the rules are only principles and that this is not a court of a law seems to be beyond the grasp of many new and inexperienced editors: clarifying matters by referring them to the relevant guidelines does no harm, and is a case where redundancy is good. In the same vein, I personally find that keeping policies interconnected and linking to the simpler, more fundamental principle (namely, that we need good sources to write an actual article - i.e. GNG) is a good way to keep policy simpler and is a potent fail-safe in case editors only give a glance at this page and do not read in depth (something which CREEP also suggests is a frequent issue). Plus, given that it is not feasible to practically fix all of the issues with NSPORTS in one fell swoop, some gradual improvement is better than no improvement. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:05, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

So, any uninvolved editor care to formally close this?

Even after the canvassing and the bullet voting, and this going over a whole month now, consensus in favor remains strong. Ravenswing 18:30, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

An uninvolved editor, yes. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 18:42, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Has either of you considered WP:CR? In any case, done myself. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:11, 12 January 2022 (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.

Editorial interviews as "primary sources"

I have been banging my head over and over against this in deletion discussions. There seems to be a widespread perception that an article in a publication that contains an interview with someone is automatically a secondary source and not to be used to determine notability. As someone who has worked in journalism for quite some time, I find this baffling and completely at odds with how the field works. Here are some facts. (Assume for these purposes that we are dealing with a reliable, independent publication.)

• In cultural coverage -- film, books, music, TV, etc. -- there are a few big "buckets" of coverage, roughly: reviews, news updates, essays, and interviews. The latter tends to be considered the most substantial and often the most "prestige." Cover stories are usually interviews, for instance. Interviews are also frequently how these publications "introduce" a subject to regular coverage. If a publication is going to cover a person, they will probably want to interview that person as a news peg.
• As such, a trustworthy publication will not devote a dedicated interview to someone unless they believe that person is notable and newsworthy. The fact that an interview exists at all is an indicator of editorial judgment and curation on their part. I've seen the argument made that an interview with a person is automatically "promotional." Sure, anyone who agrees to be interviewed about their work is probably happy for the publicity. But editors receive literally thousands of emails a day from people clamoring to be featured. They cannot promote everyone, nor do they have any incentive to. (There is a lot of paranoia about "paid content," which frankly is starting to reach "fake news" levels of anti-media hysteria and much of the "proof" provided is often... from the media, just this ouroboros of having cake and eating it)
• Interviews can be broken down into two basic categories, neither of which consists solely of a subject speaking. They take two forms: the Q&A, which is usually preceded by a preamble of some length, and the reported feature, which is often the cover story or other centerpiece of a magazine and is written through. In other words, they contain substantial material provided by the reporter and not by the subject. In other words, it is "[an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources]; it does not become a "primary source" by proximity.
• A trustworthy publication will also conceive, write, and edit such a story independently of the interview subject. The work is produced by the journalist, edited by the editor, fact-checked by the fact-checker, and so forth. You constantly see people complain about being misquoted. Would they do that complaining if they were involved in the production of the finished piece? It's unlikely.

All of this seems like it should go without saying to me, yet I keep seeing people claim otherwise. As such, I think this should be clarified in policy, as how people are interpreting it is severely out of touch with the way publications operate, and is severely curtailing the amount of secondary-source coverage we can use for no real reason. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:24, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

publication that contains an interview with someone is automatically a secondary source and not to be used to determine notability

Is that misworded? Secondary for primary? OR secondary for nonnotable? SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:57, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

You need independent sources to write an article. You can fill in a lot of gaps from a person affiliated with a topic -- say, a political candidate discussing their campaign. But writing an entire article from their perspective would turn Wikipedia into a soapbox. Or worse, you'd get a lot of WP:OR and WP:NPOV as editors start taking random quotes from interviews to paint as favorable or unfavorable a picture as they can. There's nothing wrong with using an interview for additional perspective and context, but you can only build a neutral foundation from independent sources.

There's nothing wrong with using a source that has a comment from the subject they're reporting on, so long as the independent source is driving the Wikipedia article and not the self-interested comment. But I'm not sure what the problem is here, as I haven't been at AFD much recently. Do you have some examples?

Shooterwalker (talk) 21:41, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

This is, unfortunately, a perfect example of exactly what I am talking about. My response is exactly what I said in my original post. Publications, particularly in the field of the arts, frequently frame their substantial editorial content as interviews. A publication choosing to do a profile on someone means that the editorial staff finds that person important enough to cover as a standalone individual in a piece focused on them, as opposed to, say, a blurb, a roundup, or the like. I'm also not talking so much in terms of deriving content, but proving notability -- so, in practice, preventing articles from being deleted that should not be deleted.

An example: this cover story from Rolling Stone on Taylor Swift. It is an interview. Yet it should go without saying that Rolling Stone is a high-profile, reliable publication for music, Taylor Swift is a high-profile, notable individual (and not affiliated with Rolling Stone), and Rolling Stone (or any major magazine) writing a cover story on someone is the magazine's editorial staff expressing that they consider that individual to be extremely newsworthy. Its very existence proves notability; such a piece cannot and would not exist for a non-notable person. The idea that stories like these are not signs of notability, to me, is ludicrous. Admittedly this is at the extreme in terms of high-profile prestige articles, but the basic editorial thought process is the same: "who do we find notable enough to cover in this publication?" Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure I get the point of the example. Taylor Swift is a major topic with tons of independent sources who have talked about her. Why would you argue about whether to base an entire article about her based on her own self-descriptions? You would never need to. Shooterwalker (talk) 02:08, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

You indeed are missing the point. This is not about how to write an article. This is about how to determine whether a subject is notable enough for an article to exist, or to be kept. If you look at a cover story published in Rolling Stone, meaning that multiple layers of editorial judgment were involved in deeming the subject notable, and your assessment of it is "her own self-descriptions," I don't even know what to say -- and that notwithstanding the fact that almost 900 words are not in fact "her own self-descriptions" but writing by Brian Hiatt, who the last time I checked was not Taylor Swift but a Rolling Stone writer. There is absolutely no way that such an article does not "count" toward notability. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:25, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I think you might be missing the point if you're trying to separate notability from whether we can write a reliable, verifiable, and neutral article. Those two questions are one and the same. But I would definitely say that the preamble does give you enough independent reliable information to at least start an article, though with that alone it would probably end in a merge. This is, of course, moot. We could easily find more than 900 independent, reliable words of secondary research to build an article about Taylor Swift. Shooterwalker (talk) 02:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

You're getting hung up on the specific example here. You can plausibly write a stub at least, if notability were not an issue, from the biographical information in any given person's obituary. It would be verifiable (per WP:ABOUTSELF), and it would at least be possible to write it in a neutral encyclopedic tone. And hey, that obituary was technically in the pages of a newspaper! But clearly there is a missing component here. That component is notability. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:54, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The missing components for an obituary would be independence. Aren't most local obituaries written and/or commissioned by the family? You'd also need multiple reliable sources. Wikipedia's notability guideline is coverage in multiple reliable independent sources. Shooterwalker (talk) 12:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

That is precisely my point. Most local obituaries are written and commissioned by the family, and they are published in a newspaper because the family pays a fee for it. That is different in every aspect from a piece commissioned by the publication, written by someone on staff or hired by the publication, and published there because of editorial judgment. The former does not convey notability. If the latter doesn't convey notability then it calls the whole purpose of secondary sourcing into question. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:35, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I thought you were making my point. Notability only comes from sources that are both independent and reliable, let alone with significant coverage. That would exclude paid obituaries, press releases, and the personal representations of people affiliated with the subject. If you can find an example of someone who isn't covered in independent reliable sources, but you honestly believe would still have an article, that would be a more useful example than someone who is clearly covered a lot (Taylor Swift) and someone who is clearly not covered at all (only a paid obituary). I'm still scratching my head, because I can't picture the example you're giving where someone has no independent reliable coverage, but you would still write an article. How you would even start writing an article without those sources? Shooterwalker (talk) 22:02, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

In my view, the underlying reasons why a subject is being interviewed (that is, the actions and accomplishments of the subject) are what should be considered when determining if the subject should have an article in Wikipedia. I consider the interview as a way to see what could be used as evidence, rather than being evidence in itself. "Trustworthy publication" is a broad label. Local news often has a lot of interviews; it's generally trustworthy for many things, but there are reasons beyond newsworthiness for which it may choose to do an interview. isaacl (talk) 21:47, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

First, to confirm/ clarify, by the choice of where you posted and that you mentioned AFD that you are talking with respect to wp:notability. (not wp:ver or wp:npov) There, both GNG and (when it exists) the SNG are "ways in". And so the source can be used to establish meeting GNG or an SNG requirement. The toughest standard is under GNG which says that sources used to establish meeting GNG need to be independent and secondary. Source criteria mentioned in SNG's are numerous and variable, but the tougher ones mirror the wp:GNG definition. Your question / their choice of words of saying "primary" might be confusing because I don't think that the notability guidelines mention "primary". What I think you / they actually meant is "not secondary" or "not independent". IMO, structurally, if the article is by an independent source and contains a qualifying amount of source-created material (not counting the interview content) then it certainly can count as independent and secondary and there is no basis for excluding it solely due to having interview content. If it is mostly just the interview, and it is strong in all of the other areas that you mentioned (selectivity by the source, some input/content from the source, prominence, reputation and other attributes of the source) in the big fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem, IMHO in practice the interview does tend to count somewhat as sourcing even if the guidelines do not explicitly say that. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I am indeed referring to notability -- no one doubts that these are verifiable. I obviously agree it should count as sourcing, but in my experience, "in practice" varies widely, usually depending on who is weighing in on any particular day. That's why I think this kind of thing should be explicitly spelled out. Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Before we can work on the big fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem we need to understand it. Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works is my attempt at that. North8000 (talk) 01:53, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Interviews re: notability almost always comes up at AfD in contexts where an interview may be the sole source with SIGCOV. The purpose of notability criteria is to ensure a subject has received significant and in-depth discussion by unaffiliated parties; the subject discussing themselves does not achieve this regardless of the amount of material an interview produces. Barring substantial commentary by the journalist that is independent of the interview content (not just regurgitating what the interviewee has said or giving non-encyclopedic descriptions or impressions of the interviewee), the SIGCOV is not from the reporter or magazine editors, it's from the subject, and therefore fails the independence and non-primary requirements of GNG. Additionally, as the interview content is primary it's largely not DUE in any article anyway unless analyzed/referenced by a secondary source or at least attributed in-text as an opinion/anecdote. JoelleJay (talk) 23:40, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

• I know there's a few editors that group all interviews as primary and/or dependent sources and not suitable for notability, but what consistutes an interview and its primary/secondary nature and independence from the subject can vary greatly. We want to avoid using as secondary sources the type of promotional interviews that often appear in trade journals, since this can often be paid for by the interviewee. Additionally, interviews which appear mostly driven by the interviewee (such as the interviewer giving a stock list of questions) should also be treated as primary. But we do want interviews where the interviewer is working on thoughtful questions that show transformative nature of the interviewee's responses as to make it more secondary in that nature (this was a trait Barbara Walters was able to do, for example). And then you have long-form pieces that you have responses from the interviewee mixed alongside more straightforward prose that clearly shows secondary nature. I generally agree on the assessment that interviews alone are not a good sign of notability, but there are reasonable exceptions that should be made.
• You further have to consider the relationship between the interviewee and the topic the interview was to be used on. If the interviewee is a notable person and the interview to be used on their page, it probably should not be the dominant sourcing for that page but augment good secondary material. On the other hand, if the topic is a work the person created and the interview focused on the development of the work, that's actually secondary coverage related to that work (the creator transforming the history in retrospective), though this alone wouldn't be enough for notability due to the potential non-independant factor. --Masem (t) 01:26, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
• Once again I refer you to my original post. "The subject discussing themselves" completely omits the context of the piece being commissioned, written, and published elsewhere. If you understand the journalistic process, it will be abundantly clear that such a piece meets all the criteria for significant coverage:
  • "Significant coverage addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." -- This should speak for itself, really. In many fields interviews are the primary way that publications address a topic directly and in detail. This is so much the case that the alternative is sometimes derisively referred to as a "thinkpiece." You can disagree all you want, but your disagreement will be based in a misunderstanding of the journalism field.
  • "Reliable" means that sources need editorial integrity to allow verifiable evaluation of notability, per the reliable source guideline." -- See my original post. If a source has editorial integrity, that editorial integrity does not suddenly disappear when what they are publishing is not a news brief but an interview. The interview subject did not hijack the publication. The interview was published because an editor commissioned it, and for major publications probably multiple layers of editors.
  • "'Independent of the subject' excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it." -- The "work" in question here is the article, which is produced by the writer and editors of the publication. They are not affiliated with the article's subject. They are just writing about it. Or, in other words, per WP:SPIP: "The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, author, inventor, or vendor) have actually considered the topic notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it—without incentive, promotion, or other influence by people connected to the topic matter." Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  If there is enough coverage from the interviewer writing about the subject then that's fine, but quotes from the interviewee are not "writing about" them, they are directly from them and therefore not independent and not secondary (which is explicitly addressed here on the WP:OR policy page). So something with 5 sentences of prose introduction of the subject and 30 sentences of quotes should be assessed as if it was only 5 sentences. JoelleJay (talk) 20:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

