Wikipedia talk:Semi-notability

Comments

I've read people on here who have said that there is no such thing as being "a little bit notable"... relating it to being "only a little bit pregnant" (and that can't be). This proposal seeks to squash this argument, correct? That something can be "a little bit notable"? Are those other people correct? Is something either notable or not notable, with no gray area? Can something be only "semi-notable"? Mahalo. --Ali'i 18:08, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

What is the purpose

What use is there for something to be considered "semi-notable?" Something doesn't need to be notable at all to be mentioned in an article, it just has to be relevant to the subject of the article, verifiable (either sourced, or capable of being sourced if someone challenges it). There are some other filters (e.g. not defamatory, not copyvio, neutrality, not original research, etc). There have been some efforts to create guidelines about the relevance standard but nothing has been adopted. "Semi-notability", by contrast, does not mean that something belongs in an article. It still has to relate to the subject of the article where the standard, again, relates to relevance not importance. If something fails the notability standard but is good encyclopedic information, I don't think we have to go through the exercise of establishing its semi-notability, one can just add the info to the appropriate articles. I can see a relaxed notability of standard applying to items in lists, however. Wikidemo 18:44, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Disagree with most or all of the proposal, I'm afraid. Lots of reasons.

1. First, the basis for the article is incorrect. Notability is not just a shorthand for "we've got enough sources for an article"; though it is, of course, also that. But it's also a shorthand for "it's something that people will expect to find in a comprehensive encyclopedia, something that will leave a hole if it is gone". It's also a shorthand for "it's something that enough people will be interested enough in to maintain". It's also a shorthand for WP:NOT ... an indiscriminate collection of information, a directory, a publisher of original thought. It's an important concept, including a lot of things.
2. Second, the notability concept is for complete subjects of articles, not every bit of information in an article. "non-notable [topics] wouldn't be mentioned at all" would cripple our ability to write thorough articles, if every bit of data needs to have in-depth coverage in multiple reliable sources independent of the subject, the same way the whole subject of the article does. Should we have AfDs about every sentence? "Now nominating for deletion, 37th sentence of Christopher Columbus. Not a notable sentence. See also my nominations of the 41st, 98th, and 137-139th sentences, that was really a bad stretch there..." :-)
3. Third, we certainly do, and should, have entire articles that may well not have a lot of actual information about them, and yet be notable. Some examples: Eugène-Henri Gravelotte - an Olympic gold medalist. Ioannis Mitropoulos - an Olympic gold medalist. Pope Evaristus - a Pope (one of the few sentences in our very article says "Little is known about Pope Evaristus"). Pope Alexander I - 4 sentences. 38th century BC - completely blank (37th and 39th each have something). Hopefully it can be seen that these are not isolated cases, but symptomatic of a very ... notable ... trend. These articles are stubs, and quite possibly forever doomed to remain stubs, yet what kind of comprehensive encyclopedia would we be if we didn't have them?

In short, even though this is titled "semi-notability", it seems to go way beyond defining that term. It seems to want to radically redefine notability itself, and as a result, redefine much of what Wikipedia is. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 19:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, let's see:

1. I disagree with your reading of the intent of notability here, particularly with your second point. We could delete half our featured articles without "leav[ing] a hole". Wikipedia has radically redefined what "encyclopedia" means; I don't think it's useful to tie ourselves to the traditional concept.
2. I'm not sure where this is coming from; the proposal specifically discusses topics (or potential topics) of articles. It certainly wasn't my intention to apply any variation of notability to anything that didn't want (more on this later) to be an article subject.
3. We do, and we should, but I unfortunately no longer see that as guaranteed; we have people arguing, perfectly seriously, that Popes are not inherently notable.

The intent of my proposal—and perhaps this isn't very clear—is to ensure that we don't completely lose important topics regardless of how draconian the application of the notability rules becomes. Suppose someone nominates, say, Pope Alexander I for deletion; and suppose the consensus is that the coverage is not significant enough to earn him his own article. My idea is that, even if he were not considered to be "notable", he would clearly still be "semi-notable", and could find a good home in, say, List of Early Popes.

(As a practical matter, we have piles of such deletions going on, albeit typically not with such absurd cases. A lot of people have successfully argued that if all we can source about X is, say, "X was a Y from 1982 to 1988", that X should be entirely effaced; my point was that we are better served by merging X into a List of Y.) Kirill 19:18, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

We certainly could delete or merge away some of our featured articles without leaving a hole (Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner comes immediately to mind), but most would clearly leave a hole (What do you mean we don't have an article on Helium? Microsoft? Archimedes? The Byzantine Empire? Sesame Street?). In that vein, missing articles on Popes, and Centuries, and Gold Medalists and similar articles that are clearly "part of a complete set" would leave us clearly lacking. A list is certainly better than nothing, but I believe individual articles, even if short, are better still, and the Notability guidelines allow for them. Don't pay too much attention to people arguing that Popes are not inherently notable, there are always an equal number of people arguing that high schools, shopping malls, and garage bands are inherently notable; or, for that matter, that the whole idea of Notability is a crock. The whole concept of Notability will always be contentious, but is reasonably stable and sound in general; don't fear too much for the Popes going or the garage bands staying. Unless, say, a respected arbitrator gives the radical change ideas credence they would not otherwise deserve. But that would never happen. :-) --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 20:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I suspect this is a matter of the different areas we work in, then. I'd guess that about half of WP:FA#Warfare could be deleted without the average reader noticing; a lot of the higher-quality articles that get written are on very specialized topics. Kirill 20:39, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Lately I've participated in schools and malls afds, and your concept of semi-notability applies very well to them. I believe it would help a lot in reducing arguments over whether news coverage like "Someschool students to travel to sister city in Japan"[sic] or "Water main breaks, soaks Some Mall with six inches of water"[sic, from a 1984 article] establish notability or not... --victor falk 00:00, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Different spin would be better

What I see, and like, in here, is the attempt to provide a general guideline here on when a page should be merged instead of existing separately. WP:MERGE points to Help:Merging and moving pages. If the See Also on that page is correct, we don't even have a decent essay on when we should merge; just a few bullet points near the top of the page.

I think it is a good idea to have strong guidance in favor of merging sourced encyclopedic content. I feel that only sourced content should be merged. I recollect a couple AFDs I've closed lately where I was going to merge, but discovered that all the content was unsourced, so I changed the close do "delete and redirect, as there is no sourced material to merge". Ideally the guidance would also give some thoughts as to what is "encyclopedic", but as a community we seem much better at saying what isn't than what is; compare the lengths of WP:NOT and WP:ENC.

I don't think that "semi-notability" is the appropriate way of presenting the guidance however. It will probably feel too negative. We should write in the affirmative - encyclopedic content on a small topic not meriting a full article should be included in an article or list with broader scope. Semi-notability makes it out as a "second best" type outcome (in connotation, even if not in denotation) when instead we could say what the best thing to do with something is. GRBerry 03:33, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Not really

If, as this page claims, notability is one of the more contentious areas on WP, then this is certainly not alleviated, and probably made worse, by creating the additional (and nebulous) concept of "semi-notability". Let's not do that. >Radiant< 12:46, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

No

Not a good idea. Tim Vickers (talk) 04:01, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Remove merge request.

I removed the "Merge with WP:Bare notability template as the request is outdated and may not be appropriate. Otr500 (talk) 02:41, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

See other page's talk page. I reinstated the tag. PrussianOwl (talk) 06:11, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

• Note: There was a consensus to merge. Otr500 (talk) 14:32, 1 December 2019 (UTC)