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Notability

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Notability

Notability, in Wikipedia’s editorial sense, is the threshold test for whether a subject can sustain a standalone encyclopedia article at all — as distinct from Neutral Point of View, which governs how content is written once an article already exists. Jimmy Wales argues the name is misleading: it sounds like a judgment about a subject’s personal worth, when it is really a question about available source material. His preferred reframing is closer to verifiability — is there enough independently published, reliable information to write an encyclopedic entry from — than to any claim that an unlisted subject does not matter.

The limiting principle

Wikipedia’s own working joke illustrates the boundary: German Wikipedia editors once discussed, half-seriously, whether an article on ‘the rear nut of the wheel of a well-known Wikipedian’s bicycle’ could exist — the point being that literally nothing is too small to write about mechanically, but almost everything is too small to write about usefully, for want of source material. Wales gives a cleaner version with an object in Lex Fridman’s hand during the interview: a generic BIC pen model can sustain an article (mass-produced, with a documented company history), but the specific pen in front of him cannot, because nothing citable exists about that particular object. The same logic makes an article about Wales’s own mother — a private person, however important to him personally — inappropriate: there is a genealogical fact pattern (birth, death, occupation) but not a public record sufficient for a biography.

Some contributors argue Wikipedia should have no notability limit at all — that anything real deserves coverage. Wales rejects this as unworkable in practice: without some threshold, the project would be swamped by articles no source base can actually support, collapsing into unverifiable or promotional content rather than expanding genuine coverage.

Biography of a living person, one event (BLP1E)

The sharpest edge of the notability principle appears in biographies of living people, where getting the threshold wrong causes real harm rather than merely cluttering the encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s shorthand for the danger zone is BLP1E — a living person notable for exactly one event, most often a crime victim who generated a burst of press coverage from a single incident and has no other public role. Wales argues such a person should not get a standalone biography: there is rarely enough source material to write anything beyond the triggering incident, and — unlike a public figure — the subject has no practical way to participate in correcting an error once it is published. The event itself may still merit an article; the private individual caught up in it typically should not.

A field-dependent, not fixed, threshold

What counts as sufficient source material varies by category rather than following one rule. Wales contrasts academics, whose notability typically rests on career and publication record even when almost nothing is known about their private life, with members of a royal family, whose notability is largely constituted by family relationships. Growth in the underlying source base changes the threshold over time without changing the principle: Wales recalls a Polish attendee at a 2006 Wikimedia conference noting that even a modest, single-volume Polish biographical dictionary of roughly 22,000 entries then out-covered English Wikipedia’s comparable biographical scope in some areas — a gap that has narrowed enormously since, as available sourcing and contributor numbers grew, without the underlying test (is there enough to write from) ever changing.

Categories as a notability-adjacent problem

A related, sharper-edged issue is category assignment — the labels attached to a person once an article exists. Wales gives his own case: he was for a period listed in the category ‘American atheist,’ alongside figures such as Richard Dawkins for whom atheism is a defining public campaign. Wales argued for his own removal on the grounds that atheism is a private view he does not campaign on, not a defining feature of his public life — illustrating that a technically accurate label can misrepresent a subject’s actual centrality to a topic. He extends the same caution to the category ‘American criminal’: a public figure such as Mark Wahlberg, convicted of a serious offence as a young man, is not usually thought of as ‘a criminal’ in ordinary discourse, even though the label would be technically defensible, because it implies a defining identity the subject’s later life does not bear out.

Where mainstream views differ

Wikipedia’s own community is split between what its contributors informally call inclusionist and deletionist positions: inclusionists favour a low bar and err toward keeping marginal articles, deletionists favour a high bar and err toward removing them, and the notability guideline itself is the accumulated compromise of that long-running internal argument rather than a position either side would call ideal. A separate, external line of criticism reads strict notability and BLP enforcement as a vector for silencing coverage of marginal or inconvenient subjects, rather than as protection for private individuals; Wales’s own framing — that the policy exists chiefly to prevent harm to people who cannot participate in their own correction — is a defence against that reading rather than a resolution of it.

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