• Interviews aren't primary sources, unless they're self-published, and that's a different issue. Interviews are edited. Unlike freeform live podcasts, interview podcasts often take a much longer interview and distill it down into the most succinct bits that make the points the publisher wants to highlight. THAT is the essence of a secondary source--a trusted other is curating it. Jclemens (talk) 07:13, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  Interviews are primary sources if the content is facts, as opposed to opinion or analysis. Interviews are not necessarily edited, let alone edited creatively to transform the content. The most common editing of an interview is cutting, and it’s hard to argue that cutting turns primary source material into secondary source material. Use the definitions of historiography, because Wikipedia is an historiographical document. Wikipedia is not journalism or science. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  And yet, cutting is transformative, in that it reflects the editor's judgment of what is more or less important. Jclemens (talk) 21:40, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  That is not what our policy says. JoelleJay (talk) 20:42, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  Note that only applies to interviews in the context of op-ed and similar content. Secondary sources include "an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources." which clearly includes a curated interview. Jclemens (talk) 21:40, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  None of the institutions discussing primary sources say "the raw unedited transcript of an interview", they just say "interview" and list it alongside news articles and autobiographies, both of which are "curated" by independent parties prior to publication. Directly quoting something is not "analyzing" or "interpreting" it, regardless of how you juxtapose it with other material, just like a museum choosing to display a Degas painting doesn't make the painting secondary with respect to itself. An editor inserting a quote from someone into a context that motivates a different interpretation of the quote still doesn't make the quote itself not a quote. Someone else publishing their interpretation of the quote would be secondary coverage of the quote. JoelleJay (talk) 05:23, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

  Also, an original research article doesn't suddenly become secondary just because a journal chose to publish it and it was reviewed and edited by independent people, so a "trusted other curating it" does not work as a definition of "secondary". JoelleJay (talk) 20:47, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  Actually, that's exactly what it means. Jclemens (talk) 21:40, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  ......so I take it you haven't actually read WP:PRIMARY? JoelleJay (talk) 04:44, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

  • Assuming the journal is reputable, it works as an indicator of notability. To continue your analogy, reputable sources are not usually in the business of republishing Wikipedia article outright (i.e., not talking about scrapers). However, if a newspaper chose to report on a Wikipedia article, which may or may not involve excerpting the article in the reporting, then this means that the editors of the paper are asserting that either the existence of the article itself or its subject is noteworthy. An example of the former is the Jar'Edo Wens hoax; an example of the latter is Theresa Greenfield (in this case the reporting in question being by Slate and others). Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
• As a rule, if it comes to evaluating notability, interviews don’t prove notability because they fail the “independent” word in the WP:GNG. There are exceptions, but the exceptions happen only for obviously notable topics where the interview is very far from the best sources for demonstrating notability. For borderline notable topics, if the best you have is an interview, it was probably paid for, in cash or in kind, and is certainly not independent. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:09, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
  • No. This is not how journalism works at all. I am speaking as someone who has personally conducted interviews and written them up for multiple publications, both as a staff writer and a freelancer, and who has edited them. If I received money from the interview subject for any of these, that is certainly news to me. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:32, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

    User:Gnomingstuff, this is necessarily only about interview subjects of no notability, until your interview of them. Do you interview such people? Particularly in mind are the interview subjects who are keen to publicise their new company and its products.

    I agree that what I am talking about is not “how journalism works”, but is how it is abused.

    How journalism works, I believe, is that you interview people who are already of interest to your readership. A journalist may interview a passing citizen on the street, but this does not make the passing citizen wikipedia-notable. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  • Agree with Gnomingstuff. The "probably paid for" is flat out incorrect. North8000 (talk) 20:25, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
  • While certain interviews could be paid placement, that's a feature of the forum in which the content is being covered, not in the interview. A presumption of non-independence is both inaccurate and unworkable. Jclemens (talk) 21:42, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

    Of course it is workable. The vast majority of Wikipedia biographies do not rely on a subject interview for their notability, and such biographies are always deleted, in my experience. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:58, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

So on the overall question we're running into the big fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem. But maybe we can deal with a more /manageable tidy subset of Gnomingstuff's question which I'll state two different ways:

1. If source has sufficient non-interview content (and all other required attributes)to be suitable for establishing wp:notability, can it be excluded from counting solely because it also contains interview content?
2. Should a source be excluded as counting towards wp:notability solely because it contains some interview content?

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

• A few observations: I would say, interviews are different from profiles, although profiles may also include interviews -- and many interviews do also contain secondary information, in introduction or conclusion (and even sometimes, in the questions). And no, interviews are not usually paid for at least from your mainstream sources Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
• Having read through the discussion -- and likewise having personally conducted interviews and having written them up in multiple publications, for what it's worth -- I come to the opposite conclusion to Gnomingstuff. It is not, in fact, my experience that publications uniformly vette interview subjects for their ability to meet Wikipedia notability guidelines, nor that they uniformly go out of their way to verify the information given to them by those subjects. Why, yes, a publication like Rolling Stone would surely have the means and the incentive to get an interview with the likes of Taylor Swift right ... but I really doubt that Swift's been up at AfD anytime recently. So perhaps Gnomingstuff would care to give us some examples of some AfD discussions they consider particularly problematic, rather than extreme hypotheticals. I'm wagering they're far more likely to involve obscure subjects with a distinct lack of sources bolstering notability (other than, say, a perfunctory interview in the East Broken Butt Weekly) than internationally famous singers with several hundred cites. Ravenswing 21:30, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Well of course, because interviews contributing to notability only matters in such cases where there is not already overwhelming RS coverage. Your argument here is a variation on Survivorship bias. Jclemens (talk) 21:45, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
    • My argument is a variation on survivorship bias? Stipulating so, so what? You could with considerably more accuracy assert that WP:N, the GNG and just about every notability criterion on Wikipedia operate on the same principle. Indeed, we are uniformly and institutionally biased on whether the world pays attention to something, and we gauge that attention by the number and depth of reliable sources we can find attesting to it. Ravenswing 08:13, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

    The bias argument has merit, but it does not declare it invalid.

    If an interview is all there is to demonstrate notability, it will not be good enough.

    If the interview is genuine journalism with comment by the journalist, then necessarily prior evidence of notability will exist.

    Easy rule of thumb: Do not rely on the non-independent source of a subject talking about himself, no matter who cut away the worse parts, or who copied it verbatim. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:11, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  • As mentioned, I chose an example on purpose that was at the extreme far end of both publication and subject prominence. And yet people still argued that somehow it was not an instance of the publication implicitly asserting that the subject was notable. At that point I genuinely don't know what to say, it's like trying to argue that the sky is blue in response to people who claim it is red.

As far as "vetting interview subjects for notability," common sense applies: if a publication were to dedicate coverage solely to an individual who is not noteworthy, then few people would read it or care. The two basic scenarios for cultural coverage (excluding sponsored content or content farms, which aren't what I'm talking about) are "this person has developed a pre-existing following that we would be remiss not to cover" and "we, the editors, believe that this person is doing something interesting, and so we choose to cover them." They are not: "this person wants publicity, and we have no choice but to obey"; "this person offered us money, and we have no choice but to take it"; "this person hacked our site, impersonated our writer, and used it as their self-promotional platform, and we have no choice but to leave the thing up." In short, they are the ones determining notability, and whether someone on Wikipedia likes what they choose, the policies defer to them, not vice versa.

As far as citing specific examples at AfD, it would both be shooting fish in a barrel and would require me to go back several months (it isn't in response to anything recent, I can only spend so much time there before I lose my mind). It is widespread, and the amount of misconceptions being thrown out here points to that. Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

But another example of a source: Let's take this LA Review of Books interview with author David Heska Wanbli Weiden (chosen arbitrarily, I was not previously familiar with the guy), in advance of his debut novel that would be released in 2020. Scenario: It's August 2020. You have just written a profile on this author, and someone nominates it for deletion. What do you do now? There are no reviews yet, because the novel doesn't exist yet. There is this profile in the Los Angeles Times -- which is essentially a written-through interview -- so that's one source. You then find the LA Review of Books source, which is a Q&A-style interview. Does this count as the second reliable source to provide significant coverage? The answer, to me, is obviously yes. The LA Review of Books, a high-profile publication in the literary world, chose to feature this writer out of the thousands of other writers they could have featured instead. They don't run many of these -- roughly one every couple of days, and many of them are about people well past their debut. So why did they do that? Because they believed the man to be noteworthy enough to cover. The idea that someone at Wikipedia can decide that their editorial judgment doesn't count just because they decided to cover him in interview rather than bulletin form goes against the whole reason we defer to secondary sources in the first place. Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

An exclusive book publisher seeking out an author to write an autobiography, and then editing, publishing, and promoting it, does not make the autobiography a secondary source on the author. So how does a magazine choosing which interview Q&As to publish equate to writing about the interviewee from a secondary point of view?

What you actually seem to be suggesting is essentially a new SNG specifically for subjects of interviews, wherein the preeminence of an outlet can be used as an automatic notability pass for subjects they cover, regardless of whether there is actually independent written analysis of the subject. There are numerous problems with this: which outlets would be considered prominent enough to confer notability? What if the interview content is just trivial details, like favorite food and movies -- would wiki editors have to use discretion in what type of content is in the interview? If discretion is recommended, what would we use to assess encyclopedic value -- how deeply the questions probe the subject's background? how detailed an opinion the subject gives on particular important topics? If the only sources on a person are two long-form interviews in which she opines on different matters, how do we choose what's DUE for her biography? Would we still summarize her opinions if they were all stupid inexpert takes, knowing we can't provide a rebuttal in the article without doing original research (since, by the nature of her two sources, there is no one specifically commenting on her views that we can cite)?

As I said earlier, the purpose of requiring independent coverage is to make sure a subject has been discussed in depth by unaffiliated people such that a balanced article can be written on it. Could any bio sourced solely to high-quality interviews provide neutral, proportionate, and warranted coverage of the subject? JoelleJay (talk) 04:41, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

An autobiography (edited and published through a reliable publisher) can be a secondary source for the author/person at its focus, as long as there is sufficient transformation of the person's recollections to something more than just a recap of their life. Such a person reworking what was publicly known into a new take of the events taken from their side, for example. Not all (and certainly not the majority) of autobiographies will meet that, but I can absolutely see some this way. This would also be true of certain styles of interviews where there is not much addition from the interviewer - but again, we're looking at transformation of the interviewee's recollection and not just a retelling. --Masem (t) 04:58, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

How would it be a genuine autobiography if someone else is transforming the narrative to the extent that it takes on a different meaning? Or are you saying the subject themselves contextualizing public parts of their own life story with their private analyses of it transforms it into a critical assessment of those events? Material about the author's experiences that is written by the author is still primary with respect to the author; it's still not someone else discussing the author's role in an event or dissecting the author's account of it or highlighting specific aspects of the author's life in their own independent words. JoelleJay (talk) 05:46, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

An autobiography can be considered a secondary source, no caveats needed. Anyone writing their memoirs might add their own analysis to the facts. Primary/secondary source typing depends on how it is used. For Wikipedia-notability questions, this is pointlessly needlessly complicated, because the autobiography is easily failed as non-independent. SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:29, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

And the easy thing with autobiographies is that they are immediately dependent sources (ignoring primary or secondary), and thus do not meet the other part of GNG beyond just significant coverage; more sources that are independent would be needed. --Masem (t) 13:57, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

1. Sufficient non-interview content makes it sufficiently ok. Presumably the non-interview content is the interviewer or editor creating secondary source content and not just repeating what the interviewee said.

