Wikipedia:Notability of reliable sources

This is an essay on the Wikipedia:Notability guideline.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more WikiProjects on how notability may be interpreted within their area of interest.

This information is not a formal Wikipedia policy or guideline, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

Notability of reliable sources is the application of Wikipedia's rules on WP:Notability to the WP:Reliable sources which Wikipedia editors cite. This document considers assigning notability to sources on the basis of their importance as citations in Wikipedia.

Consider the situation where the Wikipedia community is in agreement about the following:

Reliable source - A source meets Wikipedia's reliable source guidelines and is appropriate to cite and summarize in Wikipedia articles
Fails notability - This same source as a topic does not itself meet WP:General notability guideline or any specialized notability criteria, so is not eligible for a Wikipedia article
Important in Wikipedia - Wikipedia editors are citing the source in Wikipedia articles either broadly in many articles, perhaps 1000s, or deeply in some articles, perhaps for a narrow field

This creates a situation where Wikipedia is publishing and circulating the name of a publication as authoritative, but is not also able to provide readers with additional context about that publication.

Wikipedia community members agree that filling articles with primary source material is problematic and undesirable. However, there has always been agreement that some primary information is useful so long as a topic meets notability criteria and that we combine it with information from secondary sources. If we had criteria which granted notability status to certain reliable sources, then that would permit Wikipedia to serve primary information about those sources to Wikipedia readers who wanted whatever context was available on those sources. This would encourage deeper understanding about the reliability of Wikipedia articles. It also would be the origin of new challenges which the Wikipedia community does not currently have infrastructure or planning to address.

Background

"Notability" is the term for judging whether Wikipedia will have an article on a subject. "Reliable source" is the term for judging whether Wikipedia will summarize and cite information from that source. There is not necessarily any overlap between these concepts. However, as Wikipedia has expanded as a publication, it has come to happen that the Wikipedia community has judged some sources to be reliable (and valid) while judging those same sources as subjects which are not notable. This problem increases as more Wikipedia articles contain references to those sources.

Problematic cases

General description

Imagine that 1000 Wikipedia articles are citing a particular source which itself does not have a Wikipedia article.

Without a Wikipedia article, Wikipedia readers and editors cannot easily determine the source metadata, including the following:

Age of the source
Country of origin
Institutional affiliation
For-profit, noncommercial, or government affiliations
Identity of editors behind the publication
Tie between the publication and either its publisher or the publisher's owner
Related publications

In Wikidata since 2014 d:Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData has been surfacing some of this information.

Source is highly cited in Wikipedia

These are the cases which are most relevant to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals) - Wikipedia cites academic journals but many are not notable
Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers/Notability - Wikipedia cites newspapers but many are not notable
BroadwayWorld.com is a database for theatre productions. As of August 2018 about 6000 Wikipedia articles cite this database. The publication itself is not notable Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/BroadwayWorld

Source is highly cited outside of Wikipedia

This situation is out of scope for this documentation. It is presented here to acknowledge and dismiss it. This could be another issue for a guide other than this one. Also, eventually Wikipedia will seek to summarize sources which are popular off-wiki, but the more pressing current problem is providing context to Wikipedia readers for the sources which Wikipedia is using right now.

This documentation all raises the issue of assigning notability to sources on the basis of their off-wiki popularity. The consensus is that Wikipedia should not assign notability to non-notable topics based on off-wiki use.

Special notability criteria for reliable sources

There are no special notability criteria for reliable sources proposed at this time.

Options for developing Wikipedia articles for reliable sources

No Wikipedia article

The status quo is that the topic of an individual reliable source does not merit a Wikipedia article, no matter how Wikipedia cites that source, until and unless anyone demonstrates that it passes usual criteria in the usual way.

In this view the Wikipedia community does not need to make any plans to share information about sources unless they are notable.

Create special notability criteria to pass these topics

The Wikipedia community sometimes designates special notability criteria to grant notability recognition to topics which do not pass the WP:GNG. We could develop criteria to apply in this case.

Here are some example criteria which the Wikipedia community could designate as conferring notability:

More than 1000 Wikipedia articles cite a publication
A publication has printed more than 1,000,000 words (about 4000 paper pages) of original human written prose
1. 80-page monthly magazines do this in about 5 years
2. 6-12 page local near-daily newspapers do this in 5-15 years
There is an in-Wikipedia consensus among experienced editors that a source is especially important for a niche topic
1. Small-town regional newspapers might not be popular in general, but could be essential as sources for that region. These sources could be key citations already used in 50+ Wikipedia articles.
2. Special interest journals might be used in 50+ Wikipedia articles on a topic but not of interest outside that niche field

Develop the Wikidata items for this topics

There are no plans in place or scheduled development to use Wikidata information to address this Wikipedia problem.

However, Wikidata's own notability criteria are more inclusive than Wikipedia's criteria. Wikidata welcomes all of the information that Wikipedia could possibly present based on primary sources. Wikidata also has its own quality control process for this information and eventually will have all this information as structured data.

Anyone who wants to get started building out information about reliable sources may do so presently in Wikidata. If and when this information becomes welcome in some way in Wikipedia, then it would be easy to transfer.

Solicit third-party publication to make these topics notable

Wikipedia does not have strong precedents of soliciting original journalism or research. However, this could become a Wikipedia activity.

Wikipedia editors could either conduct or arrange to do research and publication on the sources which Wikipedia cites. Journal editors would probably give interviews. University students or research departments might collaborate with the wiki community to do publication.

This would be complicated. Wikipedia itself cannot publish original research so publication would have to happen in another venue. This is a terribly tedious and unorthodox research direction which is why it is so uncommon and unpopular. There is no obvious audience for publishing on this topic.