2. Containing interview content does not poison the whole article. Cut the interview content, and then ask if what remains is of sufficient depth of coverage for the GNG.

In assessing articles including a subject interview, I will analyses the article paragraph by paragraph. Two paragraphs of obviously interviewer opinion about the subject is a pass. Less than two paragraphs is getting thin, and I note no agreement on measurements of depth of coverage required. See for example Wikipedia:One hundred words. I think the intellectual quality of the 100 words needs to be considered. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:06, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

• An interview is the subject talking about themself. It is, therefore, not independent, so it does not contribute toward notability. That said, a valid point is made in the original post—a piece labeled as an "interview" might nonetheless contain a substantial amount of material that is independently written, such as a biography (though in some cases this is just a brief introductory blurb, "John Doe is a Foo at Bar Research", and that wouldn't make any difference, sometimes it may be substantially longer), and then may contain additional analysis and reporting on matters discussed during the interview. If those portions are substantial in and of themselves, that may contribute to notability, even if the piece as a whole is labeled an "interview". But the Q&A portion itself, regardless of who "curates" it or selects the responses, does not and cannot. It is not independent of the subject. If the whole piece basically is just Q&A, that's not an independent source that can contribute toward notability; the subject is just being prompted to discuss themself. And that's true whether the interview is on an obscure podcast or is the cover story of Rolling Stone. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 08:28, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I go to sleep for a few hours and even more whack-a-mole misconceptions have arisen about journalism ("an autobiography (edited and published through a reliable publisher") have arisen. No. Absolutely not. Jesus christ that is not remotely how it works. News publications are not personal author websites. They are not publisher websites. They are not blurbs on a book cover. They are not, generally, affiliated with publishers, and if they are the reliable ones recuse and/or disclose when necessary. They are definitely not edited by publishers or publicists, as much as publicists wish otherwise. (Think of how often public figures or their publicists backpedal or complain that they were misquoted in high-profile publications. Would that happen if they were the ones writing and editing it? No.) In short, they are independent.

As such, an interview is not an "autobiography" unless the interviewer is a fictional device created by an author, the editor is in the publisher's employ, and the publication... doesn't exist? How it actually works is that either an editor decides to run an interview with someone and commissions a journalist to do so, or a journalist pitches an interview to an editor, and the editor agrees that the subject is noteworthy enough to cover. Literally tens of thousands of writers (or musicians, artists, filmmakers...) and thousands of publishers would love to be featured in a publication, and they can (and do) seek that out ad nauseum. But the editors of a publication are the ones who decide which of them is notable. There is this persistent misconception that has arisen like a plague here that just because a person wants publicity, any coverage of them is necessarily the result of them bending the whole journalistic world to their will. This can be disproven by the numbers -- if everyone could do that then there would be a lot more pieces being run than they are. It can also be disproven by asking ourselves why we are citing the media in the first place. If we start doubting editorial judgment at publications as a source of notability, then the whole idea of notability collapses.

So, what I am suggesting is that we actually adhere to WP:N, i.e., determining whether a subject is notable based on whether reliable, independent secondary sources -- in this case, the LARB, a reputable publication in literature -- have determined it to be notable and have provided information beyond a passing mention. This would be a correction from our current distortion of determining notability based on misconceptions and paranoia about the journalistic field that we nevertheless claim to trust. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:13, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

The example you gave is honestly very tricky, and I have encountered it when trying to write articles. A profile like this would be exactly what we need to write a neutral, verifiable, and attributable to an independent source. I maintain that an interview like this wouldn't be considered independent. With those two sources alone, the article would probably be deleted. That said, around the same time there were some review of the book itself[39][40]. This is exactly the time where the topics could be merged. The article about Winter Counts would cover the book, and some of the author's WP:PRIMARY statements would be relevant. The only reason I say the author "could be" merged instead of "should be" merged is because the notability guideline is nearly silent on merges. This is often a disservice. If people get fixated on the question of whether something deserves a stand-alone article, the answer will be no. I have always felt that a stub that fails Wikipeda's policies might actually be merged to add some context to an article that does meet Wikipedia policies. Shooterwalker (talk) 16:49, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• Yeah, this is kind of where I'm stuck: it is essentially saying "Subjects are notable if reliable sources determine that they're notable, except we don't trust reliable sources to determine notability."

It also highlights a related issue: restricting by format of article means that we give undue weight to relatively small or non-expert publications. Literature kind of has a tricky thing where most of the industry is NYC-centric, and the Seminole Review seems to be a special case since it is dedicated to Native American topics, but let's look at the other two. The Los Angeles Review of Books is nevertheless one of the major national/international literary publications, whose staff are generally subject matter experts in literature and the book publishing world. (I should note here that I have not written for, been employed by, or otherwise been affiliated with them.) The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is a regional daily newspaper staffed by generalists, currently owned by a hedge fund and whose former owner, Tronc, has had a rocky history. Comparing print circulation and online pageviews is misleading on many levels, but nevertheless it's something like 500K for the LARB and 100K for the Tribune. The LARB has a copy and fact-checking desk that appears to have a manageable load of articles and no need to rush a paper out before it goes to print. I haven't worked in newspapers in ages so who knows what Alden Global Capital has done, but most big newspaper companies have laid off or outsourced their copy desk to hubs that process many papers' stories on very short turnaround.

It should be abundantly clear, then, that the LARB carries much more weight on matters of literary notability than a newspaper in south Florida. (Conversely, were the LARB to run an essay related to south Florida, it would carry less notability than a sufficiently established daily newspaper.) This isn't just ruler-measuring, either. These facts have concrete ramifications in who covers what. Namely, because the Los Angeles Review of Books pulls more weight in the literary world, they actually can run an editorial interview. Unless a generalized daily paper is something like The New York Times, it will not have that clout. Honestly, they're lucky to have the staff or paper space anymore. This is why the Sun-Sentinel did not run an interview, and instead ran a relatively small capsule review. Their editorial processes were basically the same -- do we cover this author in our inbox? Do we review this book sent to our newsroom? Yet we assess their importance as the exact opposite of what they are. This is a distortion. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:19, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I actually secretly hate using "notability" to describe the issue, because I think it's incredibly misleading, and it's clear that's why this discussion has gone in circles longer than it needed to (which isn't either of our faults). I think you're hung up on the question of "is this topic important?" Which is how you could think that merely choosing a subject to be interviewed in a high profile publication is enough for something to be "important". The real issue is what this guideline is actually about: "was this topic covered in reliable third party sources that are independent of the subject, so that we have the quality of research that we would need to write a stand-alone article?". That's how a local secondary source is more useful than an interview in the rolling stone. Don't get hung up on the word "notable". The entire issue is how we evaluate the quality of research we would need to write a quality article. Shooterwalker (talk) 20:23, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

?? I am not claiming interviews are autobiographies, good grief. They are just two different ways something like an anecdote about someone's own life can be sought by an independent reliable party, appear in a reliable source, and still be primary and not independent. And the concerns re: PROMO are a very minor aspect to this discussion that are irrelevant to the actual independence question. Did you read beyond the first paragraph of my 04:41 Jan 14 comment? JoelleJay (talk) 18:42, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• I did read your whole comment. It was an exceedingly poor analogy; the difference between a news outlet and a publishing company should be self-evident. And the questions you raise as wild new considerations are questions that are already addressed by policy. (For instance, a "favorite foods" puff piece would fail WP:SIGCOV whether it was styled as an interview or not. Come on.) The concerns re: PROMO are also not minor at all; not only do they keep being brought up, poorly, but they are the whole reason that we have WP:INDEPENDENT in the first place. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:19, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

  A quote about oneself is a quote about oneself. Doesn't matter where it's published. Doesn't matter who sourced it or for what reasons. It is still someone's original words about themselves, and is therefore primary content with respect to themselves, just like quoted material from the Bible is still a primary source on its contents no matter where it shows up. This is what almost everyone here has been trying to tell you. Independence isn't required solely to prevent PROMO, it is needed to ensure an article does not give undue attention to the subject's own views. It even explicitly says independent sources are necessary so that an article is not written from the subject's own viewpoint. We don't seem to have issues disregarding interviews where a someone talks in depth about their family member as non-independent and primary wrt the family member, so why is it so hard to understand the same consideration should be applied to interviews of the subject? JoelleJay (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

  Like, I understand that the magazine conducting the interview is independent of and secondary to the interviewee. And the confusion over these terms could arise from a reasonable interpretation of the wording in GNG, specifically received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, which should be interpreted as received significant coverage by reliable sources that are independent of the subject; and "Independent of the subject" excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent, which doesn't explicitly list interviews and implies such material must be "works produced by the subject" rather than "content directly provided by the subject". These sections should probably be clarified. However, as multiple editors have pointed out, there is a longstanding consensus that the portions of interviews where the subject talks about themselves are not acceptable in considering notability despite being published in independent secondary sources because they consist of the original words of the subject rather than written analysis of the subject by someone else. This is consistent with how we treat interviews in our policy on original research. JoelleJay (talk) 19:41, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

  The phrase “secondary to the interviewee” is a journalistic usage of the word “secondary” and is not appropriate to Wikipedia, as Wikipedia is not journalism. Use the historiographical definitions please, where the primary-secondary distinction is the creation or transformation of new information by the second author. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:28, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• Some interviews are such a big deal that they are notable themselves – see category:Interviews for famous examples such as the Nixon interviews. The problem is that both interviewers and interviewees will lie, distort and exaggerate in pursuit of a good story – see Bashir's interview of Diana, for example. But that's a problem with all journalism, not just interviews. The Q&A format of an interview makes the attribution of the facts clear and that's better than a piece which was ostensibly written entirely by the journalist but was just based on a press-release from the subject. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:15, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• Yes. Thank you. This is another excellent point: writers and editors receive hundreds or thousands of press releases per day in their inbox. Usually these are just brief updates and almost always they go directly to the trash. Often the emails will come with some kind of "let me know if you want to set up an interview" bit (by "set up" they generally mean "get you in touch with," since they also get thousands of emails of their own to ignore. They don't mean "let us frame and write everything" -- there are cases of publicists making topics off-limits or hand-selecting their interviewer, but those are generally famous people, as in Beyonce-level famous, with actual leverage to dictate terms.) No matter how much the publicist wants their press release to lead to an article, most of them don't. An editor choosing to follow up means that A) they believe the person and their work is notable enough to cover, and B) they want to publish more than what is in the press release. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:13, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• If we're going to base our notability criteria on whether the subject has substantive coverage in independent sources (GNG) rather than on specific achievement (NPOL, say), with the philosophy that "it's because that distinguishes topics that have enough verifiable content", then we should base it on whether the subject has substantive coverage in independent sources and not on whether those sources chose to format the coverage as an interview, as a sidebar to something else, as a profile article, or as an obituary. For the same reason, whether a source is a small-town newspaper or a major international newspaper should be irrelevant. That said, some interviews are "what are your opinions on X" and some are "tell us your life story"; opinions on X are probably not substantial coverage of the interviewee and would not count for notability. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:59, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

David raises an important point. On the one hand, there are puff-piece interviews that likely don't really amount to SIGCOV. On the other hand, there are probing, Mike Wallace-style interviews that, though the level of preparation and nature of the questions, challenge the subject and constitute "real" journalism which is unquestionably independent. It is over-simplistic to dismiss all interviews as failing the "independence" requirement. Cbl62 (talk) 20:38, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, I think there is a key difference in that material in a profile or (not paid-for) obituary is strictly from someone independent of the subject giving their written analysis of the subject, whereas in an interview the (biographical) material is direct quotes from the subject about themselves/their opinion. So we are only getting the subject's perspective on a selection of topics and/or themselves, all in their own words. So while we could maybe say their opinion on a given topic may be due, by virtue of a particular prompt being asked in the first place and by its inclusion in the final published piece, we still don't have a secondary, independent written interpretation of their opinion or of the subject in general. We do not know anything about how their opinion has been received after they give it (other than any contemporaneous reaction by the interviewer); all we could possibly write about it in their bio is what a wikipedia editor can distill from the subject's own words and perhaps the phrasing of the question prompt. Should we include their opinion on some fringe topic if that's the only non-basic info we can get from their interviews, even if it's both UNDUE and there are no critical sources specifically rebutting their statements?

Also, the outcome of accepting interviews irrespective of the source's prominence would dramatically expand the number of BLPs we have sourced solely to interviews and trivial mentions, which alongside the obvious issues related to patrolling BLPs, would strongly bias our coverage even more toward minor internet-era subjects, where there's no real limit to how long an interview can be and the "interview" can take place over however long it takes the subject to type out their answers to questions in an email. Does every little league coach whose team wins two tournaments warrant an article after being interviewed on two separate occasions by local media? I don't think people who don't participate in athlete or businessperson AfDs realize the sheer number of biographies deleted where the subject has multiple interviews and nothing else. I also think some editors here are deeply overestimating the thresholds for "significant" and "in-depth" used at AfD if they think a long "puff piece" on someone's food preferences wouldn't be proffered as SIGCOV of an athlete. JoelleJay (talk) 23:25, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Exactly right. Re-reading all of the above, I don’t know what sort of topics User:Gnomingstuff is talking about, but athlete and business person interviews are extremely unlikely to be accepted as evidence of Wikipedia-notability. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:36, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I am talking primarily about the arts, in which this is a major category of coverage as David has mentioned, and in which the major publications are generally independent of the artists they cover. From what I understand this is less the case for business and sports media, but concerns there are already solved by the guidelines we already have in place re: what is a reliable and independent business/sports journalism source and what isn't. ESPN interviewing LeBron James? Independent. The Lakers team website interviewing LeBron James? Not independent. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:18, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Re: dramatically expanding the number of possible BLPs: I see that as a feature and not a bug. If secondary sources have determined a person or topic is notable, then they have determined it is notable, whether you like it or not. It defeats the purpose of our notability policy to say we defer to secondary sources unless we [don't like the subject matter]. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:18, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Unless we're going to change a guideline, probably the best that we can say here is "should not be excluded solely because it contains interview content". Which implicitly means that other factors would need to be considered to determine whether or not or to what extent that source contributes to meeting the wp:notability requirement. North8000 (talk) 19:12, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

• YES! As someone alluded to above, we should have gotten rid of the misnomer of this guideline long, long ago. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:34, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes.

Interviews are not accepted as evidence of notability, but a source should not be excluded solely because it contains interview content.

A source can contain more than an interview. My advice is to take the source, ignore all of the interview content and subject quotes, and work with what’s left.

An excellent source may start with distant-perspective introduction on the person, and finished with the journalist’s critical-analytical comment, and include as a section an interview of the subject. The interview section does not poison the rest as evidence of notability.

A naked interview, whether a questions and answers transcript, or the answers reformatted into third person prose, is not accepted as evidence of Wikipedia-notability. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:46, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Yep, that's been my stance for a while now. JoelleJay (talk) 23:55, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

How very dogmatic. But how lacking in principled and reason-based explanation for that stance. For what reason do you find an interview, published by an independently operated and properly editorially controlled publication, inadequate for notability? Are you basing this on a supposition that it is not in-depth about the subject? That it is not reliably published? That the level of editorial control and checking that we require for a source to be considered reliable would somehow go out the window when a subject says something directly, but still be present in material from the same publisher formatted in other ways? Or that it somehow has less accurate information than a profile written by a staff author based on reading and then summarizing the results of an interview with the subject might be? Because that process of reading and then recapping seems unlikely to me to somehow introduce additional accuracy and reliability. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:01, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I think without any other context we should be wary of a topic that only using one interview as justification for notability, regardless of the type of interview. For example, there have been cases in the past of a person who was a key eyewitness to a major event, so the interviewer may start by getting an idea of who this person is, etc. and then run down what they saw. I would hope it is clear that though the eyewitness's background is covered to some depth, that this by far does not make the person notability for WP. On the other hand, and this is from my experience with video games, an interview with the key creative force in a work that clearly surpasses notability for that work, that the interview that talks enough in detail about the creative's life before the game would be sufficient as at least a presumption of notability. There's several more caveats I'd place on this (where the interview is published and if its the kind of paid-for promotion in trade magazine; the quality of the publisher, etc. ) but it still comes out that any attempt to classify interviews in a single bucket in regards to notability is not a good approach. --Masem (t) 00:09, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

What makes interviews special in this regard? I'd be wary of a topic that only used one source, regardless of the type of source. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:36, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

User:David Eppstein, the principled, intellectual basis for this comes from the historigraphical-style analysis of the information, where it comes from. If the information, and mainly looking at the secondary source information, comes from the subject, then the information is not independent of the subject. It doesn’t matter whether the Pope stamped his approval on the publication, it is about the information, and whose information it is.

If the information in the source, analysed paragraph by paragraph, came from the subject, or the subject’s website, or the subjects PR department, then it is not independent information.

If the information came from the interviewer, while in conversation with the subject, then it is too close to call it “independent”.

If the information came from the interviewer, after the interview, reflecting on the interview and other things, then yes, that is independent, and meets the independence requirement of the GNG.

Whether an authority figure or highly reputable publishers’ editor decided an interview is worth leading coverage, that might be considered separately as an indicator of notability, but it is not an indicator that feeds through the WP:GNG, and it is not one that fits the historiographical approach. The pope may have rubber stamped while not paying attention. The publication may be needed filler on a slow day. Assumptions, not information, and not analysis of information. SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:23, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Our treatment of secondary is the transformation of information, not where the information comes from. Where info comes from is a first-party/third-party or a independent/dependent aspect. Of course, most interviews do not transformation the person's information, and so are very much likely primary, but due to the fact they are not analyzing or interpreting their comments. --Masem (t) 00:30, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

If a biographer were hidden away in a cave and never had access to the subject or to anything the subject ever wrote, they would write a more accurate profile of the subject, than one based on the subject's own direct words? That's crazy. All information in biographies, ultimately, comes from the person who is the subject of the biography. It does not become more accurate by becoming more indirect. It becomes more accurate by cross-checking. If the subject said something in an interview that did not check out, I would hope that the editors would catch that. If they are not trying to catch that, then the problem is not that it is an interview; the problem is that they are not exerting the editorial control we require of a reliable source. If a source writes something about the subject entirely in the third person, that use of grammar does not make it any better or any worse than an interview for reliability: it might be a situation where the editors are checking things, or it might be a situation where they are just publishing a publicity blurb written directly by the subject without any checks of how accurate it might be. It is the editorial control, not the format or grammar of the information, and not how many steps removed from reality it has been taken, that makes it reliable. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:36, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

The Wikipedia notability test is not about accuracy of the information, but is about whether others have written about the subject.

All information in biographies comes from the subject? There is no role for the author of the secondary source? Nonsense. Qualitative assessment of the character of the subject comes from the opinion of the author of the secondary source, and sits on top of the facts of the subjects character.

You seem hard focused on reliability. Reliability is important, but Wikipedia-notability is about whether independent others have bothered to creatively transform and publish the facts into subjective analysis, opinion or comment.

Grammar analysis is not such a great clue. Machines can turn first person language into third person. The easiest useful clues are the adjectives. Suppose that the subject claims to be a designer, and indeed it is easily verified that the subject is a designer. Someone calls him a quirky designer? Where did the “quirky” assessment come from? Or any other adjective?

-- SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:27, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

If publication of being interviewed was sufficient to pass notability, Kristine Barnett, Jacob’s mother, would be notable.

This was a troublesome case, where numerous Wikipedians had trouble explaining why not. I now think an excellent explanation for why the many listed sources fail WP:N is because none of the secondary source content (I.e the ascribed meaning of it, beyond the facts) comes from an independent source, the transformation of the facts was all by the mother. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:55, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Barnett is a textbook case for why our notability guidelines of "if you can work up enough publicity you're notable" can produce bad results, but it doesn't make the point you're trying to make with it here. Kristine Barnett has only a dubious case for notability through the interviews she gave about her son, because the interviews were primarily about her son, not about herself. In any case it doesn't matter whether she got her publicity turned into a publication through being interviewed or through other kinds of churnalism (she did both); what matters is whether the publication is reliable (in this case no, because the errors of fact made it obvious that they weren't exerting editorial control) and whether it is in-depth about the subject. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:09, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. It’s hard to find an example where precisely one thing is wrong.

Here is another example. All the information comes from the CEO. The story is prosified from an interview with the CEO. So I call this a failure on independence. I don’t think “reliability” is the problem. SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:39, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I would call this independent; Mallory Schlossberg is not affiliated with the man or the company but is rather a staff reporter for Business Insider, and not all of the information in the story comes from the CEO, unless you believe, for instance, that the CEO went off on a tangent about Lululemon. (Occam's Razor: That would be the sort of thing that probably would produce a good quote.) I would classify this as coverage of the company, though, and not the CEO; it also is questionable how significant the coverage is. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:26, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Masem, our treatment is secondary is irrelevant to what I wrote. The point is independence, of what is agreed to be secondary. SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:47, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it's particularly necessary to respond to this, especially when a) I find it hurtful someone whose opinion I generally respect even if we disagree sometimes would attack my participation in this discussion as lacking in principled and reason-based explanation; b) SmokeyJoe has explained that Wikipedia uses the historiographical definition of "primary" (as should be clear from the numerous examples of primary sources, including interviews, discussed in WP:OR); and c) my earlier response to you should demonstrate why your questions aren't really relevant to the argument I've been making. JoelleJay (talk) 04:50, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

If you want some real world examples, there are probably 1,000 per week at new page patrol that go something like this:

A non-sports person (sports people articles all meet the "did it for a living for one day" SNG criteria and are exempt from sourcing requirements, those alone are another 1,000 per week) like an actor or performer. 10 references, the best 2 regarding GNG are a combination of 2/3 interview and 1/3 content written by the somewhat prominent publication, about 2 pages each. Most of the other 10 have a brief mention of them or just source a factoid. Should it (1,000 per week) go to AFD?

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 21:47, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Two sources, each containing 1/3 of 2 pages non-interview content? That sounds good enough for me. And the existence of interview content satisfies my passing assessment of it being probably reliable. At that point I would pass, or !vote “keep”, unless the subject is a CEO, or a company founder, and the article is describing something for sale, in which case I will read the two sources a second time.

I will often google search the subject with the source author, to see if one employs the other, or if they are in each others’ social media.

Probably, no, I will accept it at NPPatrol. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:36, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

• I think all the navel gazing about “primary” and “independent” is pointless. The core question is this: lacking other sources that would indicate notability, does being interviewed MAKE the person notable?

I am tempted to answer my question with: “That depends on the publication”… after all, there is a huge difference between being interviewed by a prestigious magazine like Rolling Stone, and being interviewed by an unknown local paper.

However, on reflection, I have to discard that answer… because when the only source we have is an interview (even one in a prestigious outlet like Rolling Stone), I just don’t think we have enough… at least not yet.

I think being interviewed by a prestigious outlet is often a sign that the interviewee might be notable (so look for other sources that would establish that) or is perhaps in the process of becoming notable (so keep your eye out for future sources) but I don’t think the existence of an interview MAKES a person notable, or is enough, on its own, to confer notability. Blueboar (talk) 01:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I would not codify this in any way but I would agree that a in-depth interview with high-quality source (eg the Rolling Stone interview) is not sufficient for notability but that to me would be a sign that I should easily be able to find sources that are not interviews that are independent and secondary ("easily" based of course on time factors and location - it would require some in-person searching for a person from the start of the 20th century, compared to a person today). And if cannot easily come up with sources as long as you have a reasonable means to search for such sources, then very likely the person themselves is not notable. This should be in the back of the head-type logic, I would dare not codify it to an SNG as it would be abused greatly (if the only source in an article is that interview). --Masem (t) 05:19, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd roughly agree with that assessment. And in some borderline cases, I might still !vote keep. Not because the Rolling Stone interview confers notability on its own, but because that kind of high profile interview would potentially persuade me that enough coverage is out there, somewhere, and we just haven't found it yet. I'd still be shocked if we couldn't find it though. A lot of people are always coming in here asking for a bright line test, but there isn't one. It's an art as much as it's a science, and the edge cases will always challenge us. Shooterwalker (talk) 14:10, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

My stance is the stance that is already stated in policy: "The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, author, inventor, or vendor) have actually considered the topic notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it—without incentive, promotion, or other influence by people connected to the topic matter." In other words, I am arguing that we should comply with policy, rather than the distortion of it that has taken root. The idea that merely being the subject of coverage constitutes "incentive or promotion" is insanity, pure and simple. Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Quoted content in an interview is not an author's own thinking based on primary sources, generally at least one step removed from an event or their analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources. This is the definition of secondary that wikipedia uses in its PAGs and which is required when considering notability. JoelleJay (talk) 05:22, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

And I am arguing that this definition of "secondary" is out of step with how secondary sources assess notability, both when covering subjects and when citing others' coverage, and directly contradicts the very idea of "notability." It also is exceedingly narrow -- it would exclude the vast majority of news reporting, for instance, as a secondary source. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Most news reports are primary, at least one their coverage of day to day events. But if the report frames the work to give me context to why it is significant or important, that makes those articles secondary. Just that most news reports fail to go that far and just recap events. --Masem (t) 17:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Again, you're using the journalistic definition of "secondary", which is not what Wikipedia uses with regards to the type of sources acceptable for assessing notability. It doesn't contradict the "idea of notability", either, since the whole purpose is to ensure a topic has been written about and analyzed by someone unrelated such that we can write a neutral article on it without undue representation of one perspective and without introducing original research (which is what would happen if an editor summarized two disparate quotes from a subject and linked them together either explicitly or implicitly). The wording you quote above even specifies an independent author must have written and published non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it (emphases mine); transcribing someone's interview answers is not someone writing about the those answers in their own words. JoelleJay (talk) 19:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

And yes, Wikipedia does treat standard news reports as primary, as Wikipedia is WP:NOTNEWS. JoelleJay (talk) 19:50, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

My guess is that this guideline is more concerned about "independent". It also says "secondary" (which excludes "primary") but otherwise doesn't talk about "primary". This is different than wp:VER, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV where the interpretability, cherry-pickability etc. of the source by the wiki editor is a big issue.North8000 (talk) 17:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

We want independent sources to avoid self made claims of importance, secondary as to be able to give more context of why a topic is important rather than just existence, and sufficient significant coverage to assure we have more than a few sentences in a standalone article. In this context many interviews will be inappropriate for notablity either from being non secondary, (the interview simply recapping), or from the lack of clear independence (from trade journals or the like), but that still gives room for a fair number of interviews that are neither that can be part of presuming notability for a topic. --Masem (t) 20:06, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

• Gnomingstuff, we don't actually have a rule that interviews are entirely inadmissible as sourcing. Interviews can be problematic, however, so we have rules about how they can or can't be used. For instance, we look at who's publishing the interview — an interview in Rolling Stone or The New Yorker obviously counts for much more than an interview on some random blog or a user-generated "citizen journalism" site where they could have placed a self-created interview themselves for the express purpose of inventing their own circular sourcing to support their desire to misuse Wikipedia as a publicity platform. And we look at the mix of sourcing that an article features: a person like Taylor Swift obviously has a broad range of coverage, and thus it isn't so much a problem if one or two of her sources are interviews, but some aspiring wannabe who hasn't accomplished anything that would pass a Wikipedia guideline isn't going to get into Wikipedia just because he has one or two "interviews" on webzines, if he has nothing else in the way of coverage besides just a couple of interviews.
  So it isn't that interviews can never be used at all — they can be very useful sources sometimes, and the issue is simply that we have to be careful about issues like how we're using interviews, who's publishing the interviews and whether the interviews are the only sources the topic has or not. Bearcat (talk) 20:50, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Top librarian/museum curator of a national organisation

would that be equivalent to Wikipedia:Notability_(academics)#Criteria #6 "The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society."? for example, Lenrie Olatokunbo Aina. RZuo (talk) 09:19, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

No. It's not a major institution or major academic society. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:13, 22 January 2022 (UTC).

a national library is definitely on par with, if not more important than, a university, "a major academic institution". there's usually only one such institution in every country, and they are usually deposit libraries. RZuo (talk) 16:30, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Comment I lean toward yes. 1) numerous sources[41], [42],[43],[44],[45],[46] confirm that not only are national libraries central to providing material for academic research regarding a particular country's culture, but they lead and develop research programs in the country; 2) by virtue of the fact that it is a "national" institution, it is a major facility; 3) a search of work related experience sites indicates that the qualifications required for Head of Archives and Manuscript Collections, Director of Collections and Research Services, Director of Curatorial Services, Head of Collections and Curation, etc. are all upper management positions within various library systems requiring graduate level degrees, as well as both management and curatorial experience averaging 7-10 years. SusunW (talk) 18:36, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

GNG vs SNG: a case study

Does anyone else think it's weird that Notability is the only "core" content guideline that does not have a dedicated noticeboard? It feels strange bringing specific PAG questions to a PAG talk page, but here we are.

I was a bit flustered today when I stumbled across an AfD discussion that had been closed late last year: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ricky Dale Harrington Jr.. It made me question whether I have a solid grasp of WP:N or if maybe I'm losing my marbles. First, please read a brief statement of purpose: I am not disputing the closure of this AfD, and I am not using this as a venue to litigate specific content disputes. I am seeking clarity on WP:N, using this arbitrary AfD discussion as a case study.

In so far as a guideline can provide prescriptive advice, I understood WP:GNG to provide universally acceptable criteria for inclusion. Specific and subject-dependent notability guidelines summarized in WP:SNG, on the other hand, should be used as special allowances/exceptions with respect to subjects that do not meet GNG but are otherwise notable within the context of their topic area. That was how I read the guideline; I won't bore you with specific quotes.

Now, in the AfD that I linked above, I was surprised to see that that multiple users pointed to the subject failing the criteria in WP:NPOL, as if these guidelines are intended to be a more restrictive replacement for GNG. One user even caught flak from the nominator for claiming that the subject is notable, having met the requirements in GNG. It would be one thing if this were the only AfD where I have seen this, but I see it a lot, and I don't even browse AfD that much. "Subject fails WP:AUTHOR" is a common one as well.

Is my interpretation wrong? Are subjects required to pass a more restrictive interpretation of notability guidelines for SNG in their topic area even when GNG is satisfied? If so, could you please point me to what exactly I missed? To head off some avenues of discussion, I would explicitly like to not dwell on esoteric exceptions to WP:N based on clashes with common sense, non-notability reasons for exclusion (e.g. WP:V or WP:NOT), and especially WP:IAR-based reasoning that zeroes in on assumption, not a guarantee or similar to justify exclusion. I'm really just trying to figure out if I misunderstood notability. Thanks for your advice! AlexEng^(TALK) 14:35, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

• Not yet read the rest but there was a N noticeboard Wikipedia:Notability/Noticeboard but I believe it basically devolved from being a pre-AFD or similar process, particularly after AFC was implemented to help better guide new editors. --Masem (t) 14:38, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
• The only SNG that is more restrictive than the GNG is NORG due to its higher sourcing guidelines. After that, from the discussion about a year+ ago, the other SNGs are meant to be taken as alternatives to the GNG. Eg: NAUTHOR sits on NBIO which leads off with the basic criteria that is essentially the GNG, and then the other criteria on NBIO are alternatives to that. So just because a topic fails to meet the specific SNG criteria, if they can be shown to meet the GNG, then that's a reason to keep. I'm not aware of any other SNG (beyond NORG) that specifically restricts the GNG. --Masem (t) 14:43, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
  • The NORG case is interesting. It does read like an additional layer of filtering to me. AlexEng^(TALK) 17:55, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
  • AlexEng, I forget where I've read it, but I think what happened in that AfD is the presumption that coverage of politicians during their campaigns is considered WP:ROUTINE, so significant coverage that isn't related to a political campaign is needed for WP:GNG. A special interpretation of WP:SIGCOV, I suppose. (And not finding it written, I'm wondering if I've just picked up that notion from AfD discussions.) Schazjmd (talk) 15:31, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
    • Yes, that is how the community generally views campaign coverage, especially for state and local candidates. I am working on a draft about political candidates that may help the community. --Enos733 (talk) 16:57, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
      • Isn't WP:ROUTINE specifically for events rather than BLPs? Or is there some confluence between WP:NEVENT and WP:ONEEVENT? Either way, wouldn't that be articulated in deletion rationale rather than unrelated SNGs like NPOL and NAUTHOR? AlexEng^(TALK) 17:55, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
        • There are quite a few AfDs that have been explicit about the need for non-campaign-related coverage to meet WP:GNG: Ron DiNicola, Linda Weber, Ken Armstrong, David Luther Burgess, Shawn Moody. Pinging Bearcat who explains WP:ROUTINE in that context in many of the AfDs to possibly add to this discussion. Schazjmd (talk) 18:11, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
        • The campaign itself is the event and the coverage of the campaign is routine. I will note there are a lot of normative assumptions built into our consideration of political candidates - from fairness to all candidates, the degree to which a candidate who lost is a low profile individual, the degree to which Wikipedia is a repository for campaign platforms, the community's ability to review pages for unsourced, inaccurate, or slanderous material, while recognizing the public often comes Wikipedia for information about politics. Pages about candidates (and politics in general) are among the most contentious pages on the site. To a degree, the community has often seen campaigns about the election, such as 2010 United States Senate election in Nevada, as an appropriate compromise. Reliably sourced material about all candidates can be entered and maintained on those pages, along with polling and endorsement information. --Enos733 (talk) 18:15, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
          • I do understand this perspective, but the fact remains that this looks to me like a case of SNG overriding GNG. To what extent can we really generalize WP:ROUTINE as an explanatory supplement to WP:SIGCOV as it is now, baked into WP:NEVENT? To what extent is there consensus to apply WP:ROUTINE to (re-?)define trivial coverage writ large? And why is that consensus not formalized in WP:N? If there is not broad consensus, then why is this applied in practice? Thank you for your answer, by the way. It has been instructive for me. AlexEng^(TALK) 18:37, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
            • WP:N also covers routine news, thought it's explained in the context of events. --Masem (t) 20:11, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
  • The only SNG that is more restrictive than the GNG is NORG: This isn't quite true: the criterion in BIO, WP:BASIC is slightly more restrictive than the GNG in that it mandates qualifying sources to be secondary where the GNG only prefers this. — Charles Stewart (talk) 19:51, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
    • The GNG has always been taken to require secondary sources. --Masem (t) 19:55, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Notability is a big fuzzy ecosystem that mostly works but nobody can really understand or explain, (my attempt is at Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works) which would needed prior to try to tidy it up. You won't find a clean answer in policies or guidelines, but under my view, the system also measures and counts real-world notability a bit in the decision, and somewhat discounts/ deprecates inevitable coverage of the campaign in that determination and the the overall determination for candidates. And it also discounts it a bit in the "is there enough sourcing to write an article?" category because the content is more limited to the campaign. North8000 (talk) 19:09, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

The opposite may be true as well. As an example, the initial AfD that I linked in this discussion was closed as Delete for want of notability, presumably in line with WP:NPOL. In terms of real-world notability (which is distinct from celebrity or fame), the subject won the highest proportion of votes of any Libertarian Party candidate for national office in the history of the United States. That seems real-world notable at first blush, but it's mainly covered as trivia in sources, so it doesn't appear to meet our standards for notability. Anyway, if we do want consistent standards for notability, surely that is within our power to implement, by means of proposal. Can you help me understand the history of such proposals regarding candidate notability standards, if any? AlexEng^(TALK) 19:34, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

The thing is, recieving the most votes as a third-party candidate isn't really that great a metric since at the end of the day, that still means they didn't earn a space in the office. To mean, the essence of that fact is towards the Libertarian Party and what percentage of the votes they get - this person can be named there, but there's not much else too that. Sub-notability guidelines are loosely based on the expectation of merit or importance that comes from that specific criteria, while someone that is basically a footnote to history is not going to get the GNG type coverage. There's probably more about NPOL's history at WT:NBIO. --Masem (t) 19:54, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

• The thing that we have to be very careful about, when it comes to election candidates, is that media have a moral and ethical and legal obligation to provide "equal time" to all candidates in every election taking place in their coverage area — which means that if campaign coverage were all it took to get a non-elected candidate over WP:GNG, then every candidate would always get over GNG, and NPOL itself would be meaningless because every candidate could always claim that GNG exempted them from having to be measured against it. But we also have an established consensus that we do not want to be a repository of campaign brochures for everybody who ever ran for office and lost, so the consensus is that campaign coverage is not enough in and of itself if it's all that a candidate has. Instead, for a candidate to qualify for an article we need to see one or both of two other things in addition to the campaign coverage alone: either evidence that they also have separate notability for some other reason that would have gotten them an article independently of the candidacy, or a credible reason why their candidacy was of significantly greater importance than the norm for political candidates.
  As I've often explained, GNG is not just "count the footnotes and keep anybody who has surpassed an arbitrary number" — it takes into account various other factors, such as the geographic and temporal scopes of the coverage and the context in which the person is getting covered. For example, a smalltown mayor is not necessarily going to clear the bar just because she can show some coverage in her local media where coverage of the mayor is merely expected to exist, but might well clear the bar if she can show nationalizing coverage that makes her significantly more notable than the norm for smalltown mayors — and a high school athlete who hasn't accomplished anything that would pass our SNG for sportspeople isn't going to clear the bar just because he can show a few hits of local human interest coverage about his return to sports after losing a finger in shop class.
  In other words, we don't just automatically accept everybody who technically passes GNG on a raw count of the footnotes as encyclopedically notable: it's an interaction between the volume and depth of coverage and whether the context of what the person is getting covered for constitutes a credible and WP:10YT-passing reason for an encyclopedia article or not. And even SNGs don't actually exempt people from having to have any reliable sources, either: people have been known to make false claims in Wikipedia articles (fake biographies of politicians who never really existed, musicians claiming charting hits they never really had, etc.), so we still have to be able to find some reliably sourced evidence that the person's notability claim is actually accurate. So it requires a lot more than just counting up the raw number of hits that they can technically show — it isn't strictly just either passing GNG or passing the SNG for their class of topic, but in fact requires a balancing act between GNG and the SNGs. Bearcat (talk) 20:23, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

  Ah, Bearcat. Thank you for responding. I was hoping to engage with you about this after I saw the AfD links that Schazjmd provided above. This opener looks a lot like what you had written in several AfDs. I want to address just a few of the points directly. I will try to be as concise as possible. ⏎

GNG satisfied?	NPOL satisfied?	Do we presume notability?
Yes	Yes	Yes
Yes	No	Yes
No	Yes	Yes
No	No	No

1. media have a[n]...obligation to provide "equal time" to all candidates in every election taking place in their coverage area – says who? I have never known this to be the case. For one thing, this seems to belie that presumption. But for less prominent candidates such as Jill Stein, it's not even close to equal time.
2. NPOL itself would be meaningless because every candidate could always claim... GNG – NPOL provides an alternative to GNG for candidates that don't meet it. In order to be presumed notable a candidate must satisfy either GNG or NPOL. They need not satisfy both. This is equivalent to a logical OR operation. See table.
3. In order for NPOL to be used to affirmatively disqualify (rather than qualify) candidates for presumed notability, this sentence absolutely must be deleted from the guideline: "Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline."^{[emphasis mine]} Otherwise, it is factually, objectively wrong. This is unacceptable for a guideline.
4. do not want to be a repository of campaign brochures – We don't have to be! Notability is explicitly not meant to apply to content in articles, and it is not a guarantee of inclusion. We have other PAGs like WP:NPOV and WP:NOT to moderate that content. Blatantly promotional articles and prose are still deletable under WP:PROMO, even under WP:CSD, regardless of notability.
5. a smalltown mayor ... might well clear the bar if she can show nationalizing coverage – Perhaps I am mistaken, but I do not think there is broad consensus on the level of WP:N to support that requirement. GNG has protections for nonsense content in the form of two affirmative requirements: source independence and source reliability. GNG also recommends secondary sources, which skews against interviews. Your argument in these questionable scenarios should not be "does not meet NPOL" but instead "does not meet all aspects of GNG". GNG already has everything you need to reject weak coverage.
6. I don't think I disagree with anything in the second half of your statement besides the logical AND here: requires a balancing act between GNG and the SNGs My current understanding remains that it should be an OR rather than an AND.

Thanks for reading and replying. I genuinely appreciate your time on this issue. AlexEng^(TALK) 00:50, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

In your point about NPOL disqualifying local candidates, I can say that while WP:AUD is tied to NORG, it is regularly considered in all notability discussions - something that is only shown notable from local sources is likely to be deleted, but to be clear, this does not say that local sources can work with regional or broader sources to support notability. Additionally, particularly for politics, we can expect that there is going to be routine local coverage of their races, which again is a reason they would not meet the GNG. --Masem (t) 01:02, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

While I don't necessarily agree that N as written supports instruction creep out of WP:NORG, I can believe that blurb might be de facto relevant in notability discussions. Even if we grant that, we should at least acknowledge that this advice flows from the application of GNG's requirements for independent and reliable coverage. Exceptions abound, but there is plenty of room for reasonable doubt with respect to independence and reliability of small town newspapers and similar rags. We don't need to twist ourselves into knots applying NORG to the mayor of Podunk, New York when GNG works just fine. AlexEng^(TALK) 01:14, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm just saying that in your point #3 above, NPOL's guideline as worded is not wrong. GNG would still omit individuals that are only sourced to local cover, and would allow individual who may have notability from other activities in their life that no SNG covers but the GNG does. --Masem (t) 02:10, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't believe GNG excludes local coverage. Which part of it are you referring to? NemesisAT (talk) 09:40, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Outside of NORG, there isn't anything explicit, but I have found AFDS where the topic (not a business or organization) which relies on very narrow local sources without any other signs of coverage outside them to likely be deleted. But as I mentioned elsewhere, if local sources are mixed with broader sources, that's generally okay. --Masem (t) 13:13, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

GNG doesn't prohibit local coverage from being used, no. But it does accord less value to local coverage in certain contexts, in that a topic that has only local coverage won't necessarily be considered to pass GNG. Bearcat (talk) 14:14, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

There is a very specific circumstance in the United States, as discussed in Equal-time rule: ... American radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it. The resulting air time wouldn't necessary be suitable coverage for determining if English Wikipedia's standards for having an article are met—it would depend on the type of coverage. But it does provide a baseline amount of access given to all candidates. (As noted in the Equal-time rule article, the rule only applies to the candidates, and not anyone else.) isaacl (talk) 06:45, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Alex Eng, "equal time" is a bit of a misnomer — it doesn't actually guarantee that every candidate in an election has to have an exactly equal amount of coverage devoted to their campaigns, but it does guarantee that every candidate has to get something. It's not an accurately named rule, which is why I put its name in quotes, but it is still the name of a real rule that really exists. The simple fact is that no candidate in any election ever gets absolutely zero coverage: the fringe candidates may not get as much as the leading contenders, but they still get something, and even the "leading contender" who ultimately loses still doesn't get to keep a Wikipedia article just because they had campaign coverage.

And no, it isn't actually true that NPOL exempts people from having to clear GNG. In reality, absolutely no NPOL-passing politician ever fails to also pass GNG — it's true that their articles don't always look like it, but that's not because they actually lack GNG-worthy sourcing, it's because we haven't necessarily always found and used all of their GNG-worthy sources. So NPOL doesn't actually exempt people from GNG, it works alongside GNG to establish which political roles are accepted as notability claims and which political roles aren't. US state legislators, for instance, always have GNG-worthy sourcing — Wikipedians just haven't always put in the effort to write anything more than just "John Smith is a state legislator who existed, single source, the end", which is not at all the same thing as John Smith actually failing GNG. Wikipedians have a tendency to just source to whatever they can find in a casual Google search, but for historical topics that doesn't always work: sometimes properly demonstrating that a topic passes GNG requires trips to libraries and archives, because the person's notability claim and its associated coverage predate Google, but Wikipedia editors aren't always inclined to actually do that. So NPOL isn't exempting John Smith from having to pass GNG: NPOL is really just saying "we know for a fact that John Smith's article is improvable, because state legislators passing GNG is a given, so don't prematurely delete it just for not already being in a better state than it is".

Former Canadian MP Judy Erola is a good example. When I first created her article in 2004, we didn't have the same rules about having to cite sources that we have now. Her term in office was still already 20 years into the past by that time, so she didn't Google well and her article started out looking like this — and as of May 2015, over a decade later, her article still only cited one non-ideal source and looked like this. Clear GNG fail, right? Nope, just Wikipedians not actually putting in enough effort to locate her GNG-worthy sourcing. Two weeks after that latter diff, I started working on improving it as one of my first major projects after gaining access to a new database of historical Canadian media coverage that I didn't have in 2004, and its current state is much, much better. That's what I mean: she never failed GNG, we just hadn't done the work to write and source the best possible article yet. Bearcat (talk) 14:14, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

• As a side note, I just stumbled into this monstrosity, and I now have regrets about delving into this topic. We have a web of SNGs that has grown organically, and we slapped a bandage onto the guideline last year to try and reconcile these heterogeneous guidelines with GNG. We now have SNGs with wildly different goals and no uniform way to test how their respective interactions with GNG should bear fruit in notability discussions. I don't know that this was an altogether positive change. It quite possibly raises more questions than it answers. AlexEng^(TALK) 00:50, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Let's remember that this guideline describes SNGs as verifiable criteria about a topic which show that appropriate sourcing likely exists for that topic. Emphasis added. I see SNGs as pragmatic tools for determining that a given topic is likely to meet the GNG if an in-depth search for significant coverage in independent, reliable sources was conducted. Not a superficial Google search but a serious search in libraries and newspaper archives not available online. For example, NPOL says that state and provincial legislators are presumed to be notable. We are talking about a contemporary Arkansas political candidate in this case study. Arkansas became a U.S. state in 1836. Suppose I wanted to write a series of articles about members of the 1842 Arkansas General Assembly. I imagine that it would be quite difficult to properly source most such biographies using Google. But if I flew to Little Rock and rented a motel room for two weeks and immersed myself in the archives of that assembly and the archives of the various newspapers published there, and the local public library, I am highly confident that I could crank out a lot of well referenced biographies of Arkansas state legislators from 1842. That only one of many reasons why NPOL is a useful tool.

• In your point about Wikipedia being a campaign brochure, it is quite easy for biographical pages to become repositories for all of a candidate's statements or political positions and endorsements (see WP:NNC). The ways to address this is through WP:DUE and WP:PROPORTION, among others. It is not easy for editors to engage in these areas because there can a high level of passion in these topics, especially as many of the creators of articles about a candidate are the candidate's supporters. And, with the sheer number of candidates running for federal office every year (not just in the United States), and only so many active editors, I believe there is a strong likelihood that yes, many articles will become campaign brochures. --Enos733 (talk) 19:40, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

As for WP:ROUTINE applying only to events, yes, that is true, speaking strictly. But I believe that the spirit of that guideline language has broader applicability to topic areas other than events. Consider a one store mom and pop pizza restaurant that is popular in a small town, and that has been reviewed favorably by three newspapers published in a 20 mile radius. It is not surprising to anyone that pizza restaurants are often popular, and get reviewed in local papers. Some editors might say "meets GNG" and create an article. Broader consensus in practice seems to be that this type of coverage is "routine" and "run of the mill", and that is my opinion as well. Similarly with political campaigns. I agree with much of what Bearcat writes but not with media have a moral and ethical and legal obligation to provide "equal time" to all candidates in every election taking place in their coverage area. That does not reflect either the law or actual practice, at least in the U.S. Media will devote vastly more attention to the Democratic Party or Republican Party candidates than to the Prohibition Party or Socialist Worker Party candidates. That's logical because candidates of the first two parties get vastly more votes than the candidates of the other two parties. This particular Arkansas case was an outlier because there was no Democratic Party candidate and the race came down to a Republican versus a Libertarian, and it seems that many Democrats chose to vote for the Libertarian, which at least created the potential for notability. Despite that, it seems that the coverage did not rise above routine or run of the mill, at least as assessed by the participants in that AfD. Visiting libraries or archives is unlikely to dig up vastly better sources for contemporary political campaigns in the internet era. In the end, notability in an AfD should be assessed on the reliable sources available, but anyone who wants to delete an article should use the relevant SNG to evaluate whether or not offline significant coverage is likely to exist with a diligent search. If an SNG is not doing its job as a pragmatic tool, then it should be abolished, as we did with PORNBIO.

Our current practice of declining to accept routine or run of the mill or highly local coverage of political candidates or lower level small town elected officials as evidence of notability is very important, in my view, in maintaining a neutral, well referenced encyclopedia. Loosening the existing de facto standards on politicians would open the encyclopedia to a flood of barely disguised campaign brochures masquerading as encyclopedia articles. Campaign managers communicate among each other, and if the word gets out that Wikipedia is now more lenient about articles about candidates and lower level elected officials, we will be subjected to a deluge of problematic politician articles.

As for Ricky Harrington, the subject of this case study, he is currently covered at 2020 United States Senate election in Arkansas, and there is no reason why that coverage cannot be improved and expanded, if any editor wants to. In most such cases, that is the best outcome. Articles about individual candidates all too often turn into hagiographies or hit pieces . Articles about a campaign have a strong expectation of neutrality, and that is a good thing. Lower level politicians can be covered in articles about the towns, cities and counties that they serve. Cullen328 (talk) 03:17, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Interviews of subject from a RS

I am trying to clarify an aspect of notability regarding "Independent of the subject" and maybe will initiate an RfC if we cannot come to a clear understanding or clarify this on the text. But currently "Independent of the subject" is listed as:

"Independent of the subject" excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent.

I wonder, for clarity, if we could add to this to just say, "Independent of the subject" excludes works produced by the article's subject or someone affiliated with it. For example, advertising, press releases, autobiographies, and the subject's website are not considered independent. An interview featuring the article's subject, coming from a reliable source, may be used with proper attribution."

My question relates to where interviews fit in this mix, IF the interview is conducted by a RS. Can the interview then be used for content on the persons own views lets say in a biographical article of a living person? Or at least what they SAY their own views are according to a NY Times interview or other RS? ♥Th78blue (talk)♥ 19:23, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Why would an interview conducted by a reliable source be treated as something not independent of the subject in term of notability? Calidum 19:25, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

As Dr. House would say "everybody lies". My gut feeling is that statements by the person in an interview should be treated as assertions by the person and not hard facts. That being said, I think they could be included in an article with some caveat like "they claim to have won a Nobel Prize" - which would be easily checked and rephrased to a citation-supported fact; or perhaps "they claim that blue is their favorite color", besides being non-encyclopedic (unless in fact they are blind or cannot see blue :) ), there is no way to concretize this as a citation-supportable fact. Regards --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 18:01, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

If you think statements directly from the subject are always unreliable, why do you think that statements from the subject transformed through a game of telephone into statements about the subject by someone else can ever magically become more reliable? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:07, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

This is the page on notability rather than verifiability. The reliability of the subject's statements are, therefore, not really the point. The relevant question is: "Does being interviewed contribute to a finding of notability?" Largoplazo (talk) 19:13, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, Largoplazo. Good point. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:18, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

• I do think that the fact that someone was interviewed by a major news outlet can (sometimes) indicate notability… but what they say in that interview does not. I say “sometimes” because A LOT depends on why the subject is being interviewed. Blueboar (talk) 19:29, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

We gauge notability by what and how much is being said by other people about a subject in RS. If the only SIGCOV of a subject in an interview comes from the subject himself, the interview should not contribute to notability since it is not independent or secondary (in the journalistic sense). The fact that the subject was interviewed, even by a notable outlet, would be irrelevant unless we can claim "being interviewed by X" is equivalent to winning some major award (per ANYBIO), which would be a hard sell. JoelleJay (talk) 19:10, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

• "Interviews" are likely not categorically addressed (and have not been categorically addressed) because they come in different varieties, where they are presented in different formats or subject generated info is mixed with not subject generated info. This means it is a matter of consensus discussion at the time the issue arises. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:28, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
• I agree with Alanscottwalker that interviews are, at best, a case-by-case discussion. This guideline is about sources, nothing more, nothing less. You need some neutral, independent, reliable information to serve as the foundation of an article. You can't write an article about a subject if all the information comes directly from an invested source. We often use interviews as sources, but it's questionable if an interview would be enough for an article by itself. An article should not be a summary of what a subject said about itself. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:34, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
• My answer regarding interviews would be essentially the same as Alanscottwalker's. North8000 (talk) 18:51, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
• We often use sources, in the context of notability, as a stand-in for fame rather than merely to verify the content of an article. Lots of people have information that could be reliably verified (for instance in published small-town newspaper obituaries about the death of a beloved local schoolteacher, the kind written by the newspaper editors rather than the family of the deceased) but that would probably not be considered sufficient for notability in an AfD. We like to say that notability is purely about whether it's possible to write a verifiable article, but that's a lie; if it were true, we'd have a lot more notable people than we do. By the same token, someone may have published sources about them by others that, because of their prominence, make it clear that the person is famous enough for an article, without bringing much verifiable information to the table. Many interviews are of this type: evidence for fame independent of whether they are usable for verification. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:18, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
• Interviews are case by case, and the guideline should be edited to state that. BilledMammal (talk) 07:56, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

  "Case by case" means a decision taking degrees of issues and other factors into account. This is implicit / the default for about 95% of policies. North8000 (talk) 15:46, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

  Some editors interpret the lack of mention as meaning that interviews always contribute to notability. Clarifying that they may not would be helpful. BilledMammal (talk) 23:21, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

I think there's a good point here that there are interviews, and there are interviews, and we need to find a way to determine which ones are acceptable. I'm of the opinion that an interview done by a staff reporter for an outlet considered to be reliable, even if presented in a Q&A style, should be considered acceptable; yes, it's direct statements from the subject, but it's also passed through the editorial filter of the writer and their editorial oversight, so there's a layer of review there. I'm currently reviewing an AFD for a musician; I've found Q&As conducted by staff writers in NME and Paper (magazine), for example which to me suggests there's definitely something to work with, but am hesitant to point them out because I've seen so many "interviews don't count" comments. So, some sort of clarification on interview quality or type would definitely be a benefit. Tony Fox (arf!) 23:19, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 May 2022

edit semi-Proteste Wikipedia Notability answeredno subst trim 1 State UNAMBIGUOUSLY your suggested changes below this line, preferably in a "change X to Y" format. Other editors need to know what to add or remove. Blank edit requests will be declined.

Write your request ABOVE this line and do not remove the tildes and curly brackets below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.103.232.234 (talk) 11:49, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

• DECLINED - you need to tell us what you want changed. Blueboar (talk) 12:31, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Garbled the page

By carefully following the instructions at Wikipedia: Guide to Deletion I have garbled this page and can't fix it. This is frustrating. Perhaps those instructions could be either clearer, or corrected? IAmNitpicking (talk) 20:28, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

If there is a problem with Wikipedia: Guide to Deletion then your best place to suggest improvements would be Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 22:02, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

@IAmNitpicking: Garbled what page? Why have you posted this on the talk page of Wikipedia:Notability? – Joe (talk) 12:30, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Garbled a completely different page, as you deduced. Namely, the May 1 AFD log. I have no idea how I posted here except that I had too many tabs open, and was really, really frustrated and annoyed at that point, and probably wasn't paying full attention. I apologize for bothering folks. IAmNitpicking (talk) 13:12, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

@IAmNitpicking: No worries, the manual process is not the most straightforward. You haven't edited Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2022 May 1 though. For future reference, most people use Wikipedia:Twinkle to nominate nowadays. – Joe (talk) 13:22, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks again, for the tip. IAmNitpicking (talk) 15:38, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Election contests within a General Election

An interesting question on notability has arisen at this AfD - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dundee in the 1922 general election - whether a particular election that is within a wider election (in this case a UK General Election) can in itself be notable and if so, what is the bar.

Keeping this short so you can comment on it over there.

JASpencer (talk) 11:29, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

There's no reason that a single local election can be notable on its own in addition to a national election, but this is definitely going to be exceptional and not the norm. It would likely depend more heavily on past-looking sources than current news to show why that is notable. --Masem (t) 13:13, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

On the contrary, there's no reason to decide that any broad category is, or is not, notable. Only individual article subjects should be so assessed, and only on the principle of sufficient reliable source texts existing from which to write a sufficiently informative and comprehensive article on the subject. When we try to short-circuit that process of assessing a specific article by trying to place it in a broad category, that's always bad. Instead, every individual article and subject should be, in isolation and without reference to any arbitrary categorization or similarities to other such articles or subjects, assessed on it's own merits with regard to the available source texts. --Jayron32 14:08, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Alternate wiki within Wikipedia with different rules

During New Page Patrol work I stumbled into what I'm calling an alternate wiki within Wikipedia which I did not know existed. Questions about this sort of span wP:notability, wp:not and maybe wp:lists but I think "gatekeeper" questions most directly relate to wp:notabity. I think that the nature of this is explained via an example at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of years in Brunei the subject example article, and the articles linked at that example article. But since one argument for "keep" was essentially that this set of articles already exists, this question is NOT NOT about the one article or the particular AFD. Basically this system invoves setting up an article for each year in each country and then listing some events that occurred in that country that year. And then setting up a sort of "navigation" article for each country which is merely a list of years, with the years linked to those individual year/country articles when they exist.

While at first glance they might look that way, IMO neither is really a list article. They really don't have a criteria.....I don't know what a "List of things that happenned in the USA in 2021" article would purport to be or ever could be. And the "list of years" articles are merely lists of every year. They are really just a navigation system but put in as articles. And unless one argues that they are list articles (which would put them into a grayer area of WP:Notability) IMO they clearly don't meet wpNotability.

Should this network of articles exist within Wikipedia, and if so, how should wp:notability be applied? Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:09, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

It's not just countries, 2021 in amusement parks came to mind on reading your message. To me they do fit in the category of lists although the country ones have a rather vague scope (or very broad) scope. They seem like a handy navigational aid and so if you consider them lists you could argue they are allowed per the second part of WP:LISTN, though without that exception I can't see how they would pass any notability guideline. NemesisAT (talk) 13:20, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

IMO that's a bit closer to being a list article.....it sort of has an unwritten criteria of "a list of existential-level changes in amusement parks in the year XXXX". Also note that your example is more of a set of single articles. The area that I'm discussing is a large two level system, which has an "upper" level set of navigational articles which simple lists of years. But that also points out the infinite number of potential list articles and that more guidance is needed there as well. North8000 (talk) 13:26, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I just think people need to realize there's not a one-size-fits-all method for describing things on Wikipedia. List of years in the United States works as a navigational page because Wikipedia has enough editors writing enough content about what happens in US history that we can apparently maintain timelines divided by years: these are effectively subarticles of Timeline of United States history (2010–present), etc., providing more details and split because of length. The same is not true for Brunei. Just because it's a country does not entitle it to the same per-year organization. There could be a Timeline of Brunei history with the same sort of informational snippets, but because there is less content it doesn't need to be divided into subarticles and doens't need a navigation page for those unnecessary subarticles. Whether this timeline is even needed as a parallel article to History of Brunei is another question. To the final question, I don't think this type of navigational page – either the US or Brunei list of years – is really subject to notability guidelines, but we should be judicious in when they're needed and how they're formatted in the context of other articles and their content. Template:Timeline of United States history could include the per-year pages in addition to the multi-decade timelines, and this article becomes redundant. Reywas92^Talk 14:31, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

@Reywas92: Three points:

• So I think you would say to treat 2021 in the United States as a list article, sort of with an implicit definition / criteria that it is a list of significant events that happened in the US that year?
• I think that many (including me) recognize the need (as you just did) for sub-articles which do not need to meet notability separately. Should that be added?
• I think that you in essence say that in very special cases, "merely navigation" articles could/should exist. Is there any guidance on which should? Should there be? North8000 (talk) 15:10, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:10, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

From my side, I assume these are navigational lists according to WP:LISTPURP (which may or may not make sense, depending on the country). I don't see a problem with notablity, acutally. Shouldn't there be enough retrospect magazine or newspaper articles and TV programmes on the topic "what has happened in our country this year" for most nations to establish notability? And the overall topic for the navigational List of years in Brunei would be the History of Brunei, such fullfilling WP:LISTN? Daranios (talk) 15:34, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

(1) I'd think yes. There are almanacs, etc. that give chronological histories of the US, but I wouldn't say individual year articles (for all sorts of topics) have to prove their own notability. Timelines are definitely lists. (2) Perhaps something along the line of "Some lists or articles may be recognized as part of a set which are collectively notable but are separate pages for length and organizational purposes" with these as examples. Not sure though. (3) LISTPURP#Navigation seems to cover this. Reywas92^Talk 15:40, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I think with the spinout concept, the key is that the parent topic should meet English Wikipedia's standards of having an article. Specifically for countries, though, I think it is feasible to find suitable year-in-review sources for these standards to be met, at which point it's an editorial decision to decide on the best organization. A single history article or grouping years together may be more appropriate. isaacl (talk) 15:53, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

(Year) in (topic) is fine as long as the topic is sufficient small or narrow. They serve more as navigational pages for that topic and sorta fall out of notability. What is important is how small or narrow that topic is since that keeps it relatively easy for what should be added without playing games on relative importance. The US lists for example are way too broad and probably need better delination. --Masem (t) 15:59, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

• So, the only way I can really answer the OP's question (as I understand it) is to speak the unspoken, and bring out what many of our content-gatekeeper policies are really about. The primary issue that things like WP:N, WP:NOT, really any of our rules, is stuff that has the potential for genuine harm or abuse or misuse or whatever, either to Wikipedia's mission or to the real things we write about here. Look, 90% of GNG enforcement is to just stop getting people from promoting their business, themselves, their friends, etc. There's a lot of low-problem technical violations of GNG and similar guidelines or policies that we mostly ignore (and rightly so, IMHO). Things like navigational lists are a classic example; it's not really clear how such lists fit within the GNG framework for understanding how articles should be created, but it also feels like it isn't really harmful, it isn't promotional, and honestly many people might find them useful. If we strictly applied GNG to such lists, since they are often lists that really only exist on Wikipedia, one might say "of course we should delete them", to which I would say "of course we shouldn't". Our policies are written in such a way as to appear like they are to be applied equally and blindly towards all articles. They should not, however. We should spend close to 100% of our enforcement effort on stemming the tide of crap that really harms Wikipedia's mission, like promotional material or attack pages or stuff like that, because stuff like List of years in Brunei is not actually a problem. It's a nice way to organize information; yes it is currently a lot of redlinks, but that's not a valid deletion reason. Look, for example, at List of states in the Holy Roman Empire. It is just an organizational front page. It doesn't actually contain much useful information, it only serves to navigate one to pages like List of states in the Holy Roman Empire (A), which is where the actual important information can be found. Insofar as something like List of years in the United States leads to 2021 in the United States, then one should reasonably expect that we could build such an organization system for all countries; that it hasn't been completed yet for a country like Brunei is not a problem. These pages in the main space aren't really articles, they're navigational tools, which is a perfectly valid reason to exist WP:LISTPURP. No, these pages don't pass WP:GNG. But they aren't the kinds of stuff GNG is designed to stop. GNG is designed to stop things like promotional material or attack pages or stuff like that. Applying it blindly to every page in the mainspace, without considering anything else, is NOT useful. --Jayron32 16:15, 12 May 2022 (UTC)
  • I think there is some nuance about how the GNG applies to navigational aids such as templates or indices. But I think that editors run into the most trouble when they try to stretch a navigational aid into something that it's not. A purely minimalist index of blue links is more likely to be kept, all other things being equal. If you mix in lots of red links and unreliable prose, you are now blurring the lines away from a navigational aid, and you're more likely to trigger a deletion discussion. (This is my best description of what we see at AFD, without commenting on whether we should or shouldn't do it this way.) Shooterwalker (talk) 17:38, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

    I agree on the "unreliable prose". However, red links in and of themselves are not a reason to delete such a navigational aid. The specific example by the OP, List of years in Brunei, is an example where it is perfectly reasonable to have lots of redlinks and still be fine. Insofar as Brunei existed and things happening there were recorded in reliable sources, it's expected that creating the "XXXX in Brunei" articles for those years would happen at some point. It is true that we don't get a lot of editors from Brunei with an interest in building those articles right now, but insofar as the source material exists to eventually create them, and I'm 100% sure that it does, Brunei has newspapers, historians, universities, libraries, etc. Someone has written this stuff down somewhere. Just because it hasn't been added to Wikipedia yet is not a reason to delete the navigational list. Of course, WP:GAMING the system is not to be tolerated, but the "lists of years in Brunei" type articles are NOT a problem for Wikipedia. At all. --Jayron32 18:00, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

    This wasn't meant to be an agree/disagree statement. I've gotten very conflicting opinions about red links even in the WP:FA process. Only pointing out the types of content that is universally left alone, versus the types of content that end up at AFD, which is itself full of conflicting views. Shooterwalker (talk) 00:57, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

    Well, the reason you get conflicting opinions is that people have different feelings about things. That's called life. However, my opinion on redlinks is that we shouldn't treat a red link different from any blue link so long as there is a reasonable expectation that an article under that title should exist. That one doesn't yet is not a problem, per WP:DEADLINE. Wikipedia has until the heat death of the universe (or the extinction of the human race, whichever comes first) to complete its mission. Until that point is reached, people shouldn't complain about redlinks which should be articles, but aren't yet. --Jayron32 11:55, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

    I 100% endorse the views espoused by @Jayron32. The only thing that I can add to it is that the OP has presented quite an interesting dilemma because we appear to have competing guidelines with the notability guidance requiring the topic of a list to be "notable" (blah, I never did think much of notability guidance anyway), and our MOS suggests lists come in a variety of forms that do not require notability such as indices, glossaries, categories, and navigational lists. Huggums537 (talk) 18:35, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

    This page expressly states "Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes often are kept regardless of any demonstrated notability." under WP:LISTN. There is no conflict. --Jayron32 11:58, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

    Right. Figured that out thanks to Jclemens making the connection day before yesterday. Guess I forgot to modify my comment noting that I stood corrected. Huggums537 (talk) 05:48, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

There's another sidebar observation on the navigational pages. In essence there's something regarding "navigation only" articles which is covered only in the manual of style (not in wp:notability, not in Wp:Stand alone lists) that establishes navigation-only articles as a type of articles, and identifies them as list articles, which sets them up as a type of article that doesn't meet the wp:notability test. That should be simple for people trying to figure out wp:notability to notice.  :-)  :-) North8000 (talk) 18:12, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Navigational lists are addressed in WP:LISTPURP which is referenced in WP:NLIST. Jclemens (talk) 19:35, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for making the connection to the notability guidance. The important thing to notice is that the reference being made specifically states that these lists are often kept regardless of any demonstrated notability. Huggums537 (talk) 19:45, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

If I may try to summarize, there seems to be a consensus that the above-described types and structures of articles for the case of years in countries can exist, and without need to fulfill/meet any particular wp:notability requirements. Structurally this merely means that such should not be excluded solely on the basis of not being an allowed type of article or not fulfilling wp:notability requirements. North8000 (talk) 18:58, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

So this means that such lists are allowable in this case, not that they have a "trump card" for being kept.North8000 (talk) 13:59, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

I do want to say that a claim of meeting the standard of "Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes" is not a trump card that protects any list from deletion. There needs to be consensus that evidence shows that the list serves those purposes. I merely argue that I believe that the "list of year in country" type articles do clearly serve such purposes. There may be other such lists that don't, if we want to find out whether or not such a list does; and someone legitimately believes one doesn't, than we need to have a discussion on that specific list, or type of list, and see where consensus lies. --Jayron32 12:01, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

My wording structurally covered that but perhaps in a manner too abstract to communicate. I should add something.North8000 (talk) 13:55, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

This summarizes current practice, as I understand it. (And I think that practice is basically good, in my personal opinion.) Shooterwalker (talk) 14:08, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

• Lists can either be notable lists, or lists of notable things.

List of years in Brunei is perfectly reasonable if YYYY in Brunei is or could be mostly bluelinks. This is dubious. 2007 in Brunei, for example, should be deleted because it does not list articles, bluelinked, or redlinks that should be turned blue. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:16, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Why not a policy yet?

WP:N seems non-negotiable; shouldn't it be promoted to policy status? Background: WP:PGE. fgnievinski (talk) 03:36, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Hell no. It does not fall under one of the five pillars, and absolutely is negotiable by virtue of the fact that editors can negotiate whether an article/list is notable, or if an article/list even has to follow notability requirements or not. (As demonstrated by the discussion in the section above.) Huggums537 (talk) 04:55, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Nope. I have been a highly active editor since 2009 and an administrator for over four years. I have never heard of this WP:PGE essay until today, disagree with it, and reject it as an influence on policy. No way. Cullen328 (talk)

Thanks for commenting. I had noticed lots of other WP:DEL-REASON are policies, such as WP:NOT and WP:BLP. Since WP:N comes up quite often in WP:AfD I though it ought to be promoted. fgnievinski (talk) 06:56, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

It’s because the concept is so complicated, and the explanation so evasive of a concise objective explanation, that it needs the guideline caveat of common sense and exceptions. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:04, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, we need this to have a lot more flexibility in interpretation and application than a policy, but its generally widely accepted so stronger than an essay. --Masem (t) 14:08, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:32, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

It's a guideline about how to know if a particular topic can have a policy-compliant article. Levivich 06:16, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

2022

no — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.44.239.128 (talk) 19:15, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm torn between deleting this section or replying "yes". Phil Bridger (talk) 19:23, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

That’s because (as usual) “it depends”. Blueboar (talk) 21:53, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• Delete, fails WP:GNG. BilledMammal (talk) 00:42, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

  Bad faith response, clearly did not follow WP:BEFORE. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 00:46, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• There are a wide variety of opinions in this thread; someone should probably add an RfC tag to generate more input. Levivich 06:14, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I would if it were April 1. Largoplazo (talk) 09:28, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• I googled "2022" and got a lot of hits so maybe it's an important topic that we need to discuss. North8000 (talk) 10:49, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

  That's only because it comes after 2021, see WP:NOTINHERITED. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 11:43, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• Mm, with an anon IP kicking this off, I'm concerned that 2020 might be abusing multiple years. Can we get a checkuser in here? Ravenswing 19:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC)