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Archive 1

Generated from AFDs

Several recent AFDs, notably Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce where the need for this guideline was explicitly discussed, led me to create this proposal. Is there a consensus that a news item such as the a human interest story, or the disappearance of a child, or a cute animal stuck in a tree, or a violent crime, or an accidental death can gain multiple coverage in reliable sources independent of the subject, and be newsworthy enough to lead the evening news, but not require or deserve a Wikipedia article? In otherwords, is newsworthyness inherently encyclopedic, or should the subject have to be part of the enduring historic record to be encyclopedic? If a guideline is drafted, polished, and reaches consensus here and by being referred to in deletion debates, it might avoid the need to decide this question of news versus encyclopedic content in many future deletion debates. In the first draft on the project page, I have included several ideas expressed in the deletion debate mentioned above, and I thank their original creators, who bear no responsibility for the net result. Thanks. I referred to this by the shortcutWP:NEWSITEM since WP:NEWS was already taken, but other shortcuts are welcome, and perhaps someone can set it up as a functioning shortcut. Edison 21:39, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

First, thank you for creating this; it does seem important that we at least try and nail down a policy for this. (I mean, we have notability criteria for Porn Actors, but not news events?) This is a good start, but seems to be coming from a heavily exclusionary POV (It would be nice to know what is notable, not just what isn't). And per point #2, I would really think it's worth mentioning that many news items, although not deserving articles of their own, may be eligible for inclusion in an existing article or list. I'll give this some more thought and check back later, hope this generates some good discussion. A quick thought off the top of my head - Perhaps a requirement could address the range of distribution of a news item - such as state-wide or country-wide? I'm pretty sure that would quickly eliminate a number of cat-in-tree or prostitute-arrested type subjects. Although WP:N purposefully does not set a specific number of independent sources required, could it be something that could be addressed here? -- Antepenultimate 21:54, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I wholeheartedly support this endeavour. Hopefully Zunaid can pop by and post the good reasoning shown at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce. As for using AfD as it is as an indicator of consensus, I think that's a flawed position as the consensus developed around the existing guidelines and those are terrible in relation to news items and bias wikipedia in favour of passing news fads. Hopefully this guideline will help to fill the gap. MLA 22:02, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't support this at all. Notability is a low bar for ensuring that we can write a decent article. This is just an attempt to raise the bar because people feel we're getting too broad, but if there's enough to satisfy WP:BIO, for a person, why not? WP:NOT#PAPER, after all. Is this just going to contradict WP:BIO where it says people who become famous for involvement in notable events are notable? Many people are extremely well known for only one thing. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:55, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Further, if you look at the AFD, consensus is overwhelmingly against Edison's position and in favor of broad inclusion for events. Guidelines are supposed to be descriptive of the general feelings of the community that already exist. As that AFD shows, most people feel this kind of bar isn't necessary. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:59, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I would imagine that WP:BIO would supercede anything here (especially in these earliest stages). This would seem to be focusing more on events (right?), rather than individuals. Obviously a lot needs to be done before this can even be considered a true policy (it's less than a hour old, give it a chance). Also, I'm one of those who belives the AfD should result in "keep", but I believe Zunaid made some excellent points about the possible need for this type of guideline. It's true that the guidelines as they stand now can be interpreted to allow some items that are truely unencyclopedic, and it could be useful to have something other than a long-winded WP:IAR to back that position up. A lot of discussion would have to take place, obviously, before that could happen. And if no consensus is reached, what's the harm in trying? -- Antepenultimate 22:04, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

The existing requirements have a rule of multiple nontrivial coverage, and it's a standing rule that multiple mentions of the same day's events don't count. However, if there's ongoing coverage of a crime and then a trial for example, like Laci Peterson, or of an event and then its recogntions, like Wesley Autrey or stories that go back and cover the consequences, like the followup on Gerald Washington, then we have multiple coverage. Single events like Antepenultimate suggested aren't going to get these kinds of coverage and aren't generally going to have enough worth writing an article about, but some prostitute arrests are notable, so we shouldn't make specific iron rules. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 22:09, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Is it a standing rule in the sense that it is part of a standing policy, or is this another one of those de facto rules that we just have to take a person's word for? Part of Zunaid's argument is that there are de facto approaches to this, if that is true then I see no harm trying to make it a real policy. You might notice that every example you gave would have passed my "beyond local coverage" proposal above. The events I mentioned were in response to examples already given on the project page. Example: Let's say a high school football team wins the regional championship, and a local newspaper and two papers from a nearby city cover the story. Now this team obviously does not deserve an article, but rigid interpretation of existing guidleines say: Yes they do (technically). Here we can attempt to spell out why such an event or organization wouldn't be eligible for an article, despite being non-trivially covered in multiple, independent sources. -- Antepenultimate 22:22, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I have to confess I once successfully argued for keeping an article about a cute little panda who escaped from the zoo and got stuck in a tree. It had enough news coverage, but in the long run is it encyclopedic? Then there are the perennial missing pretty girls, and dead business executives. Not to make a WP:POINT and while seeking to avoid WP:BEANS, one could take the past week's news and find a dozen things, events, human interest stories, or tragic deaths which were a primary subject of multiple independent and reliable coverage. Most reasonable persons would agree that most of these are not encyclopedic. If the proposal is too deletionist, then please discuss modifications. Most of it came from the deletion debate mentioned above. A big question is: Can something be quite newsworthy without being encyclopedic? For instance, in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is mentioned the current news story of Jim Hamm, who was attacked by a mountain lion and who was successfully defended by his wife. It is an alarming story, it could happen to anyone who went hiking in the mountains, it mentions an animal, and has human interest and heroism, but it is properly mentioned in the article about the park. But if one wanted to have a Wikipedia article about Mr. and Mrs. Hamm, there are 17,600 Google hits for Jim Hamm lion and independent stories (not just reprints of an AP story) were run in countless newspapers and broadcast news workdwide. With the victim clinging to life, and receiving advanced medical treatment, more coverage is occurring daily, so it is not just a one day news entry. Heroic, tragic, but is it encyclopedic enough for a standalone encyclopedia article? Edison 22:31, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
While the story may not be "encyclopedic", the zoo the panda escaped from, or the persons involved in the events, or some other aspect, may be, and furthermore, We Don't Care. An article on Jim and Neil Hamm, for example, would pass WP:BIO as "elderly couple who fought of a mountain lion and became nationally famous for it." I wouldn't object to the article, because they have plenty of coverage and it passes all of our policies to have an article on them. And yes, you can go through the paper and find a dozen things that pass. I say Create Them!, I'd love to have thousands of well-sourced articles on interesting stories, even if they're not historically important or the most significant things of all time. We need to worry about articles that don't meet our basic policies, instead of ones that do but some people feel shouldn't be here anyway. Notability isn't subjective for a reason; if we're going to be the sum of human knowledge, why exclude legitimate stories? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 22:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I would have to say that the story about Jim and Neil Hamm would probably be better suted as a section in the existing State Park article. I would have to imagine that the fame will be fleeting. -- Antepenultimate 23:05, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I just looked it up, and Mountain Lion attacks about as rare as shark attacks, and we have List of fatal, unprovoked shark attacks in the United States by decade. When you've got that few, I think each one has some notability. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 23:06, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
you're right, but it's also true that when you have so few, a single article could encompass them all. Separate articles are not needed. -- Antepenultimate 23:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I think such a thing would be useful, but I would think that the notability would come from any sort of precedent it sets, or if it prompts some sort of change in law/procedure/whatever. In the case of Tom ap Rhys Price, it appears to have prompted a review of process; at the very least, Tony Blair got involved. --Dennisthe2 19:52, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

A second draft, from a different perspective

The first draft raises some good points, but I believe it is coming too much from an exclusionary point of view. I'm going to attempt to write another draft here that is perhaps more nuetral in tone and comes from the perspective of what is notable (in the manner of most guidelines I've seen). Please excuse the syntax; I'm not normally in the business of policy making.


The cornerstone of Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that a subject is considered notable if it is the subject of multiple third party sources, independent of the subject and each other. However, the nature of modern newspaper publishing makes it possible for subjects and events to fulfill this requirement without being of truely encyclopedic value. These guidelines aim to distinguish what types of events should be included in Wikipedia.

  • If coverage of an event extends beyond local news organizations to such publications as a nationally or internationally distributed magazine or television news program, such an event is likely eligible for inclusion. Other specific criteria, such as WP:BIO, may still be applied, however.
  • Many individual events may often be better covered by inclusion in an existing article. The demolition of a particular, long-standing building, for example, may be better suited for inclusion in the article addressing its home community.
  • Subjects and events covered by multiple news sources that are eligible for inclusion at Wikipedia should show sustained, non-trivial coverage, and/or coverage should extend outside of the event or subject's immediate area. This is applicable especially to crime coverage concerning such instances as murder or robbery.


Ugh, I know that sounds terrible. But those are my ideas. Any thoughts? -- Antepenultimate 22:59, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Couldn't this all just be covered by a formalization that "coverage of a single day's events counts as single coverage for purposes of coverage in multiple nontrivial sources"? That way a single event on its own is clearly not an article topic in itself. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 23:05, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Sure, and WP:N could probably be summed up in it's first few lines as well. But most people like things spelled out for them. You may be right, however, and perhaps including a line such as that in an established guideline may be the way to go. but I would like to see how this plays out. -- Antepenultimate 23:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
A particular nonencyclopedic but widely covered event may have coverage over many days as news editors try to squeeze every bit of interest out of the story, or as a wounded person/animal lingers on and doctors work around the clock, or as the bad guy is hunted by law enforcement and a year later brought to trial. Edison 00:13, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I guess I tend to err on the side of inclusion. I think a refined version of the above would go a long way toward solving many of the problems mentioned at the above AfD that dragged me into this whole affair, without being overly prohibitive. -- Antepenultimate 00:31, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, take the heroic human aspect of a story out and see if a news story seems encyclopedic: How about the 2 year old bear who got stuck in a tree, was shot with a tranquilizer, and bounced off a trampoline in 2003 in Montana [1]? 275,000 Google hits for 'bear tree trampoline.Multiple coverage in reliable sources of a one time occurrence. This particular one might fail the proposed "events occurring on one day" but so would a bystander killed in an assassination attempt of someone else. And it has received sustained coverage. Bears falling out of trees into trampolines is a rare occurrence, like shark attacks. Do you see the makings of a standalone encyclopedia article there? What I am looking for is an example of a widely covered news story where something is the subject of multiple independent reliable coverage, but is not encyclopedic. There was a cat stuck in the walls of a deli in New York City for 2 weeks, and the story received widespread coverage over multiple days, with all sorts of animal experts and psychics trying to lure it out, or to see it with high tech search and rescue equipment. [2] "Molly's distressed meows _ audible from the sidewalk outside the building _ became international news, and rescuers worked almost around the clock for her safe retrieval. " Eventually she was rescued. [3][4]84,000 Google hits for Molly cat deli wall'many of them about this particular cat. I envite examples of news stories which receive multiple nontrivial sustained coverage, but should nothave standalone articles. Perhaps we can arrive at a quick consensus of news stories which clearly are encyclopedic, and widely covered news stories which are not, then try to find guidelines for the borderline cases, as in a story which barely makes it and one which barely misses. Recent AFDs as examples might be useful. That is what I am looking to delineate. Edison 23:49, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with the Molly story having a brief, factual article. It recieved international, sustained attention - it's the kind of thing that a person might remember (as you did, and I do, too) and be curious about. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if a decent article existed here to inform such a person. Also, it's encyclopedic (to me, anyway) in that it is an example of the type of thing that grabs and holds people's attention, although nobody could have predicted that response. There are people who have made careers studying such things (for the purposes of sociology and, by extention, marketing). -- Antepenultimate 00:16, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
The reasoning behind prohibiting articles is the availability of information, not importance or encyclopedicity of a topic. The main notability guideline explicitly disclaims importance of a subject as being relevant to inclusion. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 01:17, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Which to some editors (myself included) is a flaw in the guidelines when it is applied specifically to news stories. Because news coverage is so widespread, and because stories are likely to be carried for a weeks, there are many articles that could under the current guidelines be created. For this guideline to work as proposed it has to exclusionary, of necessity. There is simply no other way around it. Zunaid©® 09:57, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Why? What is wrong with well-sourced, neutral articles free of original research? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 14:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Afd debates

Use this section to list all news-related AfD debates, as an indicator of the type of articles being nominated, and the type of arguments being made, in relation to news items. If the debates are closed, please indicate the outcome as well.

Note:The above 2007 Plot article probably will marginally meet the current version of WP:NOTNEWS, though, using the slightly expanded criteria of multiple independent articles in multiple weeks. Therefore if the debate were reintroduced in a couple of months it's possible that WP:NOTNEWS would not be used for a delete recommendation. Dugwiki 19:14, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Discussions

Post links to prior or current discussions on this topic, wherever you may find them.

Misc

Other links that may be useful

  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/News News-related AfD debates get (voluntarily) transcluded into this page. The history might be useful to course more AfD debates. Please help to update whenever a news-related AfD springs up!

Guideline philosophy in your own words

In a few sentences, describe what you want this guideline to achieve, and how you foresee this being achieved. (For the sake of moving forward try not comment back and forth on each other's reasoning too much.)

  • This guideline should provide a framework for establishing the encyclopedic value of newsworthy topics, and provide clear guidance as to what turns a newsworthy topic into encyclopedic material. Since news topics are almost always covered by "multiple independent non-trivial reliable sources" they always and trivially satisfy the core principle of notability, and we ("I") do not want every news topic in the world to have an article on the 'pedia. This guideline is thus forced to be exclusionary in order to work, and must be regarded as an extension of WP:NOT, as only policies may "trump" guidelines. Zunaid©®
  • WP:NOT paper, it is true, but WP:NOT the newspaper either. Those who wish to write current events articles can do so! Just generally not here. The place for that is two blocks down and hang a right at Wikinews. Ask some questions before you hit the "create this article" button. Will it be of interest in ten years? Presidential election? Almost a certain yes. A highly publicized but local-interest crime? Almost a certain no, but Wikinews is perfect for that! Wikinews exists for a reason. That reason is that news reporting is outside our scope. Not unsourced, not a technical violation of policy, but quite simply, not compatible with the goal of a general-purpose encyclopedia, period. Seraphimblade 11:47, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
    • This is inaccurate; the prohibi tion in WP:NOT is against firsthand reporting, not repeating information that's already made the news. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 14:42, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
      • Probably true, relating to that exactly. However, the fact still remains that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. While there may be some overlap between what we would cover and what newspapers would, the overlap is not and should not be complete. More what I was referring to was WP:NOT#IINFO. Just because something is published somewhere doesn't mean we need or want an article on it, even if it's in theory verifiable. The subject should be appropriate to a general-purpose encyclopedia, and this means of at least some lasting interest and value-not just a "flavor of the week" or "tragedy of the week". Seraphimblade 20:21, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Many things are very newsworthy but not encyclopedic. Current events belong in Wikinews; if the story has "legs" it could eventually become a Wikipdia article, like the disappearance of Judge Crater. News editors often "take note" of things which are not encyclopedically "notable." Their selection of stories is not done with any eye toward what belongs in Wikipedia. They run lurid stories about missing white girls, murdered rich suburbanites or cute animals to boost ratings, and ignore less appealing victims. They have been widely criticized for all these policies. I think there is consensus that a single Associated Pres or Reuters story published in 100 papers counts as a single report, and there seems to be some agreement that a news story about a single day's event or which is reported in only one local area may not make the grade (granted some want everything included). A crime or tragic death or disappearance in my view would need independent coverage over a wide geographic area over an extended time.. The usual extended time for reporting of the crime, the arrest, the trial, and the sentencing does not really make the extended time criterion. It should lead to documentaries, movies, book, new laws, new safety related changes in regulations and practices, changes in societal practices (such as: people in the town lock their doors now and don't let their children go out to play, the schools all install metal detectors, passengers can no longer carry on liquids or sharp objects). Sympathy with the victims or their families should not allow Wikipedia to become a memorial site linked to fund appeals.Edison 20:00, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
  • An individual news story is probably too narrow to write an article from. No more than we can write a great article about a book or movie with only the work itself as a source, we can't cover an event from a single story. As a tertiary source, wikipedia is here to collate and condense information into a useful summary. Only create articles about things that have sufficient information available to warrant it. Individual events should probably be mentioned in a larger article, or merged there if created separately, unless and until enough nontrivial information is available to warrant a separate article. For example, articles about individual episodes of a TV series or games in a sports season. The importance of a subject or encyclopedic merit doesn't matter when decided whether we can have an article; all that matters is a sufficient quantity of quality information to write a good one. There's no harm in having a good article on a silly subject.Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:08, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Anything which meets the primary notability criterion can be included in Wikipedia as an article. Whether they should have their own article or should be merged is a decision left to the normal editorial process. Topics which don't meet the standard should be either deleted, if the content is useless, or kept and merged, if the content is useful and meets our content policies. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:21, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I generally am a deletionist on Wikipedia, but I voted for keeping the murder of Mr. Price (see link below) and Eilat Bakery Bombing. I am generally in support of including any news item that (1) is documented by multiple sources outside the standard area of coverage (for example, an incident in Iraq being reported in major western papers such as the New York Times); and (2) that is fundamentally unique in its character. This is a subjective judgment, but your ordinary murder or terrorist attack would not count even if it is reported internationally. I would need to give some thought as to how to articulate these criteria into a policy. Generally, I applaud and support this effort. While I am wary of instruction creep, I think the current proposal on the project page, and the alternatives on this talk page, are all acceptable. YechielMan 04:40, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
  • The worst weed species is violent and cruel, and periodically one is likely to kill another in shocking and cruel ways. This sort of thing is a predictable pattern in their ethology. While it calls forth ritual behaviour of naming, blaming, and shaming on the part of the survivors - their own pathetic attempts to repair the tinfoil covering their own black hearts - this sort of thing is simply part of the normal behaviour of the animal in question. More is required for it to be noticed by an encyclopedia. The ways that the crimes of Homo sapiens can become worthy of note are manifold. Some have stories that are engaging, or confirm various prejudices, and so can make the jump from purely local matters to become matters of national comment. Some are written about by noteworthy writers. Some live on in folklore. None of these avenues to notability should be foreclosed, but at least some distinction between a regular murder and a noteworthy murder should be attempted. - Smerdis of Tlön 15:50, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

What's wrong with news?

Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy was created and updated practically as soon as the news happened, same with 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. We know now that the events mattered, and have thorough articles with dozens of references for each, but their full importance wasn't immediately clear. But, if they had turned out not to be important, should we delete them? The Islam controversy would probably barely merit a mention in an ordinary biography of the pope, and doesn't seem to have had lasting effects, but it was a big hubbub and we've got plenty of information on it. Why not include that information, even if you don't think it's an important story? It's not hurting anyone, or even dragging us down, because it meets our policies and offers quality information. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:14, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

This guideline goes to the very heart of what Wikipedia is and isn't. A general purpose encyclopedia should not be covering each and every news story that meets the notability criteria, because encyclopedias are not newspapers and more loosely, "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia of everything". What you're suggesting is a Wiki news archive, which is exactly where these things belong if they "turned out not to be important". The only things that should be in an encyclopedia are things that "turned out to BE important" i.e. those that have had an historical impact. One way to measure this is by the amount of secondary analysis and material (documentaries, books, movies, etc) that a particular story generates. Another is to note if the incident set any type of precedent (legal, commercial, etc.) or caused wide-scale societal changes (legislation, behaviour, etc.). Remember, notability is not subjective so it is important that a proper framework is used to "measure" news articles by. Within each of these measurements we can of course set the notability threshold quite low. This would filter out most "newsworthy" stories while allowing those that have had a proven impact. Zunaid©® 12:40, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
WP:HARMLESS is not, not, not an inclusion criterion. I really need to write that essay. Seraphimblade 14:33, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggested addition removed

Removed the following addition, please discuss:

"The news item involves an already notable subject, and needs to be spun off into its own article due to length considerations."

For my part, I don't believe we should ever put the idea in that if something non-notable "needs" to be spun off due to excessive coverage length, it's automatic justification for an article. If there's enough secondary source material to support such a length, the subject is notable anyway and it's a nonissue. If the subject has very little source coverage but has a huge entry here, we need to think in terms of "What can be cut?", not "How can we pull off this having its own article?" Seraphimblade 15:00, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

We have many Wikipedia:Featured articles with all references from news sources or primary sources - from the participants in the event. Some examples:

plenty of others. Applying this proposal strictly would take a heavy toll of excellent articles. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 15:28, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I must say, I too am skeptical of this guideline as written. The only portion of policy which restricts news reporting is WP:NOT#OR, which is intended to prevent only firsthand reporting. The reason for that section of policy is that Wikipedia is not a primary source, so can not be the initial source of a breaking news story. However, it does seem appropriate to me that if a story generates multiple published verified accounts (not merely copies of the same wire feed) then it meets the bar for inclusion. This proposed guideline appears to draw a fairly broad brush to eliminate numerous articles whose only verifiable sources are newspapers. And it does so with the, I believe, tenuous argument that an article must prove a particular level of "importance" for inclusion. It also seems to take the view that information is not important unless it is currently being analyzed, which defeats the purpose of historical articles in the first place. It seems to imply that interesting incidents that people in the present have forgotten should probably not be included as having little significance. And, lastly, the guideline fails to spell out exactly why excluding articles based solely on published news reports is necessary or beneficial to the Wiki readers, or how this follows from exisiting policy.
So at least at the moment, I have a number of questions about this guideline that would keep me from recommending it. I'll reconsider, though, as the issues I mentioned are potentially addressed. Dugwiki 16:24, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
On the one hand, I can see that the editors and readers of Wikipedia do not want to wait a long time before an article is created on some event in the news, such as a shooting, to see if scholars and commentators do significant secondary analysis of it. But a current event could be covered in Wikinews, and then if it turns out to be historically important, it could be ported to Wikipedia. I myself have gotten caught up in the thrill of the chase, adding details to a schoolhouse shooting the minute they appear on the CNN site or a wire service. Three ways we could go are 1) Put news stories in Wikipedia as articles, then if the missing white girl turns out to have gone to visit her boyfriend and the story becomes a nonstory, delete it, even if it was on the front page for a week. 2)Put the story in Wikinews, then if it leads to new laws, societal changes, books, documentaries, make a Wikipedia article out of it. 3)Make it a Wikipedia story and leave it there forever, although in retrospect it was forgettable. Our notability criterion is not based on recency. If several papers wrote about something over a period of days anytime in history, however much it was a publicity stunt or a cute human interest story or a hoax, it could technically satisfy the notability criterion. I just do not see how such things as an article about a fat cat who got stuck in a dog door and got multiple stories [5] makes Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. Edison
Absolutely the correct way to do it-create the current event article at Wikinews, and here, take a "wait and see" approach for all but the absolutely most obvious historic events (e.g. a Presidential election, the Olympics, the assassination of a major world leader). If in a few months, the event is still generating coverage (as, incidentally, would be the case with all of the FA material above, the sources are spread out over time), it's much more likely to be encyclopedic as well as newsworthy. If not, it was a flavor of the week, and we should never have an article on it-the one at Wikinews will do just fine. Seraphimblade 19:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
What does "over time" mean for you? How long do we have to wait before we can make an article about an event? A week, a month, a year? --AnonEMouse (squeak) 17:24, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Well Henrietta the four-legged chicken, up for AFD, has been called the "weakest of keeps" or the "weakest of deletes." had 2 independent stories and lots of major newssources across the country ran the AP story, but the coverage only lasted a day. A one week filter would have taken her out. I would vote for Wikinewsing cute animal story/missing white girl/feature stories for at least a week. I think that some stories which are not encyclopedic can keep getting coverage as they go through their natural and newsworth but not necessariy encyclopedic phases: Disappeared, search widens, found, cause of death. Or Killed: killer sought, killer caught, killer tried, killer sentenced. If such a case or incident led to new legislation, changes in society, books or movies, in depth editorial coverage, even widespread coverage in online sites it would be encyclopedic. But we could try for consensus on the "legs" a story has to have. Edison 20:08, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Please consider the following (changes)

First, let me thank you for your effort to create a guideline that addresses this issue and to improve Wikipedia. I am, however, quite reluctant to see something like this becoming a guideline. Frankly (and I hope you do not take offense), I do not think this guideline is necessary given the existence of WP:Notability. Also, the range of topics it covers is very large (as compared to, say, WP:BIO, which applies only to biographical articles). Everything in Category:History was, at one time or another, a "news item", and many of the best articles may not have satisfied the 3 criteria for years. Which brings me to my last point: I feel the guideline is too restrictive and exclusionary. The guideline notes that WP:Notability can be insufficient because "news stories are generally covered by multiple independent sources".

However, WP:Notability considers and excludes such superficial multiplicity:

The "multiple" qualification is not specific as to number, and can vary depending on the reliability of the sources and the other factors of notability. For example, several newspapers all publishing the same article from a news wire service is not a multiplicity of works, while several researchers or journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles do constitute "multiple" sources.

At the least, assuming that this guideline (or a similar version) is supported via WP:Consensus, please consider adding a fourth criterion for inclusion that reads something like:

  • An event is notable if it receives non-identical coverage in more than one reliable news source on multiple occasions.

Let me define my terms:

  1. "non-identical" means that the text of the news reports cannot be the same (e.g., 10 newspapers publishing reports that replicate the text of the same AP wire does not constitute "multiple").
  2. "coverage" refers to news reports that treat the event as the primary subject or that report on events that are the direct result of the original event (e.g., a reports on the "occupation of Baghdad by US forces" in 2003 that references the "invasion of Iraq by US forces").
  3. "on multiple occasions" requires that the event be newsworthy on at least two separate occasions (not necessarily by the same source) separated either by time or form.
    1. "by time" - an event is reported on the day it occurs and then further reported on 2 days later as new developments arise, even though the significance of the event has not changed during that period of time
    2. "by form" - the significance of an event increases over a given period of time (e.g., an event is reported on the day it occurs and 2 days later another news article reports on Angela Merkel giving a speech in response to the event or that references the event in a non-trivial manner)

To summarize: Given that

  1. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy,
  2. Wikipedia should avoid instruction creep, and
  3. it is official Wikipedia policy to do what is best for the encyclopedia even if it means violating some rules,

I believe WP:Notability suffices for determining which articles should or should not be in Wikipedia (see quote) and that Wikipedia editors should be trusted to handle such matters through consensus.

Notable here means "worthy of being noted"[1][2] or "attracting notice"[3]. It is not synonymous with "fame" or "importance". It is not measured by Wikipedia editors' own subjective judgements. It is not "newsworthiness".

Thank you for reading through all of this -- unless you haven't ... ;-) -- and I apologize for writing such a lengthy comment. Cheers, Black Falcon 02:28, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Does "newsworthy" always mean "encyclopedic?"

Thanks for your thoughtful post about the proposed guideline. My concern is that we will have too many articles which are definitely news at the time they happen, as evidenced by the decision of newspaper editors and TV news show producers to present them. But they may be so commonplace that we would have articles about things which are a frequent part of daily life. The example was give of a fatal multipassenger car wreck in a small European country. It will definitely be presented in the 3 major newspapers and the 3 TV stations. Some would say, well, it still doesn't get in, because we require coverage on more than 1 day's events. So we have the accident reported on Feb 1, then the funeral on Feb. 4, with more coverage because one was a high school honor student (nonnotable but sympathetic). Then we have another when the hit and run driver is found and arrested. We hasve another round of stories when he is put ontrial and another when he is convicted. To go to a recent tragic missing white girls story, please tell me if there should be Wikipedia articles for Rachel Smith and Rachel Crites. The two girls, 16 and 18 went missing along with a car belonging to one around Jan 22, 2007 from Gaithersburg Maryland. On Jan 22, TV station NBC4 (Maryland?) ran a story "Police get leads from public. The Washington Post ran an independent story "Police reach out to 2 missing teenagers " on page PB2. On Jan 23, CBS TV channel 5 in Montgomery County Maryland ran a story derived in part from an Associated Press story, "Diary may hold clue." WJZ, CBS-TV Baltimore Maryland ran "Diary may hold clues." CBS TV station KCAL in Los Angeles, California ran a story originating from the Maryland TV station, giving the story coverage on at least both coasts. The Frederick News, Frederick Maryland ran an original story "Police search for missing teens." ABC-TV WJLA ran a story based on the Washington Post story. The Gazette-Net Maryland (print or net, not sure) ran an original story "Search for missing teens."

On Jan 24, the Examiner.com Montgomery County Maryland ran an original story "Scope of search increases." The Maryland Gazette ran "Nationwide search launched for missing teens.

On Jan 25, NBC4.com ran an original story "Center for Missing and Exploited Children searches for teens.”

On January 26, Cox.net a cable TV news channel, ran "Two missing Montgomery County girls gone a week."

On Jan. 27, The Washington Post ran "Family member plead for a phone call. America's Most Wanted, a network TV program which had earlier run a brief story on the two, ran a feature story.

There was a gap, then on Feb. 2, Fox TV News ran "On the Record, a network program with Greta van Susteren, in which the story was covered extensively and the father of one was interviewed. The Herald Mail online of Hagerstown Maryland ran an original story "Missing girls might be in area." NBC-TV channel 25 of Hagerstown ran an original story "Police find car with two bodies," with no signs of foul play. Snopes.com, a respected website which is carried in numerous newspapers, ran "Rachel Smith and Rachel Crites" telling the sad story.

On Feb 3, the Washington Post ran "Missing MD teen car found with two bodies" on page A1, indicating it is a major news story. The Associated Press sent out "Teens most likely dead from fumes." no suicide note, no pills, ignition on. But one girl had expressed a desire that they be buried together in her diary.

So this story had numerous original stories, not just reprints, written over numerous days, carried in papers in Maryland and adjoining states, and carried on 2 network TV programs, and carried in TV stations around the country This Shakespeare-quality tragedy seems to fully satisfy [[[WP:N], WP:RS, and WP:V. Are there other guidelines which could be used correctly against in in AFD, or would it be deleted on grounds “It just isn’t important enough a story?Does it satisfy WP:BIO? Compare to Jennifer Wilbanks who chose to run away and turned up safe. But Examiner.com, Washington D.C ran a story Jan 24 which said Montgomery County police (one county out of thousands in the U.S. had 1650 cases of runaways in 2006, and 811 remain open. Should we have 811 Wikipedia articles per county? Or only ones where two pretty teenage girls run way together in a Missing white woman syndrome. ( I can think of several similar cases in my medium size town) or only when they are found dead? Or is it a sad case for Wikinews? After doing the research and finding sources, I feel that I (or we) could write up a well sourced article on each girl or on the disappearance of both, and see if it survives AFD. It is a heart rending story for parents or friends of teenagers. But I'm not sure that this story or literally tens of thousands a year belong in an encyclopedia. I do not see new laws or any other change in society coming out of it. Can you find a reason for there not to be an article about this, or do you think I (or you) should write such an article? How many such cases of disappearances, crime victims, or even cute animal human interest stories get enough press coverage in enough independent sources over a long enough period to satisfy the filters you have listed and not get stories? Or is all news encyclopedic (not just Wikinewsworthy?) I really see the need for an additional filter to say, yes, it was widely covered for a couple of days or weeks, but it is not encyclopedic. A fat cat stuck in a doggy door may make national news on the day he is rescued, and then again when the owner installs a giant doggy door, because editors love to keep going back to an appealing story. Please give me your thoughts on my long (but labor intensive) reply to your long and thoughtful posting. Edison 21:38, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your thought-out and detailed response. To answer your question: No, "newsworthiness" does not automatically translate into "encyclopedic"? Wikipedia should not have an article for every incident or person that makes the news. You are quite correct to note that my suggested criterion of "non-identical coverage in more than one reliable news source on multiple occasions" for the notability of news items would permit a great many articles which even I agree would be unencyclopedic (such as 811 separate articles about missing persons for each regional political subdivision in the world--county, province, etc.). However, I still believe that it is a necessary addition to this guideline assuming it is adopted (a part of me is still quite reluctant to embrace this new criterion despite my frustration at seeing unencyclopedic articles about captains of non-notable naval vessels, newly-established bands, etc.).
I believe the current criteria of the proposed guideline are much too strict and would justify the exclusion of articles like the Battle of Hurtgen Forest--a WWII battle that involved 200,000 soldiers and caused 45,000 casualties and yet had no great strategic importance--for years after its occurrence. Although WP's deletion process is imperfect, I think it works rather well. Unencyclopedic topics, no matter how well-sourced or NPOV will eventually be tagged for deletion and a final decision can be reached based on consensus. An article about a boy that is rescued from a well and then gets a dog is obviously not encyclopedic, and though it passes my criterion, that does not mean it is safe from deletion. WP:Notability specifies the kind of articles that categorically do not belong, but it does not extend guaranteed protection over all others. In any case, simple "news reports" (even if they have multiple sources) fall under WP#NOT.
Another concern: the criterion of secondary (non-news) documentation, publication, and/or analysis (which is essentially what the entire policy is) is likely biased toward certain countries that have a larger publication capacity. For example, you will find many detailed analyses of WWII battles (and even minor engagements) involving the US and UK, but far fewer on battles between the Third Reich and the USSR.
I will note again that the deletion process, though imperfect, is quite good. Articles that are newsworthy but unencyclopedic will be identified, targeted, and eventually deleted (the 7th sentence on WP:Notability specifically excludes merely "newsworthy" articles). Given that "Notability is generally permanent", some news pieces may pop up as articles from time to time, but if long-term notability is not shown, they will be deleted. I believe we should trust consensus to do what is best for the encyclopedia. I would value your thoughts on the issues I have raised. Cheers, Black Falcon 01:53, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
On the other hand, common sense and Ignore all rules cuts both ways. All this guideline aims to do is to provide a framework for which news articles may be judged. Yes it may be too strict when it comes to individual cases that we may want to keep in the 'pedia, but, so long as these cases are clear-cut, I doubt they'd get nominated in the first place and even so a WP:IAR keep can be argued. Zunaid©® 08:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, but I disagree with that reasoning. It's a bad idea to create a guideline intentionally knowing that in order for the guideline to work properly you have to assume it will have to be frequently exempted. We should be able to safely assume that a new guideline is something we can apply without much fear of having to say "well, we would apply this guideline but 'common sense' dictates we can make an exception." Dugwiki 17:13, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I fully agree with Dugwiki on this point. This guideline makes exclusion or deletion the default and promotes an elitist position. If someone created an article in good faith, then they must have believed it was noteworthy. Thus, unless the article fails WP:CSD--which are often bad-faith contributions--their contribution should receive fair consideration (by being prodded or listed at AfD). By assuming that the default is deletion, fair consideration becomes much more difficult if not impossible. Also, while WP:IAR is a policy, the fact is that editors are often reluctant to invoke it and are frequently criticized when they do. I am not an inclusionist, but I think this guideline (in its current form) goes too far. Black Falcon 19:19, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Agree with Dugwiki. Also, I worry about us judging the values of subjects or motivations of media sources. Frankly, if half a dozen unrelated newspapers from Maryland to Los Angeles, including the Washington Post, and a national television program, covered any other subject, yes, we'd think it was pretty encyclopedic. Deciding that it is or isn't based on its subject would strengthen the arguments of those who argue that Notability is subjective. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 21:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Dugwiki makes a good point. But in that case the solution would be to tailor the guideline appropriately. Obviously we are only human and can't foresee all the possible (ab)uses of this guideline, but let's first get something in place then refine it from there. It's better than what we have at the moment, which is nothing. On AnonEMouse's point, the guideline doesn't argue notability based on the subject, editors do, and they have done so for a long time now. If you peruse AfD on topics in the same subject field you will undoubtedly see that to some editors, notability is subjective. The guideline are not perfect and sometimes I know it when I see it is the only argument one can make for keeping/deleting an article. Zunaid©® 07:33, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
We do not have nothing. We have WP:Notability, WP:NOT, WP:NOR, and WP:Consensus. "I know it when I see it"-type arguments are nothing more than one person trying to (deliberately or subconsciously) impose his or her view of what is and is not interesting on everyone else. If that's the only argument for deletion that can be raised, the article should be kept, and vice versa. Black Falcon 17:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
One of the major assumptions of this guidelines is that WP:N is inadequate when it comes to judging news stories specifically. On that basis we really do have nothing. This guideline is intended to help avoid "I know when I see it" arguments, so it's a good thing, no? Zunaid©® 10:55, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikinews

The most appropriate home for news-based articles of insubstantive encyclopedic notability is on Wikinews. It would wonderful if transwiki to wikinews was an option. But unfortunately due to a license incompatibility, direct transwiki from wikipedia to wikinews is not possible[6].

I believe this has the effect of depriving wikinews of editor and user attention while unencyclopedic material accumulates on wikipedia. Wikipedia is by far the more high profile and "prestigious" project (there's an element here too I think of people preferring to use wikipedia rather than wikinews because a feeling that making something for an encyclopedia is more "important" than doing the same for a news service) and people prefer to create breaking news articles - regardless of considering the encyclopedic notability in light of Wikipedia:How_the_Current_events_page_works#Wikipedia_is_not_a_news_service - on Wikipedia rather than Wikinews. Wikipedia articles on breaking news stories typically develop to be far better and more in depth than Wikinews equivalents, even when the article more appropriately belongs on Wikinews.

Writing a discerning Wikipedia news notability guideline (which is badly needed, in my opinion, - WP:N is woefully inadequate for dealing with the conflation of newsworthiness with encyclopedic notability) would help boost our sister project Wikinews too (especially if a solution or workaround to the transwiki problem was arrived at) Bwithh 09:33, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

How about a change to the edit page? It already has the "You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL"-why couldn't we add "If community consensus is reached to transwiki your work to Wikinews, you agree to a dual license under CC-BY"? Seraphimblade 10:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
I dont think that would work. Users here agree to license their work under GFDL. Changing the license to accomodate wikinews would open a whole load of other issues which I don't think would get support across the community.
Personally I've stopped contributing to wikinews. The main problem is the focus on "news" - i.e. recent events. This means you cant contribute on anything that happened even a few months ago - which is where internet sources are most valuable. AndrewRT(Talk) 16:15, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

WP:CREEP

From WP:CREEP:

All new policies and guidelines should be regarded as instruction creep unless it can be proved they will actually be helpful.

Does this proposed guideline do this, and if so how? AndrewRT(Talk) 16:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, there is a rationale provided in the main proposal, but in the main:
  1. It ensures that contributions here stick to subjects appropriate for an encyclopedia, and helps prevent "flavor of the week" events from creeping in because a newspaper or two ran a story.
  2. It ensures that all contributions will be of lasting impact and interest, which will make sure that articles are maintained and maintainable.
  3. It prevents articles being created which can never be comprehensive.
  4. It encourages people to use the proper project for the proper purpose (in this case, Wikinews for news, Wikipedia for subjects genuinely of interest to a general purpose encyclopedia). We don't and shouldn't aim to cover everything, we should aim to cover a limited range of genuinely encyclopedic subjects. This range is a very wide one, granted, but it should not be an unlimited one.
Creep is always a valid concern, so hopefully this will lay out some legitimate concerns which this proposal is intended to address? Seraphimblade 18:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
What Seramphimblade said - this may have problems, but it being instruction creep is certainly not one of them. Moreschi Deletion! 18:35, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I've added

Another criterion for inclusion: "The news item has caused multiple comments by major political figures.". While this is far from perfect, I think that something like it is necessary as at the moment this guideline might technically have excluded 9/11 until laws got passed caused by that event. This should have the effect of including stuff that could be included, while - and I think this is the answer to several of the criticisms above - excluding that which we will never be able to write a featured article about. Moreschi Deletion! 18:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't that fall under the exemption that the event will unquestionably be a historic and world-changing one? Many things get comments from political figures (though, in some cases, those figures might be usable as sources themselves.) Seraphimblade 19:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
Not necessarily: I can think of several that fall short of that exception - which I can't see? - but are of sufficient encyclopedic merit for us to include. Moreschi Deletion! 19:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Meanwhile, I've written up a fairly primitive "Scope" section, please feel free to revise and fix up as necessary. Moreschi Deletion! 19:20, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Recent sad example of news meeting WP:N but not being encyclopedic

My concern is that we will have too many articles which are definitely news at the time they happen, as evidenced by the decision of newspaper editors and TV news show producers to present them. But they may be so commonplace that we would have articles about things which are a frequent sad part of daily life. To go to a recent tragic "missing white girls" story, please tell me if there should be Wikipedia articles for Rachel Smith and Rachel Crites. The two girls, 16 and 18 went missing along with a car belonging to one around Jan 22, 2007 from Gaithersburg Maryland. On Jan 22, TV station NBC4 (Maryland?) ran a story "Police get leads from public. The Washington Post ran an independent story "Police reach out to 2 missing teenagers " on page PB2. On Jan 23, CBS TV channel 5 in Montgomery County Maryland ran a story derived in part from an Associated Press story, "Diary may hold clue." WJZ, CBS-TV Baltimore Maryland ran "Diary may hold clues." CBS TV station KCAL in Los Angeles, California ran a story originating from the Maryland TV station, giving the story coverage on at least both coasts. The Frederick News, Frederick Maryland ran an original story "Police search for missing teens." ABC-TV WJLA ran a story based on the Washington Post story. The Gazette-Net Maryland (print or net, not sure) ran an original story "Search for missing teens."

On Jan 24, the Examiner.com Montgomery County Maryland ran an original story "Scope of search increases." The Maryland Gazette ran "Nationwide search launched for missing teens.

On Jan 25, NBC4.com ran an original story "Center for Missing and Exploited Children searches for teens.”

On January 26, Cox.net a cable TV news channel, ran "Two missing Montgomery County girls gone a week."

On Jan. 27, The Washington Post ran "Family member plead for a phone call. America's Most Wanted, a network TV program which had earlier run a brief story on the two, ran a feature story.

There was a gap, then on Feb. 2, Fox TV News ran "On the Record, a network program with Greta van Susteren, in which the story was covered extensively and the father of one was interviewed. The Herald Mail online of Hagerstown Maryland ran an original story "Missing girls might be in area." NBC-TV channel 25 of Hagerstown ran an original story "Police find car with two bodies," with no signs of foul play. Snopes.com, a respected website which is carried in numerous newspapers, ran "Rachel Smith and Rachel Crites" telling the sad story.

On Feb 3, the Washington Post ran "Missing MD teen car found with two bodies" on page A1, indicating it is a major news story. The Associated Press sent out "Teens most likely dead from fumes." no suicide note, no pills, ignition on. But one girl had expressed a desire in her diary that they be buried together, .

So this story had numerous original stories, not just reprints, the stories were written over numerous days, carried in papers in Maryland and adjoining states, and carried on 2 network TV programs, and carried in TV stations around the country This Shakespeare-quality tragedy seems to fully satisfy WP:N, WP:RS, and WP:V, just like thousands of other stories every year just in the U.S. . Are there other guidelines which could be used correctly to justify its deletion in AFD, or would it be deleted on grounds “It just isn’t important enough a story?" Compare to Jennifer Wilbanks, who chose to run away and turned up safe. But Examiner.com, Washington D.C ran a story Jan 24 which said Montgomery County police (one county out of thousands in the U.S.) had 1650 cases of runaways in 2006, and 811 remain open. Should we have 811 Wikipedia articles per county? Or only ones where two pretty teenage girls run way together in a Missing white woman syndrome, or only when they are found dead? Or is it a sad case for Wikinews? After doing the research and finding sources, I feel that I or anyone could write up a well-sourced article on each girl or on the disappearance of both which technically satisfies WP:N, {WP:V]] and WP:RS, and see if it survives AFD. If there were a WP:NEWSITEM such as this proposal, it might be used to delete such an article. It is a heart-rending story for parents or friends of teenagers. But I'm not sure that this story or literally thousands a year similar news stories belong in an encyclopedia. I do not see new laws or any other change in society coming out of it. Can you find a reason for there not to be an article about this, or do you think there shoud be such an article? How many such cases of disappearances, crime victims, or even cute animal human interest stories get enough press coverage in enough independent sources over a long enough period to satisfy the filters now existing and not get stories? Or is all news encyclopedic (not just Wikinewsworthy?) I really see the need for an additional filter to say, yes, it was widely covered for a couple of days or weeks, but it is not encyclopedic. A fat cat stuck in a doggy door may make national news on the day he is rescued, and then again when the owner installs a giant doggy door, because editors love to keep going back to an appealing story. Cute boy falls in well, the nation waits to see if he gets out, he is rescued, then he gets a cute dog, then the President has him visit the White house. Encyclopedia or news archive? Edison 05:03, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Another possible index case: Michael Auberry, a 12 year old Boy Scout, wandered into the woods and got lost on a camping trip. Three days later he was found alive. In the first 3 days, he has 860 Google hits, representing multiple independent substantial coverage by various news services as well as newspapers and TV stations. The major news services such as CNN stationed correspondents at the search site to give extensive live reports. Would this incident in any way make an acceptable encyclopedia article? If it had happened 100 years ago, would the news coverage of that era make it a suitable entry for Wikipedia (simce notability is permanent?) Or is it a great item for Wikinews[7]? The article James Kim dying of exposure after getting lost in the mountains survived an AfD. We should make sure there is guideline in WP:N or its possible successor WP:AI which could be cited in a deletion debate for such an article. At present there is one in WP:AI, number 3, which could exclude an event with several stories on the same day, but this event already extends over 3 days and has far more than the 2 or 3 articles referred to in that guideline, and will likely have retrospective followup articles. I see nothing in WP:N which would allow deleting an article about this 12 year old and his 2 days in the woods. Edison 16:32, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Your desire for a section in WP:N or WP:AI to cover this is equivalent to a post-hoc justification of a prior subjective desire to see certain types of articles excluded. However, if this is established as a general guideline (rather than being discussing at on AFD on a case-by-case basis), it will be a blanket statement that applies to all articles. But look at the amount of coverage that James Kim received! Why should a person that received so much coverage over a period of more than 1.5 months be excluded? And if he is excluded, what justification is there for keeping any other article? I do not feel a general guideline can be appropriate for such subject-specific subjective preferences. -- Black Falcon 17:12, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Is Auberry a suitable subject for a Wikipedia article or not? And if I am discussing an article which has not yet appeared in Wikipedia wouldn't that make it "a priori" entirely? And a priori for the next such sensational news stories which get huge coverage on CNN and FOX and in the newspapers, but which I do not see as encyclopedic? Edison 17:18, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Case by case basis

I truly think that "news events" is such a heterogenous set of subjects that trying to say anything general here is difficult. The problem is with the general notability criterion "multiple non-trivial published sources" which is an approximation at best. In general, things are not notable because an independent source covers them. Media covers them because the things are notable. There is without doubt some correlation between notability and independent coverage, but the slavish application of that standard is detrimental to the project.

I think we are better off trying to discuss news events on a case-by-case basis, if you think an event is unencyclopedic bring it to AFD and give the article a fair hearing. We will usually be able to build up a feel for what we generally consider encyclopedic. We have pretty much determined that commercial air disasters are notable. We have determined that most car crashes are not.

Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I think we should say that "multiple non-trivial published sources" is a good indication that something is notable, rather than a definition. As you rightly point out, it doesn't always follow. AndrewRT(Talk) 00:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

A few problems I'm having with proposal as written

Ok, getting into some specifics here, I have at least three problems with the current proposed guideline:

1) The introduction states that Wikipedia "is also not an indiscriminate collection of information," and uses WP:NOT as justification for the guideline. However, WP:NOT does not prohibit articles based on news stories. The only thing it prohibits is using Wikipedia as a firsthand primary source for a breaking story. There are, though, no restrictions in WP:NOT against articles that rely on already published accounts. Therefore I would suggest that the reference to WP:NOT be removed from the introduction, as it is not actually directly relevant to this proposal. (The lines referring to notability and verification are valid comments, I think, but not the references to WP:NOT).

2) The article refers to differences between an article being newsworthy versus encyclopedic, but never actually explains what it means for a subject to be encyclopedic. The problem is that the word "unencyclopedic" is frequently misused in afd and cfd discussions as shorthand for WP:IDONTLIKEIT, meaning that the editor has a gut feeling that something doesn't belong here but can't actually explain why it should be deleted according to Wiki standards. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the word unencyclopedic being a central phrase of the guideline when it's fairly debatable what the term means.

3) The "Rationale for this guideline" section doesn't actually give a rationale of how this guideline improves Wikipedia for readers. A central question that must be answered is why eliminating articles based on multiple published, verifiable news accounts benefits Wikipedia readers. This is a crucial missing element, since on the face of it there is no obvious reason a reader benefits from the deletion of otherwise accurate properly referenced articles from multiple media reports. There's no practical physical limit on information in Wikipedia, and it's not clear that allowing this information will result in confusion for readers or these articles being unmaintainable by editorial staff. So the proposal should provide an actual, objective and practical benefit that readers would enjoy by adopting this guideline. Otherwise it's unclear why the proposal would even be necessary in the first place.

I'd say those are the three main problems I'm having off the top of my head with supporting this proposed guideline as written. If those three items can be sufficitently addressed, though, then I'll likely be more supportive. Dugwiki 17:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I think its very important to set the framework for the guidelines with reference to the related policies. The reason for refering to WP:NOT is not because news stories are explicitly banned - as you rightly pointed out, only primary source material is excluded (as per WP:NOR) - but because indiscriminate collections of information are excluded (see WP:NOT#IINFO. This is key to the rationale behind this guideline - excluding indiscriminate information - hence I would like to keep the reference in here.
As to the definition of uncylopedic, the only one we have is set out at WP:NOT (see WP:ENC) whcih is already cited.
On your last point, wikipedia benefits if the guidance is clearer because it means that people don't put lots of effort into an article for it to only be deleted after WP:AFD. Also it helps build a consensus when an article does come to AFD. AndrewRT(Talk) 22:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
To reply a second, "indiscriminate collections of information are excluded" is actually misleading. WP:NOT#INFO talks about specific types of information that Wikipedia discriminates against for inclusion. But that shouldn't be taken to mean that WP:NOT#INFO deals with "random" or "trivial" or "unimportant" information. It lays out some types of information that have broad consensus that editors feel should be altered or removed, but its language is written in such a way that that particular section doesn't extend much beyond those types of information.
An example of what I'm talking about is almanac style information. Last year, an editor attempted to add an "almanac" bullet point to WP:NOT#INFO, but that bullet point was deleted a day later for lack of consensus. Thus even though some people might argue that almanac style information is "less important" or "less encyclopedic", WP:NOT can not currently be taken to say "almanac data is an indiscriminate collection of information so isn't allowed". It is, in general, a frequent misconception that WP:NOT#INFO deals with trivia, almanac information and other "random" facts. (See the talk page for WP:NOT for further discussion on that topic).
As to the other point that "wikipedia benefits if the guidance is clearer because it means that people don't put lots of effort into an article for it to only be deleted after WP:AFD" and that it "helps build a consensus when an article does come to AFD", I agree that having guidelines helps the editorial process. So I wouldn't mind having a guideline with how to deal with news stories in some form. The problem, though, is there needs to be a rationale for why this proposal is a useful guideline that benefits the Wiki readers.
For example, a counter-proposal might be to simply write a guideline that says "Any article that includes verified references on its major facts by multiple news publications on multiple days can be considered notable for purposes of inclusion in Wikipedia." That guideline would be quite clear and objective in how it works, and would likewise make afd discussions fairly straightforward on what news stories should or shouldn't be included. Thus it meets the "streamlining the afd debate" and "consistency in decisions" requests. But it also is significantly more inclusive than the current proposed guideline. So what benefit does the proposed guideline have over the hypothetical guideline I just proposed, particularly in terms of how the readers use Wikipedia? There ought to be a practical benefit to deleting the additional articles that would be deleted by this proposal over the hypothetical more inclusive one; otherwise why delete them? Dugwiki 23:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I've gone back and read WP:NOT#IINFO again. I take your point, but I would interpret the policy wording differently. I read the policy as saying in principle "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information" and specifically here are some examples. Although this example is not listed, the principal is very much relevant to this guideline, hence why I think it should be mentioned. Which makes me think, maybe this guideline needs, before it's adopted, to be preceded by an entension of WP:NOT#IINFO to include non-notable but newsworthy items as a specific bullet?
I'm glad you agree that having a guideline, of some sorts, would be useful. Personally I contribute mostly to current affairs articles so I have a personal interest in this debate because I'm worried quite a bit of my work could end up in the dustbin - hence my interest in having a guideline of some sort or another. Having said that, I would be quite happy with the alternative you outlined as well - assuming it could be made to fit with the other policies and guidelines that currently exist. AndrewRT(Talk) 00:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
To clarify something, WP:NOT does discuss news items in the WP:NOT#OR section. However, it only mentions them in the context of not using Wikipedia as a first hand source. If there is strong enough consensus to change the policy, then it might also make sense to include a line in WP:NOT#INFO about guidelines for current event reporting. The only hitch is that since WP:NOT is a policy, it needs stronger consensus than simply a guideline. Therefore I think the proper way to go about consensus building is what we're doing here - try and work out agreement on a WP:NEWS guideline for what are considered worthwhile current event articles, then eventually if the resulting guideline receives enough approval consider making it part of WP:NOT policy. (In other words, guidelines can be based on policies, but policies shouldn't be based on guidelines which by definition haven't yet demonstrated strong enough consensus.) Dugwiki 16:35, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed added sentence about "lasting notability" in rationale

FYI, I have (for now) removed a sentence added this afternoon to the rationale section that stated:

"What is notable today may not be notable in a century or two, and Wikipedia plans to be around for that long. It is necessary to think about lasting notability."

I'm not sure I actually agree with that statement. Whether or not something is currently notable does not necessarilly imply whether or not it is historically accurate or useful. Just because something isn't currently receiving any public attention doesn't mean that it isn't useful to archive articles about that information for historical purposes and potential later retreival. If all we were interested in was writing about topics which are currently being discussed, there would never be a need for historical archives. We could simply toss out information that we haven't referenced in a year, for example.

Generally speaking, when possible it is better to archive information than to permanently destroy it. Thus I am not convinced that the "100 year notability" criteria as described above is actually a useful condition for this guideline. Dugwiki 18:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Rossami reinserted the "long lasting" bullet point section, with the comment that "It may be a minority opinion but it is part of the rationale held by some of the supporters of this proposal." The only problem with that statement is that if it is a minority opinion, then it should NOT be included in a guideline which is intended to reflect editorial consensus.

However, rather than redeleting the section, I tried a rewrite of it to see if there is a compromise solution. I reworded the section to try and match the basic intent, which is to merge or delete articles that are about "one-shot" news stories. The previous version of this bullet point said that "While some events may be of encyclopedic notability, this would require that the event be of lasting, not just passing, significance and interest. In many cases, this determination can only be made well after the event occurs. Writing an article about such events should wait until such lasting notability is unambiguously clear." Some problems I saw with that wording are:

- It probably isn't necessary to "wait until lasting notability is unambiguously clear". Rather, most readers and editors seem comfortable with articles about major current events well before anything is "unambiguously clear". Therefore I changed the language to suggest that articles which fail to meet this guideline's recommendation should probably be considered for merger or deletion. This way articles can be drafted and created and given some time to gather appropriate references and increase notability, and articles about very short-lived subjects can be removed if necessary.

- Guidelines can't really "require" anything. They are simply consensus recommendations for other editors to follow. Changed that to "recommends".

- Added some explanation of practical reasoning why this part of the guideline is hopefully useful for the readers.

Let me know what you think of the revised language. Dugwiki 17:53, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Remember that the "rationale" section of a proposal is usually removed into the archives if/when the proposal is approved. The rationale section is only intended to help new readers get up to speed on the debate. You are correct that the proscriptive sections of a guideline are made of only those clauses which have consensus. The rationale for those proscriptions, however, may be presented as the sum of positions and can represent both majority and minority opinions.
Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now... You asked for specific thoughts on the revised language.
  • Because we're in a section where we are explaining why, not what, the opening wording should probably be changed from "This guideline recommends" to some variant of "Many editors believe" or "strongly believe".
  • Wikipedia is not in a race. We have no need to scoop anyone. Unlike other forms of encyclopedias, we have no publication deadline that we have to meet. I believe that we can afford to wait until an issue is very clear before opening an article on the topic and that waiting is often best for the encyclopedia in the long run.
  • In that same vein, I think the sentence "In many cases, this determination can only be made after the fact" was a clearer statement than the current text. Some readers may disagree with it but at least you could be sure what you were disagreeing with. The current text seems to avoid taking a stand one way or the other.
I hope that makes my own opinion a bit clearer. Thanks. Rossami (talk) 20:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I've started a related discussion at WP:NOT combining this new guideline with a related change to the list of examples at WP:NOT#IINFO. AndrewRT(Talk) 23:00, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I replied there that I think it's premature to discuss adding a reference to WP:NOTNEWS to policy. My suggestion is wait until we reach a consensus version of WP:NOTNEWS and make it a guideline most of us support. Then reintroduce your suggestion at that point to include a reference to it in policy. Dugwiki 23:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Would it not be easier to get consensus on the principle first and then move onto the detail? AndrewRT(Talk) 23:16, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure it would, because changes to policies requires stronger consensus than creating a guideline. The burden of proof needed to change policy is higher than it is to craft a simple guideline. A guideline is a set of recommendations that most editors agree with, but policy is a stronger assertion that editors almost always should abide by policy due to strong consensus on how to handle policy issues. I think at this point how to handle news articles doesn't have much agreement yet, even in principle, so it's much more likely the first step you can achieve is to get the weaker level of consensus needed to make a guideline recommendation. Dugwiki 23:28, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Strong support

I like this proposal and actually like it exactly as written. Wikipedia is not WikiNews. Our project is not structured to handle the thousands of transient news stories that occur every day. WikiNews, on the other hand, is structured to handle those kinds of topics. This proposal will help explain to new users (and some old users) how to find the boundaries between the two projects. Rossami (talk) 06:02, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of having some proposal. I'd highlight WikiNews nearer the top, not down in a footnote. I might even lead with "WikiNews is the project for news. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a newsire. To add breaking news to WikiNews, please ..." GRBerry 21:43, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I very much like GRBerry's suggestion, and have put it in. Please hack at it or revert if you disagree or think it should be done better. Seraphimblade 21:50, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

An additional criteria I could support

In thinking about this guideline this morning I think I could lend greater support to it if something like the following was added to the Criteria for Notability:

5) A news article is considered notable if it receives multiple paragraph coverage in multiple distinct articles over a multiple week time frame. By distinct we mean the article is not simply the same news wire story recopied by other news outlets, but is a new, original article. A multiple week time frame means that stories which only appear within a one-week time span with no follow-up coverage are likely one time events that will receive little to no reader notice shortly after the event is concluded, and thus are better handled by Wikinews, which is better formatted to handle large amounts of short duration news article information.


The idea then of the above additional criteria is to filter out news articles which are only covered on the day of the event or within a couple of days afterward. The multiple paragraph requirement eliminates relatively insignificant news blurbs, such as "odd news" and gossip blurbs, which aren't likely to attract much lasting interest.

Now obviously this is a less restrictive, more inclusive criteria than what is currently proposed. However, it seems like it might be a good compromise between the current version, which is possibly too restrictive, and the current situation where extremely minor events that have very short articles all on the same day have seperate articles.

Any thoughts? Dugwiki 17:02, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd go for that, so long as we don't leave any room for "lawyering", and make it clear that any subject still must pass WP:N-enough reliable secondary source information to make a comprehensive article must already be available when the article is created. We should also make clear that expected future coverage doesn't satisfy anything-we have no idea how thorough or comprehensive it'll be. Seraphimblade 17:26, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I'll buy that. You don't want to speculate about future coverage. Change the tense of "receives" to "has received" and I think it probably "future proofs" the paragraph. Dugwiki 17:35, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I went ahead and added a slightly modified version of the above suggested criteria to the proposal. As I mentioned in the added section, it's to try and handle articles whose sources consist almost solely of newspaper articles but which are otherwise likely to be found of notable value to Wikipedia readers. My hope is that this will lighten the restrictions on the proposal and help it gain consensus.

Please feel free to give feedback on the section. If there isn't consensus on keeping it in the proposed guideline, we can always reword it or remove it. The main concern I have would be editors possibly finding it a little too inclusive. Personally, I'd rather err on the side of including article than deleting them, though, so I tried to keep it somewhat open. Even so, this still would exclude "one-shot" events that receive no independent coverage a week or more after they occur. Dugwiki 18:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Something about this new clause disturbs me but I haven't been able to articulate it yet. Still thinking ... Rossami (talk)
This is perhaps a bit too inclusionist. Consider this example: Guy gets shot, is in hospital for a week, then dies. Manhunt is ongoing, two weeks later an arrest is made. One month later the trial begins and another month later the shooter is convicted. He appeals, appeal goes to court another few weeks later, and is finally dismissed. See my point? This could go to months of coverage and is still only a run-of-the-mill murder case. Length of coverage does not have a good correlation with the notability of the event. The wording needs to be strengthened to make it clear that the event needs extensive non-trivial coverage long after it has already completed. This would indicate that it is notable enough for the outside world to care, at which point it is probably notable enough for Wikipedia to care. Notability is not subjective, so we have to use the outside world's response as a measure of news articles' notability. Zunaid©® 07:27, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
I think in a case such as the one you have outlined, WP:Consensus would appropriately handle the article (probably through deletion). However, requiring that "the event needs extensive non-trivial coverage long after it has already completed" is a bit too exclusionist. Many events drag on for months, years, or decades without being "completed". Also, many events (e.g., the recent War in Somalia) receive only extensive news coverage for several months without affecting laws or being noted in non-news sources. I think not having articles on such incidents, which many people will search for, would harm WP's stature far more than temporarily (given that they can be deleted) having articles on more obscure events that few will look for. I would appreciate your comments, if any. Cheers, Black Falcon 08:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
This is where it becomes tricky. The examples we both presented fairly represent the opposite ends of the spectrum where this guideline may be misused. I don't have any immediate answers, other than "use common sense". The problem with that approach of course is that people have their own view on where to draw the "common sense" line. Thus AfDs become nothing more than shouting matches won by the larger percentage of people who turn up. We need to strike a happy middle here, but at the moment I don't have any answers. Zunaid©® 11:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
If something happened and it received enough paragraphs of news coverage in enough papers over enough days to satisfy the new Criterion 5 above, but that was the absolute end of it and in retrospect we look back at the article 3 years later, can you see there being a rationale for deleting the story then? We say that notability is permanent; it is not fame, which fades with time. But couldn't there be a rationale for retrospectively deciding that what looked encyclopedic when the story was new, looks like just another run of the mill every day happening from the perspective of a few years. I can think of many stories of bygone years which got the required coverage at the time but would not seem to require an article today.It would be not so much that the notability faded away, but rather we gave it the benefit of the doubt at the time and overestimated its notability, then thought better of it later. With this rationale for deleting later, we could be more inclusive while the news item is fresh and people are likely to be Googling for details about it. I can envision how hard it would be to delete all stories until several weeks have passed the next time a pretty white girl goes missing. Judge Crater's disappearance is notable because of many decades of continuing news coverage and books, but the disappearance of a forgotten judge from the next county, which also got news coverage for a few days in the 1930's, would not be encyclopedic. Or do we just fall back on "not paper" and I can create articles about obscure forgotten news stories of the 19th century which received coverage in multiple papers over multiple weeks or days (depending on how high the bar gets set). Edison 16:44, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
As I have largely abandoned my reluctance regarding a news notability guideline, I would support that. You wrote, "With this rationale for deleting later, we could be more inclusive while the news item is fresh and people are likely to be Googling for details about it." If, after some time (depending on the event, of course), it seems the notability of an event was overestimated, the article can and should be deleted, transwikied, or merged to another article. Although there may be articles on individual news items in the short term, in the longer term it will be easier to merge those articles into an article on a broader class of events. So, what do you think? Should we leave in Criterion 5 (sorry I meant Criterion 4) and add a disclaimer for lasting notability? -- Black Falcon 17:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
I would say that is the idea I was shooting for, BF. I wanted to err on the side of being a little too inclusive, rather than deleting potentially acceptable articles that happen to be about current events. Keep in mind that just because something meets this proposed guideline doesn't mean it will necessarily meet other guidelines or policies. So not everything that meets that criteria would be kept - some could be deleted for other reasons, such as improper sourcing or POV problems or original research or copyright issues, etc. And, of course, consensus can change on individual articles so it might be that down the road articles which were once borderline accepted by this guideline will be reevaluated and deleted. The main thing is I'd rather err a little on the side of including a few too many articles than deleting too many otherwise accurate and verified articles and subjects of borderline significance.Dugwiki 18:10, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

After reviewing the comments above, I added a brief disclaimer to criteria #4 indicating that this criteria intentionally errs on the side of extra inclusion, knowing that some borderline cases will be eventually deleted or merged on future review as circumstances or consensus changes on the article. Hopefully that will help alleviate worries that this would lead to highly suspect articles being permanently kept. Dugwiki 18:20, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Establishing notablity of persons

Is this guideline intended to outline the conditions under which coverage by news media would establish notability of a person? If not, is there such a guideline? Sancho McCann 18:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (people) is the main guideline covering how to determine notability for biographies. This NOTNEWS proposal is more for handling articles about events which receive some verifiable news coverage. Dugwiki 19:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Can we please ensure then that guideline specifies this clearly. At present I would suggest that it does conflict with WP:Bio which states A topic is notable if it has been the subject of secondary sources that are reliable, independent of the subject and independent of each other. - often this is newspaper coverage. Recent AfD debates which are about people have indeed being referencing this proposed policy. We then have people referring to this policy saying well just because they were in the newspapers doesn't make them notable. I believe there will be significant conflict over what is newsworthy and what is encyclopaedic. This guideline will not sufficiently help the debate. The useful point is that the news item has received multiple paragraph coverage in multiple distinct articles over a multiple week time frame. However, on overall reflection,I do not support this proposed policy, perhaps that point could be included elsewhere in other policies to clarify rather than creating a new policy. --Golden Wattle talk 20:12, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Why are politicians more important?

Why are politicians singled out in this requirement: 

"# The news item has caused multiple comments by major political figures and/or significant political debate." ?

That would tend to make every political scandal worthy of its own article, while the same scandal, with the same amount of news coverage would not be worthy if it affected a university dean, a corporate executive, or a sports figure. Should we automatically assume that politics is more important than art or science or whatever other field? --AnonEMouse (squeak) 18:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

They (politicians) probably have a different and larger sphere of influence, and most politicians probably cause change for more people than people in most other professions. However, this does not mean that their mention of news items should be a requirement. We could probably keep this in a list of items that indicates that a particular news event "is more likely to meet" more central criteria, but not as one of the central criteria. Sancho McCann 18:50, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

You don't like it, {{sofixit}}. Cheers, Moreschi Request a recording? 19:10, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I just did :) Sancho McCann 19:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I think that looks better. Cheers, Moreschi Request a recording? 19:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't try to force unfinished policies on articles to prove a point

This is a very young policy (less than two weeks), do not disrupt articles to try and get this noticed. There are only a handful of editors here and NO Consensus. Hypnosadist 15:06, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Consensus does not require unanimity, and the amount of participation by both "inclusionists' and "deletionists" in this proposed guideline compares favorable with that on other adopted proposed guidelines. A proposed guideline becomes an adopted guideline by people referring to it in deletion debates or in article revisions, by consensus on the discussion page that it is ready, and by someone slapping a template on it that it is a guideline. i.e., that labelling it a guideline justs reflects the reality. There is absolutely no legalistic procudure such as a vote to decide if it is an official guideline, nor is there a Wikipedia High Tribunal For Deciding What Is An Official Guideline. Edison 16:30, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Ah so it is as i thought, the article i created has been targetted to push an unproven, unaccecpted policy thus wasting my time.Hypnosadist 17:07, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Just to be fair, it's ok to refer to this proposal and its talk page as reference to a discussion on related issues. Clearly we have a lot of debate back and forth on the talk page that will probably mirror the issues on your particular article (I'm guessing it's the afd at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2007 Plot to Behead a British Muslim Soldier ). So while nobody should be calling WP:NOTNEWS a "guideline", it's ok to say "this article falls under what is being discussed at the WP:NOTNEWS proposal talk page. Check there for related discussion." Dugwiki 17:47, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
Absolutely, or why wouldn't it even be acceptable to say "This case is exactly the type of reason I support the proposal at WP:NOTNEWS, and the reasoning there applies to this?" Certainly that's easier on the server then copy/pasting the entire essay into the AfD debate, and basically, all that's saying is "What he said." Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 17:58, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

With all due respect, guidelines (which is what this is shooting for) are supposed to be a reflection of practice: first, a lot of people have AFD debates that mostly seem follow one kind of reasoning, then someone codifies the reasoning of those debates into a formal guideline. This seems to be being made the other way around - the #Afd_debates listed above have mostly ended up in Keep, but people are trying to make this a guideline in spite of them. And, yes, people do seem to be trying to apply it to articles partly to boost its standing as a proposed guideline. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 18:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I should mention that today I added an extra criteria for notability to try and handle articles which have news articles as their sole sources. The new criteria expands the proposal to cover events which had multiple news articles in multiple weeks, but still weeds out articles which had basically "one-shot" coverage. Hopefully that will broaden the inclusion somewhat and make this proposal more likely to gain consensus. Personally I wouldn't "apply" this to an afd, but I would include a reference to this talk page to further the discussion. Dugwiki 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
What a great idea Dugwiki. Your approach has my support. Wjhonson 18:15, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
One small caveat. At the present day, Wikinews just does not have the cache that wikipedia has. It doesn't have critical mass. Once Wikinews becomes as cited, as known, as updated as wikipedia, then perhaps this guideline could be made stronger, that is, more exclusionary. But even I, still come *here* to Wikipedia for my *news*. Wjhonson 18:17, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Missing bits

I think there are two things that are missing from the current proposed guideline.

First, I think it should say more about merging articles about events with articles about subjects. For instance, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David Beckham move to Los Angeles Galaxy was essentially merged into David Beckham (except all the material was already there). I suggest that events should normally be first included in articles about the subject or theme of the event, and then spun off if the article gets too big.

Which comes onto my second point which is we need to at least acknowledge the relationship between this guideline and the Summary Style. Often you will get news stories which could be seen as specific examples of overall events - for instance the Al-Askari Mosque bombing is part of the Post-invasion Iraq, 2003–present. Because of the Manual of Style you should expect to get articles that are on a subject more minor than you would ever get with a normal encyclopedia.

I thought of wording along the lines of:

______

Under the Manual of Style, it is recommended that article length is not excessive so that they remain readable. The Summary Style recommends that long articles are split up by spinning off separate sections into their own subarticles. Hence subarticles that are related to a main topic will often cover topics of relatively minor importance.

______

AndrewRT(Talk) 21:05, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Good God, let's not encourage using "summary style" as an excuse to write about non-notable stuff more then it's already used! If we've got a ton of text on a non-notable person, thing, or event, and people are considering "spinning off", we need to encourage them to cut instead. A lot of the time, such entries are bloated and unencyclopedically detailed (often with unsourced and borderline OR stuff) and really need a good trimming anyway. "Summary style" should never be allowed to be used as a trump-if you've got too much information about a subject that wouldn't even be notable enough for an article, cut it down. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 17:55, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Actually, although irrelevant material should be "cut down", I think merging relevant information is appropriate. I think the guideline should mention merging as an alternative to Wikinews and deletion. However, I don't think the Al-Askari Mosque bombing is the best example, as it's generally accepted as the event that set off the Iraqi civil war. -- Black Falcon 18:31, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
While there is some overlap between this proposed guideline and the Summary Style subarticles, I don't think they actually conflict. Rather, WP:NOTNEWS is intended to help editors decide between two possibilities: splitting off and expanding coverage of a specific event related to a person, or keeping the coverage of that event to a short couple of sentences in the person's article. Event coverage that becomes exceedingly long doesn't always have to be split into a summary subarticle, but instead can simply be trimmed and kept short without unnecessary detail. What NOTNEWS is basically saying is that it's not worth doing full expanded subarticle coverage on one-shot, otherwise very transitory, events. Dugwiki 18:33, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

What's wrong with surveys?

The first criterion states:

The news item has become the subject of secondary documentation or analysis independent of news services. This includes being the subject of books, documentaries or non-trivial academic study (i.e. excluding surveys). (emphasis added)

Why are surveys excluded? I could understand excluding surveys on blogs or discussion pages where anyone can post (these would be excluded by WP:RS anyway), but why should we exclude academic surveys or surveys by Gallup, Zogby, etc.? It seems to me if a news item becomes the subject of an academic or political survey, it's a good sign of its significance. I haven't removed it yet as I want to know if there a particular rationale behind it. Thanks, Black Falcon 18:25, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this was possibly intended to exclude "non-scientific" surveys, like call-in telephone polls or newspaper surveys with little scientific scrutiny behind them. I would think, though, that a major academic survey or study is probably reasonable. I'll go ahead and add the phrase "non-scientific" before the word "survey" to help clarify that. Dugwiki 18:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Yep, that was exactly my thinking when I added the phrase. Simple opinion polls in the immediate aftermath of an event is what I had in mind. I was going to phrase it is as "excluding simple surveys" but decided to circumvent possible wikilawyering over the word "simple". I'd prefer "non-academic" to "non-scientific". A poll can be scientifically conducted (correct statistical population sample etc.), but unless the results are actually analysed and interpreted, it is still merely a poll. Zunaid©® 08:43, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Temporarilly removed the one-item "list of indicators"

I temporarily removed the section below:

The following is a list of indicators that a news item likely meets the above central criteria, but is not a replacement for the news item meeting the above central criteria

  1. The news item has caused multiple comments by major political figures and/or significant political debate.


The above section has a couple of problems. First, it's kind of strange to have a "list" with only one item. Thus at best this list should probably be reworded in paragraph form. Second, the section says flat out that it "is not a replacement for meeting the above central criteria". But if having an indicator doesn't mean it meets the NOTNEWS guideline recommendations, then what's the purpose of talking about the indicator? If it meets the criteria, it meets the criteria. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Why even bother trying to evaluate whether something meets an "indicator"?

Of course, it's quite possible I'm missing the point of the section and overlooking a purpose. But pending some explanation for why we need an "indicator" in the guideline, it's probably best to leave it out, at least for now. Dugwiki 18:44, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I am of the opinion that that should be made a criterion (rather than an indicator). It already limits such discourse to "major" public figures. Perhaps it could be reworded to include only national- or international-level politicians to the exclusion of municipal-level and district/county/province-level politicians. If the president or PM of a country comments on an event multiple times (or alternately, multiple presidents/PMs comment on the same event), that seems to me to be a sufficient indicator for notability (of course, the news item still needs to meet the general WP:Notability criterion of multiple, published, non-trivial reliable sources. -- Black Falcon 18:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
I probably wouldn't be opposed to adding an additional criteria about "political commentary". I'd want to see how it was worded first, though. Dugwiki 19:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
How about something like:

The news item has been the subject of nontrivial political commentary by one or more national- or international-level political figures on more than one occasion.

  1. "nontrivial comment" requires that the event in question not be mentioned just once in passing by a politician;
  2. "on more than occasion" excludes multiple references by a politician in the same speech, but includes multiple references by one politician at different times, and also includes single references (as long as all are documented) by multiple politicians on one occassion (for instance, an international conference).
  3. "national- or international-level political figures" -- this includes any official position taken by a government, IGO, notable INGO, autonomous region, and/or notable nongovernmental (para)miltiary organization, and statemenst made by the following persons: (please add/remove or comment as you see fit)
  • Heads of state (e.g., Queen Elizabeth II)
  • Heads of government (e.g., Tony Blair)
  • Chairpersons of any intergovernmental organization (IGO)
  • Chairpersons of notable international non-governmental organizations (INGOs)
  • Mayors of capital cities or governors of capital districts, whichever is applicable
  • Speakers of parliament/legislature
  • Chiefs of a country's armed forces -- usually the highest-ranking military figure
  • Members of cabinet (ministers only); deputy ministers are only included if they are presenting the official position of their country
  • De facto head of state/government of any autonomous region
  • Leaders of notable nongovernmental military or paramilitary organization (e.g., bin Laden)
There also some that may be included but may be somewhat controversial, for instance:
Not having that much faith in the judgement of most political leaders or their ability to avoid pandering to the cause celebre of the moment, I'd be more comfortable taking that criterion out all together. If it's an encyclopedic event, the evidence for it will be clear without needing a politician's quote. Rossami (talk) 20:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

If you look above on this talk page, you'll see the item moved after I asked why politicians were inherently more important than major figures in other professions: religious leaders, scientists, university deans, corporation CEOs, etc.--AnonEMouse (squeak) 21:23, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm wondering if this is actually already redundant with the existing criteria. For example, let's assume you has an event which receives non-trivial commentary by multiple politicians on multiple occasions. Then you would likewise almost certainly have multiple news articles to reference for each of those comments, which very likely meet criteria 4 (multiple non-trivial news articles on multiple weeks). At the same time, I'm not sure you want to include an article that was only talked about once at a specific political conference, no matter how many politicians participated.
So are there, in fact, any examples of an event which was only discussed in a single week period by politicians that should probably be considered notable enough for inclusion? If not, this politician criteria might not even be needed. Dugwiki 21:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
I see your point. Any topic that is notable enough to be discussed at a political conference will undoubtedly receive multiple-week coverage. So, in essence, this is subsumed by criterion 4. Thanks for noticing this, Black Falcon 18:27, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Scope

I propose a more concise definition of scope to see the kind of articles this is relevant to, along the following lines:

This guideline is applicable to events where the sources that are cited as evidence of notability are solely comprised of news media covering the event in question.

I think it goes without saying that if someone has written a book about an event - say the sinking of the titanic - then the main notable guideline applies.

AndrewRT(Talk) 00:22, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Agree and disagree, err...somwehat. I would make the following amendment (bolding the changes):
This guideline is applicable to events where the non-trivial sources that are cited as evidence of notability are solely comprised of news media covering the event in question.
This prevents wiki-lawyering over trivial mentions in non-news media. Obviously something as substantial as a book or documentary on the event would be a non-trivial non-news source. The reason I disagree is that it actually contradicts the rest of the guideline; being documented in books is the first notability criterion! Zunaid©® 09:01, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
How about "solely or primarily comprised of news media"? That would cover the case where almost all the references are news articles, but there is also a published book or film, etc, that can be referenced for notability purposes per the first couple of criteria? Dugwiki 19:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I tend to think that the scope should be narrowed, myself. Rather than "news items", which seems to be a bit vague and broad, I would confine this to "crimes, accidents, acts of God, and natural disasters." Of the various items in newspapers, some involve things like the acts of political leaders or legislatures, which seem to me to require no special notability guidelines. It's news items that are about crimes, accidents, and other mishaps of mostly local interest that need some kind of dividing line. This clarification might address many of the other concerns noted here. - Smerdis of Tlön 15:27, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It looks like the current version of WP:NOTNEWS has possibly kind of reached an equilibrium of consensus. Noone has modified the policy in over a week and the influx of discussion and recommended changes has dropped off as well. I'm thinking it might be time to try and determine whether to upgrade this to a guideline, assuming you guys don't have major objections. What's the best process to go about upgrading this article to guideline status? Dugwiki 19:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, voting is not an accepted way, but when a cute animal story or some such which gets featured in the news for a day or two gets an article created. Per the discussion above, it should be referred to as a proposed guideline, not a guideline. Consensus does not require unanimity. I support it being labelled as a guideline. Edison 20:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that voting is not the way to go. A good step is probably to simply ask here for comments on whether or not this should be labelled a guideline, or if there are some changes that should be made first. Give this thread a week or two to generate feedback, positive or negative. If the consensus appears to be overall positive toward relabelling this as a guideline, then we can probably simply do it. If not, then we can deal with the negative issues that are brought up. It also might help if someone could place a link to this proposal or this thread on some of the other related talk pages to get some outside feedback from people that might not otherwise have participated so far in drafting WP:NOTNEWS. Dugwiki 21:50, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You say it's "not a valid guideline", but don't actually talk about what it is you disagree with or suggest ways to improve it. WP:CREEP says that "...new policies and guidelines should be added only where they will actually be helpful, and that instructions contained in existing pages may have to be pruned at times." So assuming the proposal is helpful, then there's not necessarily anything wrong with working toward making it a guideline. Is there something specific you're objecting to in the proposal? Dugwiki 21:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Dugwiki, I agree that more specifics are warranted, and I will work on that. One of the generic problems with most of the recently proposed guidelines is that these generally restate the same justification in the introductions and then restate WP:N. In the end the core information distills down to very little added value. I don't mnean to belittle your efforts or intent, but the collective effect of the permutations from WP:N is getting as complicated as the tax code and encouraging wiki lawyering. A good test is to apply these proposed standards and WP:N to several test cases and see whether the results would vary significantly and frequently enough to support a whole new guideline. Cheers! --Kevin Murray 21:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the follow-up. To answer some of the questions above, I would say that WP:NOTNEWS is attempting to fill a gap in WP:N regarding transitory news stories that do have multiple published articles, but for which all the articles occur in the same very brief time span and there is no measure of ongoing or follow-up coverage. For example, you might have a news story which gets press coverage from multiple outlets for one or two or three days in a row, but then it falls off the public radar and gets no coverage from that point on. WP:N doesn't quite adequately deal with an article about this type of story, because technically the article could cite multiple independent sources who happened to write about the subject in the same very brief time frame. There appears to be some consensus that such articles probably shouldn't be considered notable, and there should be some minimal measure of media notability that lasts more than a couple days (at least). Thus WP:NOTNEWS is trying to handle this somewhat grey area that WP:N doesn't seem to quite handle yet. Dugwiki 21:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • The problem then is at WP:NOTE in being too weak in the eyes of the "consensus". Adding this as a patch is then in direct conflict with WP:NOTE and will create more problems than it will solve. --Kevin Murray 22:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • An alternative, then, might be to see about adding a condensed version of this to WP:NOTE to tighten it up slightly. Either method is fine with me, frankly. My main goal would be to get some general editorial guidance on news-specific articles. Dugwiki 22:05, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Specifics

I'll insert my concerns below each of the proposed criteria: --Kevin Murray 22:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

  • The news item has become the subject of secondary documentation or analysis independent of news services. This includes being the subject of books, documentaries or non-trivial academic study (i.e. excluding non-scientific surveys).
  • This adds nothing substantially different than the prime criterion at WP:N
  • The news item has been used as source material for a secondary publication. This includes being used for a fictional book, film, or music album.
  • This is pretty weak establishment of notability unless you establish the notability of the secondary publication, and this also runs afoul of performing primary research to establish the notability and document such at the article.
  • The news item has set, or has caused to set, a precedent in some way. This includes new laws being passed, novel interpretations of existing law, first tests of new law, notable "first of its kind" achievements, new or increased safety legislation, causing a notable change in societal behavior or norms, etc.
  • With this level of prominence there should be sufficient sources for satisfying WP:NOTE, unless you get into demonstrating this through primary research to support a hypothesis.
  • The news item has received multiple paragraph coverage in multiple distinct articles over a multiple week time frame. By distinct we mean the article is not simply the same news wire story recopied by other news outlets, but is a new, original article. A multiple week time frame means that stories which only appear within a one-week time span with no follow-up coverage are likely one time events that will receive little to no reader notice shortly after the event is concluded, and thus are better handled by Wikinews, which is better formatted to handle large amounts of short duration news article information. This criteria is intended to handle articles whose sole references are news publications but which otherwise are likely to be of notable interest to Wikipedia readers. Note that articles which solely meet this bullet point's level of news notability may still fail to meet other policies and guidelines, and borderline articles that are initially accepted may be subject to future review as editorial consensus on the article shifts in light of future information. Thus this criteria errs on the side of at least temporarily including borderline notability articles, with the knowledge that some of these questionable cases will eventually be deleted or merged at a later date on further review.
  • This gets into the notability of the subject matter of the news event, where the subject would have qualified under WP:NOTE. This is a stricter standard than the Primary criterion, where these are supposed to be special cases for inclusion, not for exclusion.
  • To reply to the comment on criteria #4 (multiple articles in multiple weeks), you're correct that it is slightly stricter than the current version of WP:N. That's intentional - the consensus in the discussions above and in the afds I've seen so far is that there is a bit of a loophole in WP:N that allows a "one-shot" story to get an article if it gets, say, two or three papers writing about it for exactly one or two or three days. So this criteria in particular is meant to be a slight tightening of the WP:N guidelines that is specific to news stories. Dugwiki 22:08, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • If you want to tighten-up WP:N, then that is the place to do it if you can gain consensus. It seems that this is all about resticting the use of the product of news reporting organizations to qualify as sources as defined at WP:N, and not the "news." --Kevin Murray 22:16, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Yes and no. It's more about restricting the use of possibly redundant, replicated news sources to qualify as seperate references. It's not claiming that a news reporting organization isn't a valid source, but rather that there is a fair amount of redundant reporting and reporting on very short-duration stories that don't necessarily need to be archived in Wikipedia. Dugwiki 22:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • You have a good point about conciseness of the criteria. As I think about it, there's probably a way to combine them into something more succint, or maybe to fashion a short one paragraph addition to WP:N that summarizes a slightly stricter handling of redundant sources. One possibility might be to tighten up the section on "non-trivial" to include that the sources not be essentially cotemporaneous redundant versions of the same information. I'll bring this topic up at the WP:N talk page and see the crowd there thinks about tweaking WP:N to address the main issue discussed here. Dugwiki 22:32, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

As per the discussion thread above with Kevin Murray, it might be possible to tweak WP:N to address the concerns in WP:NOTNEWS without resorting to an entirely new guideline. The central idea would be that WP:N currently appears to have a loophole allowing for an article about a transitory event for which the only sources are news articles all of which are written in the same very short time frame and which contain a great deal of redundant information.

Specifically, the central theme of WP:N is that "A topic is notable if it has been the subject of at least one substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." I believe the loophole is in how "multiple" is defined. In WP:N it says that:

The "multiple" qualification is not specific as to number, and can vary depending on the reliability of the sources and the other factors of notability. For example, several newspapers all publishing the same article from a news wire service is not a multiplicity of works, while several researchers or journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles do constitute "multiple" sources.

That's pretty close, but it leaves open the possibility of, for example, two or three news sources each writing their own, independent story of the same event, all of which have similar information and are written in the same one to three day period. Such cotemporaneous news coverage probably shouldn't count as "multiple sources" when it comes to news events, because they're not necessarily adding any additional information on the subject and they don't really guarantee that there was any actual lasting interest in the topic beyond a couple of days.

One possible solution might be to change the quoted section above to something like this:

The "multiple" qualification is not specific as to number, and can vary depending on the reliability of the sources and the other factors of notability. For example, several newspapers all publishing articles regarding the same event, each article written within the same one to three day span, are not a multiplicity of works. On the other hand, several journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles over the course of a couple of weeks do constitute "multiple" sources.

This change would clarify that news articles all produced in the same initial spurt of information should not be counted as "multiple articles" for purposes of notability of an article. Rather, to demonstrate notability an article should have multiple sources slightly more spread out over time to avoid having articles about subjects that only had a couple of days national or international interest before disappearing altogether. It also, I think, would probably handle all four criteria in the current WP:NOTNEWS proposal. That is, if something meets one of the four current criteria, it also should meet the suggested "multiple" wording above.

What do you think? If this sounds good, I'll take the suggestion to WP:N. Dugwiki 23:02, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I think we can boil this down a bit more. I don't think that the issue is multiple as much as independent. Try:

Several journals simultaneously publishing articles about an occurrence, does not always constitute independent works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information. --Kevin Murray 23:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I could live with that language too. My first draft was trying to keep the language as close to the current version of WP:N as possible. The key word to include here appears to be "simultaneous". Dugwiki 23:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Rejecting this proposal

I propose that this guideline be rejected and the issue be resolved at WP:N as this is all about a perceived deficiency there. I have proposed text at WP:N and will support its inclusion. Please join that discussion. Thanks! --Kevin Murray 00:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I think "rejecting" might be confusing if we do ultimately include the text in WP:N-it would show in that guideline as having been accepted, but then would show here as rejected. Perhaps {{historical}} tagging might be better? (I do like better the idea of including directly in WP:N, though). Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 00:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I disagree with "rejected" or "historic". This proposal has been the subject of intensive discussion by a large number of editors and has been up for less than a month. Since Wikipd4edia is not paper, we do not need to worry about the server space used to support this forum, and a better Wikipdeia may be the result. The two of you do not constitute a consensus for demolition of the ongoing work of a much larger number of editors. Rather than launching a revert war as you have done with the "rejected" tag placement at WP:CONG, how about indicating here or in a sandbox what of the propositions created here you think should or could be added to WP:N to indicate that news judgement of TV or newspaper editors is not judgement of whether a cute animal, lost girl, "water cooler story," crime of the day, or other feature story belongs in an encyclopedia. I will judge you to be master Wikipedians if you can come up with one or two pithy sentences to be added to WP:N which achieve the objectives of this proposed guideline. Thanks. Edison 06:37, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Now I never could resist a good challenge. But here are some suggestions.
  • While news events may frequently be covered in multiple newspapers or other news publications, these sources are frequently similar or even the same, as in the case of reporting through the Associated Press. Such coverage should be very carefully evaluated to determine if the coverage is genuinely from multiple independent sources, independent of one another as well as the subject, and if the coverage is truly sufficient for an encyclopedia article.
  • News events should be carefully examined for encyclopedic suitability. An event which has had little or no historical or lasting impact is unlikely to be suitable for an encyclopedia, even though it may be perfectly suitable for a newspaper.
  • Seraphim's wording is missing the key phrase "simultaneously published" (or something similar). The stories AnonEMouse mentions above, for example, received multiple articles on the topic that were not "simultaneously published" (ie extended coverage over time). The timing point is pretty important, and for that reason I think Kevin's wording on WP:N is probably better. Dugwiki 17:38, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm missing the salient distinction between the terms "news event" and "subject." If you subsitiute the word "subject" for "news event" in Seraphimblade's suggestions above, it virtually replicates the primary text at WP:N. Look at the current text at WP:N which goes even farther:
  • Several journals simultaneously publishing articles about an occurrence, does not always constitute independent works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information.
  • The "multiple" qualification is not specific as to number, and can vary depending on the reliability of the sources and the other factors of notability. For example, several newspapers all publishing the same article from a news wire service is not a multiplicity of works, while several researchers or journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles do constitute "multiple" sources
How about something to this effect, then?
  • Generally, articles whose only secondary source is news media coverage, regardless of its amount, should be regarded with skepticism as to being appropriate subjects for an encyclopedia. In most cases, subjects suitable for an encyclopedia will be covered by sourcing beyond the news media, stories covered solely by news media are probably more suitable for Wikinews.
In most cases, events of "obvious" notability (Presidential elections, the Olympics) have been covered in other types of sourcing (analysis and commentary by experts, etc.), well before the event even happens. In other cases where the event is not anticipated in advance (9/11, an assassination of a political leader), such commentary is available a very short time after the event occurs. I don't think that would make a bad dividing line. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 14:36, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Strong oppose Seraphimblade's suggestion. Most of our sources for articles about living people and recent events are news media. Even the commentary you describe is on news media. Here, a recently featured article, Peter Jennings - 90 out of 94 sources are news media, are you saying without the remaining 4 this article should be deleted? --AnonEMouse (squeak) 17:07, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Anon, are you "Stongly opposing" the proposal to reject, or the proposed guideline? --Kevin Murray 19:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Clarified. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 19:27, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
That question is pretty well moot, those other sources are there, and if not could easily be found. Perhaps you could find an article which you believe belongs here, yet the sole coverage available actually is news media? Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 19:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Reasoning for rejection

Per Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines: "A rejected page is any proposal for which consensus support is not present, regardless of whether there's active discussion or not. Consensus need not be fully opposed; if consensus is neutral on the issue and unlikely to improve, the proposal is likewise rejected. Making small changes will not change this fact, nor will repetitive arguments. Generally it is wiser to rewrite a rejected proposal from scratch and start in a different direction."

--Kevin Murray 01:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • I believe this to be premature. Unlike other notability-related proposals, this one hasn't been around for more than a couple of weeks, and also unlike some others, it's about an issue that comes up frequently. This page could benefit from more discussion and input, e.g. by advertising it on RFC or the village pump. Ultimately it may be best to merge and redirect it to WP:N, and/or to add a short subsection to e.g. WP:BIO to cover "news about people". At any rate the ideas here are useful in principle and discussion is good. >Radiant< 10:38, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I also think it's premature to label the guideline as "rejected" as the basic principle of the proposal actually does seem to have some consensus. Even Kevin currently seems to agree that there is a slight loophole that should probably be tightened up in WP:N regarding news articles. So the devil is actually in the details of whether we should try and modify WP:N or create a brand new seperate guideline to address the problem.
Personally I think the best approach at this point is to look at the proposed modification presented at WP:N. If modifying WP:N sufficiently addresses the problems we're trying to patch, then this guideline won't be necessary and it could instead be simply treated as a detailed essay on the reasoning for the change. On the other hand, if consensus at WP:N is that the problem is better handled as a seperate sub-guideline to WP:N, then we can make whatever corrections are necessary to this proposal and leave it in place. The only reason I can see the proposal would be rejected or deleted outright would be if it appears that there is lack of consensus that anything should be done at all (which so far doesn't seem to be the case). Dugwiki 16:34, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Dug, I agree that this is an important issue as summarized in our discussion above, but we don't need a whole page to make a simple point. What I object to is the plethora of restatement and discussion which are not guidelines. A thorough discussion would be welcome in an essay. If the concept is rejected at WP:N then doing an end-run around that consensus is inappropriate. --Kevin Murray 16:41, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Right, I agree. If the concept of a fix is rejected, then the guideline isn't necessary either. However, it doesn't look like the general concept of the fix has been rejected, and in fact I'm optimistic that most people agree a fix of one form or another would be useful. For the moment, therefore, I think the prudent course is to see how your "simultaneous" wording adding change at WP:N is received. For my part, I posted my support there and tried to summarize the reasoning behind it. Give the change a week or two to get some feedback, and then if people generally agree with the change we can look at maybe repurposing WP:NOTNEWS into an essay. Dugwiki 16:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
  • WP:NOTNEWS needs to be a tight ship, so perhaps it is better coded as a separate guideline. If you can somehow capture the essence of it into a few lines on WP:N then by all means do so, but the current wording still leaves too much leeway for run-of-the-mill news stories (I've given an example and a counter-example on WT:N). I'm surprised with the "rejected" tag though. As far as I can see, only NightGyr is in principle opposed to tighter guidelines for news stories specifically. Everybody else on this page seems to agree that WP:N has a loophole which allows any news story to be included on the 'pedia, and this is something almost everybody here wants to exclude or at least set a boundary/framework in which they can be evaluated. Zunaid©® 14:00, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Zun, For the most part, I'm not seeing this as anything more than dissatisfaction with WP:N and an attempt to set up parallel and stricter standards where the source is in a journal or periodical
  • The term "news story" is practically synonymous with the word "subject." At most a subject wears a "news story" when it travels through the media, like a diver wears a wetsuit when travels in the ocean.
  • The salient new information here is only the concept that the simultaneous work of multiple independent writers should not be considered multiple per the WP:N guidelines, which has been added to WP:N. The wired syndication is already covered.
  • What is really new here?
--Kevin Murray 14:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
  • What's new is the idea that when a subject is carried only or primarily in the news media, such mentions in the news media, no matter how many and over what length of time, should not count towards encyclopedic notability. Even NON-simultaneous works in the news media over a length of time should not count as "multiple" or "independent" (cf. my murder case example). Reason being, length (and even depth) of news media coverage only indicates a subject's "newsworthiness" and has no bearing on a subject's "encyclopedia worthiness". This exception to the general notability criterion of "multiple non-trivial independent reliable sources" should be made clear, and it should also be made clear that it IS an exception. Hence my (and others') appeal to expand WP:NOT to add "Wikipedia is not a news archive". However, let us first deal with it at a guideline level before even considering a change in policy. I don't disagree that it is preferable to work within WP:N, I just feel that the wording needs to be made stronger than it currently is. To cut a long story short, read my conclusion after I presented two examples at Wikipedia talk:Notability#Why news stories are such a difficult case. Zunaid©® 16:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
  • My primary concern has been over where it should go, and I think we agree that whatever course of action is decided, WP:NOT and/or WP:N are the appropriate guidlines to cover this issue. Secondarilly, I think this is dangerous ground although you tread here with noble purpose. --Kevin Murray 17:01, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I think it is desirable to work within WP:N. The statement that "mentions in the news media, no matter how many and over what length of time, should not count towards encyclopedic notability" is, to me, quite bothersome. You are essentially calling for news sources to be discarded altogether. The statement that "Reason being, length (and even depth) of news media coverage only indicates a subject's "newsworthiness" and has no bearing on a subject's "encyclopedia worthiness"." is a subjective statement that is frequently inapplicable. There are news reports that are 20 words long (breaking reports) and reports that are 10 pages long. I do not see why news sources should be discarded as unworthy. The issue should be whether there is enough material to write an encyclopedic article (I view that to be the purpose of WP:N). As long as sources are independent and reliable, I see no reason why one type of source should be deemed inferior to another. An article with 10 trivial news sources may be deleted because there isn't enough material to cover it, but an article with 2 directly-related news reports may be more than enough to allow the writing of an article. -- Black Falcon 18:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with the comments above that discussion about rejection are premature. Frankly, even the merger recommendation is probably premature. I think this page has the potential to add clarification and detail on a specific sub-topic - detail which could become unbalancing on the "master" page. For an example of what I'm talking about, compare WP:NOT which clearly says that "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" and WP:WINAD which says the same thing but goes into more detail about why and what alternatives editors have who want to write dictionary entries. WP:WINAD is a very useful drill-down page from the main page. I see parallel possibilities for this page. Rossami (talk) 04:26, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, there's obviously strong opposition to tagging rejected, and generally that's a decent indicator that something actually might achieve consensus. So let's see if we can't get to some sort of consensus on what it should be! Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 04:45, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
  • On rejecting this proposal. This proposal is not like WP:WINAD. WP:WINAD targets the content of articles and requires that non-encyclopedic dictionary content be removed from Wikipedia. That's perfectly acceptable. This proposal, however, does not target the content of articles. Rather, it targets the sources. Though Wikipedia is not Wikinews and I believe the general idea of this proposal has merit, I think the initial approach taken by WP:NOTNEWS is flawed.
What makes news sources inherently inferior to other sources? We should be looking at issues of content. If a subject has not received enough coverage in order for an encyclopedic article to be written on it (a content problem), then that article should be deleted. However, if an encyclopedic article can be written, why does it matter what the sources are as long as they are all reliable? Although I support the principle of this proposal, I think this attempt to create a guideline has been unsuccessful. If an article is truly a "news piece" rather than an encyclopedia article, consensus will identify it as such and it will be removed.
I think it's time to tag this page as {{rejected}} per the term's definition:

A rejected page is any proposal for which consensus support is not present, regardless of whether there's active discussion or not. Consensus need not be fully opposed; if consensus is neutral on the issue and unlikely to improve, the proposal is likewise rejected. Making small changes will not change this fact, nor will repetitive arguments. Generally it is wiser to rewrite a rejected proposal from scratch and start in a different direction. (emphasis added)

I do not think {{historical}} applies here, as it is for proposals "where discussion has died out for whatever reason", which is clearly not the case here. I hope those who have contributed to this proposal and the discussion do not take my comments personally. It was an honorable effort, but in hindsight I believe it to have been flawed from the start because it targeted the sourcing of articles instead of their content. -- Black Falcon 06:32, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
In that case could you please suggest a different framework within which to work? There's no harm in trying to reframe the guideline until we can get consensus. It's very very tricky to draw a line which includes civil wars but excludes murders (to use just two examples). My stance has always been that an encyclopedia should cover only news stories which have had a lasting historical impact. The best non-subjective way to determine "lasting historical impact" is by what the outside world thinks of news stories. This means looking at the amount of non-news coverage a news story generates. Zunaid©® 07:12, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I too agree with that stance, but determining what events have had a lasting historical impact is largely a subjective exercise. The "best non-subjective way" that is WP:NOTNEWS is by its nature problematic, as it discounts news sources specifically for being news sources. Consider please the following questions:
  1. Should more consideration be given to a book that mentions an event in two paragraphs of text over a news article that discusses the event in two pages?
  2. Should a university website that has a brief biographical section on a college dean count more toward establishing notability than a news source which documents the event of that person becoming a dean and also uses the unversity website as a source to provide more biographical information about the person?
  3. For a murder case, should news sources which discuss the case be discounted as establishing notability, only to have the actual police and court reports (non-news sources) subsequently used to justify inclusion?
  4. Should news reports issued by a city government be considered more valuable toward establishing notability than a front-page news story in a regular regional paper?
If one answers yes or no to any of these questions, another immediately pops up: Why?
  1. Why is one type of source inherently superior or inferior to another?
  2. Why should we discount a news source so that we can exclude an article on a murder case, but at the same time allow the article to be created based on the police and court records?
  3. And finally, and I think most importantly: should we create guidelines based upon a disputable preconception of what should be included and/or excluded, or should we make initial judgments as to standards for the quality of sources (see WP:RS) and of content, and then accept or reject articles based on that guideline, consistently applied across cases?
I realize that I've raised many questions, but provided few answers. The best alternate framework I can offer at this time is this: trust in consensus. Trust that, in the end, Wikipedia will take the direction its editors want it to take. Mistakes will be made along the way and there will be inconsistent decisions. But on the whole, articles which are obviously just unencyclopedic news blurbs will usually be merged or deleted (see, for instance, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Henrietta the four-legged chicken). Conversely, articles which consensus holds to be encyclopedic will be kept. And finally, articles for which there is no easy consensus can be judged on a case-by-case basis. It's not the perfect framework, but I think it's the best so far.
I truly admire the effort of those who worked on this proposal and want to thank them. The goal behind it was a decent one: to create a set of rules that would consistently differentiate between notability and newsworthiness. And I admit that I feel some guilt for recommending that it be tagged as rejected, given the effort that has gone into it and the goals it is intended to further. My contributions on this talk page will attest that I was initially opposed to the idea, but gradually came to appreciate its purpose and indeed hoped that it could succeed. However, in light of a great many discussions at various AfDs and Wikipedia guideline and policy talk pages, it seems a consensus does not yet exist for this guideline, which itself raises many questions which are difficult if not impossible to answer. I apologise for having written such a long response, but hope that it adequately addresses your inquiry. Cheers, Black Falcon 08:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
To answer your questions:
  1. No. A two paragraph mention in a book falls foul of the "non-trivial" (or whatever term we're using these days) coverage. However, a chapter in a book dedicated to a particular incident may indicate that the event was important enough to be analysed subsequent to the event haven happened so would indicate "lasting historical impression". This would "deserve" more consideration than two pages in a newspaper as and when the event is in progress. Even a two-page post-event analysis carried in a newspaper would count more towards notability than a two page news report while the event is still happening. It is NOT the medium per se, it is the type of coverage that is being targeted.
  2. No. Assuming the dean became notable because of something he did (which was only reported in newspapers), this would satisfy Criteria 3 by being a "first of its kind" type of event. If it is not such an event but something more mundane, the article shouldn't be created in the first place.
  3. No. Neither the news sources NOR court and police records (which are simply fulfilling a legal requirement of documenting the trial) should count towards establishing notability. See below.
  4. No. Neither of them should be counted towards notability. See below.
As to why, it is because newspapers cover different things than encyclopedias. What is appropriate for news coverage does not necessarily correlate with encyclopedicness. The notability of a news-based article should be judged by the notability of the event (of which we've gone to some lengths to describe certain inclusion criteria), and NOT (let me emphasise NOT) by the amount of news coverage it gets. News sources target coverage of topics in different ways than do encyclopedias and often the coverage is disproportionate with the actual encyclopedic value of said topic. This cannot be emphasised enough. Also note again, it is not the medium that is targeted, it is the coverage that is being targeted. I don't suppose I'm convincing very many people here though :( Zunaid©® 10:29, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your thought-out and detailed response. Yes, technically, "newspapers cover different things than encyclopedias". But in that sense, so do books. So does every other type of source except another encyclopedia. You note that "it is the coverage that is being targeted", but base this claim on a prior assumption that news sources inherently provide inferior and/or insufficient coverage. I agree that the notability of the event should be issue at hand, but we must have a relatively objective means of determining notability, and what means other than "coverage received" is there? For us (editors) to judge notability based on something other than what others have written about the event approaches original research. I do not believe we should create guidelines based upon possibly controversial preconceptions of which topics are inherently encyclopedic and which are not. Instead, I believe we ought to be open to accepting an article on any person, event, or object as notable as long as it satisfies a pre-determined set of neutral standards that is not biased for or against a certain type of event. In cases where an article obviously belong at Wikinews, consensus will identify it as such and the article will be removed from Wikipedia. I do believe that the goal of editors working on this proposal has been to address the content of articles. However, in trying to do so without resorting to subjectivity, they focused on the nature of the sources, which is of course objectively determinable, but raises further questions as to why sources of a certain nature--irrespective of any other factors like their quality, length, or subject-relevance--are inherently better or worse than others. -- Black Falcon 18:15, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Unlike books, research papers or other substantive media, news is published EVERY DAY and broadly speaking, there is no restriction on what they cover. Generally they will comment on any aspect of a subject they deem interesting, to a depth they require to fill their pages/newscast on a given day. The reason and the specific way in which they are "inherently" worse than other sources is precisely because of this indiscriminate coverage of both meaty subjects (which we want) as well as everyday murder or robbery etc. (which we don't). So let's rather not use the volume of news coverage as a basis for determining notability, as it does not provide a good "filter" (too many false positives). Zunaid©® 08:35, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

An end to Pokemon?

Does this policy which people have tried to use to delete important news mean an end to the over 400 articles to do with pokemon?Hypnosadist 17:08, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

This proposed guideline (it's not a policy) probably would have no effect one way or another on Pokemon related articles since the sources for those articles aren't solely news media. Rather, the guidelines that cover fictional material like WP:FICT would apply to Pokemon and its characters. Dugwiki 20:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
What i thought each pokemon has "encyclopedia worthiness" while major events in the War on terror don't. The Darfur conflict is all news links is this to be deleted? The people who are promoting this policy need to look at the type of encyclopedia they want, one with meaningful events and facts or pop-culture tripe. Hypnosadist 22:57, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
In the Darfur conflict article, just a cursory scan of the sources reveals a UN report, so that's been covered by non-news sources in any case. (And if you want to get rid of the Pokecruft, I'm 100% behind you). Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 23:10, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Would you support me in getting rid of all the "history-cruft" in Category:History and the "biography-cruft" in Category:People? ... Pardon the way that's presented, but I think it effectively conveys my message. I mean no offense to you, but I hold the use of the term cruft to be a flagrant violation of civility. However, to get back on track, let me ask this: if you have no problem with the Darfur conflict article, do you believe the article on the War in Somalia (2006–present) should be deleted, as it has only news sources (58 news sources, but news sources nonetheless)? This question is, quite unfortunately, a serious one. I believe your answer would help me see where you stand on WP:NOTNEWS and perhaps aid me in clarifying my own position (I support the guideline in principle, but do not know how it should be applied/created). Thank you, Black Falcon 01:10, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
"Cruft" isn't really intended as an attack (though I'm a programmer, so for me, it's a common term). It's just a descriptive term to describe stuff that builds up over time and needs to be periodically pruned. I imagine there's some cruft in the history and biography sections as well, I'd have no objection to pruning it (be that by deletion, merging, or whatever means are appropriate to the individual article, pruning doesn't have to specify deletion). It's a necessary editorial process, it's not an attack on anyone-the whole idea of Wikipedia is that no individual editor's work is "forever". If people can't deal with that, they probably shouldn't be editing a wiki (this one or any). As to the Somalia conflict, a very cursory search turned up some non-news sources (scholarly papers and a UN report), so, again, it's a moot question in relation to that. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 01:30, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your response. If that is the case, then you do not use "cruft" in the sense that I have usually encountered on WP, and I commend you for it. The meaning that I have encountered is that of "useless junk", with the particular implication that articles on a given topic are inherently unencyclopedic (a valid argument at times, but in my opinion usually overapplied). If it's simply a matter of the removal of non-relevant material, then I can hardly argue with that (nor would I want to) as long as it's done properly. I recognize now that the Somalia war article was not a good example and I hope you don't mind if I present you with one more example: the 3 February 2007 Baghdad market bombing. This is the second--deadliest terrorist bombings in Iraq to date. As far as I know, there is no non-news information on the attack or any news information that suggests this bombing had more of an impact than any of the other bombings that strike Iraq daily. It's only claim to notability (so far) and the only thing that distinguishes it from other attacks is that it has been the subject of multiple non-identical news articles, that it is the second-deadliest bombing in Iraq to date, and that statistically it is one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in post-WWII history (I'd say 99th percentile). The last claim is, of course, original research based on my personal knowledge of the history of terrorism and terrorist attacks. -- Black Falcon 01:59, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Once again, I think your example actually strengthens the argument for that, have a look at this search. There are official government sources about that, so once again, non-news sources are available for this event. (That's not to say they must be used for the article, only that the availability of such at all makes a good litmus test). Also, guidelines are guidelines, and we can occasionally make a reasonable exception-I just argued to keep a school which only cited one newspaper article as a secondary source, but that article was exceptionally in depth, covering the school's importance and history over the span of more then a century, and was obviously sufficient for a good-quality article, it wasn't your standard "human interest" bit to fill a little bit of space. As to "inherently unencyclopedic", I object to that just as strongly as "inherently encyclopedic". More than anything, the logical view of "no original research" and "verifiability" is that decisions as to what we write should be out of our hands. We as editors are not to decide the "truth" of a matter, only to report what reliable sources state, and if there is a debate or disagreement, to properly frame the positions without taking a side. In the same vein, we shouldn't be deciding what's notable or not. In the end, those who write the source material we use decide that-by deciding to write material about a given subject, or by not. That properly places the decision out of our hands, and is the best insurance against systemic bias there is-if we use that as a guide, we are not deciding what's worth including at all, so our own biases play no part! Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 02:23, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
WOW! Can we copy the latter part of your sentence as a paragraph in WP:N? That is really a clear and eloquent expression of that position. On the matter of news notability, let me actually identify what the government sources are:
  1. a timeline of events in Iraq since 2003 that incorrectly identifies the February 3 bombing as the deadliest (which calls into question its reliability as a source);
  2. a county web site that simply links to a bunch of news stories on Yahoo and Reuters;
  3. a Senator Coleman's blog from Iraq that talks about other bombings (note the date is Dec. 19, prior to the date of the bombing)--this may also itself count as a news report;
  4. an interview with Senator Jack Reed that only trivially mentions the bombing;
  5. a Department of State document published years before the bombing;
  6. two Department of State news release (and #2) published prior to the bombing--do not address the bombing and also are news sources;
Unfortunately, none of these sources can be used in the article. -- Black Falcon 03:41, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
The House is still a credible source, even if they get something wrong. (Verifiability, not truth, although sometimes that's a tough one, especially when one is absolutely sure a source got something wrong!) Of course, other sources could be cited which correct that specific error, and I imagine there are plenty. An example would be: "A report by the U.S. House of Representatives classifies the bombing as the deadliest to date [1]. However, the New York Times and USA Today have classified the bombing as the second-deadliest, and classify the X bombing event in which Y people were killed as deadliest.[2][3]" In this case, we're not correcting the source's error, we're letting other sources do it. There also exist the possibilities that different sources use different frames of reference, the House report might be referring to bombings in a region while others refer to them nationwide. (This is not necessarily the case, just by way of example as to how they could be "both right".) As to the rest-thanks very much, and of course anyone's welcome to copy anything, that's the whole idea here. WP:N is currently protected due to previous edit warring, though. (Also, I didn't do a tremendous amount of searching for other sources on the Feb. 3 bombing, if I had a good look through Proquest I'm sure I could find more. That may also be a case for exception-my proposal would only call for a degree of skepticism with "news-only" sources, not absolute automatic exclusion. Some events covered almost exclusively in news media may well still have a depth of coverage that allows for an article, but many do not. Technically, regular-season sports games normally receive coverage in multiple publications, but that doesn't mean we should have articles on all of them!) Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 03:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


"There are official government sources about that" Shame the rules Seraphimblade talks about arn't enforced when this policy was forced onto Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2007 Plot to Behead a British Muslim Soldier. As i had sourses from the West Midlands police talking about this raid. And as for the source presented as a argument above, what a joke! the 3 February 2007 Baghdad market bombing was not notable until an american senitor put it in his Highlights of the iraq war, then it was notable! No pro-american bias introduced there! And again Darfur conflict was not notable until a white guy in a UN office does something about it, that was about 3years and 100,000 casualties later of course but those 100.000 people are worth nothing and are not notable. This obviously needs thinking through again as these rules violate NPOV!Hypnosadist 03:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Once again, we can make reasonable exceptions when called for. However, it is not to us to counteract some sort of perceived bias in the world at large. If news coverage of an event is in-depth, and provides a clear overview not only of what's happening right now, but what brought it about and analysis of where it might lead, we certainly might be able to write a good article solely from news sources. However, if all that's written about something is basically a quick blurb, we really can't. I imagine generally wars are, firstly, going to have non-news sources (governmental, UN, Red Cross, Amnesty International, etc.), so I doubt this proposal would include any such things, and secondly, will often have in-depth news coverage. (And just because the example cited in this case was a US government source, doesn't mean sourcing from another government would somehow be excluded.) This proposal calls for a degree of skepticism when the only sources cited are news media, not "total exclusion in all such cases". As to the West Midlands bit, just because something does meet minimum requirements doesn't mean it might not be more suitable for merge into a parent article, that's an editorial decision. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 03:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
In principle, I would not object to a section in WP:N calling for caution with news-only articles. However, WP:NOTNEWS as it's currently worded does not call for such caution, but is instead an exclusionary guideline. And about the House source, it's about the war in general (not a specific region or time period)--also, it's just a trivial mention. WP:NOTNEWS calls for deletion of articles with news sources to be made the default, with exceptions allowed. I think it is fundamentally flawed. We should treat news sources just like any other sources, but allow exceptions for articles that are obviously news blurbs that have had their 15 minutes of fame (like "four-legged chicken" and "cat stuck in a tree" stories). -- Black Falcon 06:08, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I certainly see your point there. I think a call for caution and discernment of "fifteen-minutes-of-fame" type articles would be a reasonable compromise there, and also to urge editors to check the depth of coverage, not just the number of sources covering it. If an event is largely covered "out of context", without much thought in the coverage as to what led to the situation and what it may lead to, it's probably an indication that the event is of only passing significance. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 06:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree that that should be done, but believe a more appropriate place would be WP:N. I have proposed that this proposed guideline be rejected (or tagged as historical--I really don't care, but rejected seems to fit this care more closely). -- Black Falcon 06:43, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with taggin this and incorporating the agreeble concepts at WP:N and WP:ATRIBUTION, as appropriate. --Kevin Murray 18:42, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Agreed about incorporating the discussion into WP:N. I don't see anything that should go to WP:A. Did you have something specific in mind? Also, please see my discussion in the above section with User:Zunaid (I have proposed it be rejected, but am not sure how we go about tagging this article (is there a preliminary process--straw poll, etc.)? -- Black Falcon 19:23, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Notability is not importance

How does this square with the stipulation in WP:N that notability is not a matter of importance? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 05:17, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It fundamentally disagrees with it ;) But it does so in a very specific and well-framed way. Unless you're arguing that 15-minutes-of-fame stories all should have their place in the 'pedia because they satisfy the letter of WP:N? Zunaid©® 08:44, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Strong support in principle

The proposal makes a lot of sense to me, particularly as a way of counterbalancing WP:BIO. Many people theoretically meet WP:BIO by achieving 15 minutes of fame through a news event. And sadly, most news events are bad news, not good news. Kla'quot 20:17, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

The 9/11 test

As currently written, the 9/11 terrorist attack could not be the subject of a Wikipedia article until weeks later. That's a flaw in the policy. Any news-notability policy should allow for immediate editing of a story that's obviously going to have a long-term impact. Noroton 22:36, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Which is where one can reasonably apply WP:IAR. It's not necessarily a flaw in the guideline though. There are other projects funded by the Wikimedia foundation that cover breaking news. What is happening is that Wikipedia is parasitically stealing the limelight (and probably editors too) from its sister project. Wiki means fast, not first, we are not here to document breaking news as it happens, with an article in constant flux. Encyclopedias are reference works that are meant to provide an overall balanced picture of a subject. Without resorting to our own synthesis of various news material available this can only be reasonably done once other analysts do the research and documentation. Only then should we write about the subject from these hopefully reliable sources in a neutral manner. Zunaid©® 08:04, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Agreed, that's a feature, not a bug. Wikinews is for immediate reporting on something the minute it happens. Wikipedia is for an encyclopedia article (if warranted) on the event once the dust settles a bit. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 17:03, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Don't use "notable" in a definition of "notability"

In the "Criteria" section, Item 3 reads:

The news item has set, or has caused to set, a precedent in some way. This includes new laws being passed, novel interpretations of existing law, first tests of new law, notable "first of its kind" achievements, new or increased safety legislation, causing a notable change in societal behaviour or norms, etc.

(A) Well, if it's in some way "notable" then of course it's going to be allowed under this notability rule because we've already established that it's "notable". The definition then becomes circular. I think that word needs to be changed.

(B) Also, "achievements" is too positive, since something just as important but negative would be just as noteworthy.

(C) This sentence seems overly concerned with law. Government is only one news beat among many, and legislative bodies are only one aspect of government coverage.

Time-bomb method

I'm dubious that we can find any workable way of avoiding judgment calls to decide what will be encyclopedic in the future. I think it would be better if we had automatic review of news stories at set intervals, something like this:

When an article about a current event is created, a tag is placed on it (something like the "Articles for Deletion" tags) requiring an AfD-like vote two weeks after the article is started. If the article passes that vote, wait for a longer time period and have another automatic AfD debate in, say, four months. If the article passes that, do another in three years. Then maybe another in 10 years (all time periods after the original start of the article). The future debates should be automatically nominated by Wikipedia software and not rely on humans making the future nominations. If the creator of the article doesn't put on the AfD-like tag the instant the article is created, then anyone can put it on, and the clock starts ticking when the article is started. So if you find one three weeks after the article is started, you slap on the tag and it's immediately up for a vote.

Three potential problems:

  1. Admittedly, this doesn't address what standards should be used in assessing notability, but I think it makes those decisions more likely to be correct. Perhaps the easiest standard would be a judgment call rather than a standard. The editors should ask themselves "Do I think this article will be useful to a large number of readers at the time of the next scheduled vote?" It's not quite subjective, although it involves some guesswork and some judgment about what kinds of things are of lasting value.
  2. Also, this is more than just a guideline change but would involve deeper Wikipedia practices, but not practices all that different from what we do now, except for some kind of "timebomb" trigger to set off automatic nominations.
  3. Admittedly, there may be arguments over whether an article with a News-AfD notice slapped on it is really a news story, but I don't think that will happen too often. If that kind of dispute comes up, I suppose it would go to administrators for some kind of decision. Noroton 23:34, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Reverted Black Falcon rejected tag

I reverted Black Falcon's rejected tag, as per above it appears he did so prematurely. He claimed in the history note that "only one editor replied", but failed to account for the fact that there is extensive discussion about this guideline both before and after Black Falcon's specific conversation with another editor.

Moreover, the rejected tag implies that the guideline in principle could never receive consensus, which does not appear to necessarily be the case. Almost all the editors here have agreed that the general goal of the guideline is correct, but the question was in some of the specific details in how to create it or, alternatively, if a fix such as the one Kevin did to WP:N would correct the primary issues being discussed.

So I have reverted the tag back to "proposed" pending more concrete results from the WP:N change. Assuming that change remains in effect, then this page can instead be converted into an essay on articles which solely use news articles as sources. Dugwiki 16:58, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Based on the discussions on WP:N, and the fact that Kevin's change hasn't been altered, I'm thinking that we should give the WP:N discussions a week or two longer to see how they shake out. Since this proposal is supposed to be a refinement or clarification for WP:N, I think the prudent thing is to see how WP:N plays out and then revisit this page to decide on its final state (rejected, essay, rewrite proposal or guideline). Dugwiki 17:25, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, I am fine with that. My rationale for adding the rejected tag was this: given the seeming lack of strong consensus at WP:N, it was unlikely that this would achieve consensus support. Also, the text of the proposal had not been changed for 20 days and discussion had slowed down considerably. However, your suggestion to wait on the discussion at WP:N seems prudent. Cheers, Black Falcon 18:02, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
I would say the that the concept has not been rejected, but the need for a separate page has been rejected. I think leaving this as a proposal is misleading, though marking it as historical with an explanation could be a more clear message than rejection. --Kevin Murray 18:45, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
I can buy that reasoning, Kevin. I'd still like to see what happens at WP:N, though, before changing the label or making major changes to this proposal. Dugwiki 19:54, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm do not yet support that conclusion. Let the page evolve for a while. The project is not well-served by an attempt to rush to judgment. Rossami (talk) 03:23, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
How long should a proposal be discussed before it is rejected? IMHO this proposed guideline is still young, let it sit for a while before we reject it out of hand. I suggest we tag it with "pause, pending whatever-the-hell finally happens at WP:N". Discussion at WP:N has stalemated it seems, putting this guideline in limbo. Until such time as WP:N goes one way or the other it is fruitless discussing or rejecting this proposal, since we cannot move forward until we know what form WP:N is going to take (and whether it will stick of course). Zunaid©® 13:19, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Bad idea

I oppose this proposal very strongly. Also note that any time WP:NOT#IINFO is used to justify something without regard for what WP:NOT#IINFO actually says, that's usually a very bad sign. Everyking 19:45, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to some of the concepts, but to create this guidline seems at cross purposes to WP:N. The wait and see whether WP:N evloves this way or not argument, is basically saying that unless WP:N goes our way, we will just push for a contradictory rule. I think this conversaZtion is over and there is no consensus for adopting this. The policy is quite clear that proposals whcih do not reach consensus are to be tagged as rejected. Per WP:POL: "A rejected page is any proposal for which consensus support is not present, regardless of whether there's active discussion or not. Consensus need not be fully opposed; if consensus is neutral on the issue and unlikely to improve, the proposal is likewise rejected. Making small changes will not change this fact, nor will repetitive arguments. Generally it is wiser to rewrite a rejected proposal from scratch and start in a different direction." --Kevin Murray 20:24, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Consensus does not require unanimity. There appesar to be far more in favor than opposed , and it gets cited regularly in deletion debates. It appears about as well supported by consensus as other guidelines. How many guidelines have you personally tagged as rejected in the past month? Edison 20:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Edison the fact this idea is cited by people who support it in AFD's is not important, what is is the fact that none of the AFD's have deleted anything. Your policy has been rejected 10 times now please stop disrupting wikipedia as per wp:point. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hypnosadist (talk • contribs) 20:45, 15 March 2007 (UTC).
Please remain civil and assume good faith. -- Black Falcon 23:16, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm ok with marking WP:NOTNEWS as rejected for now. It looks like we might possibly have a rewrite of WP:N coming down the pike which involves a merger of ideas from WP:N and WP:INCLUSION. Since WP:INCLUSION and WP:N currently both incorporate the idea that an article references should not all be from a very brief time span (ie a couple of days coverage then nothing else), they both would recommend against "one shot" news articles. Thus one of the main criteria of WP:NOTNEWS at this point is looking somewhat redundant with the main guideline proposals being discussed at WP:N and WP:INCLUSION. Dugwiki 21:22, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


Hypnosadist, your unsigned post is a bit of a personal attack, so please attempt to remain civil in discussions. Accusations of disrupting Wikipedia are overreaching and inappropriate. Edison 21:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

No they are not inappropriate, i had to do lots of extra work on an AFd because someone wants to push a policy that does not have concensus. They went to lots of different articles and spam created AfD's, that is a clear violation of wp:point. Hypnosadist 09:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I had previously tagged this proposal as {{rejected}}, reasoning that "consensus support is not present" and no changes were forthcoming and/or feasible that might sway editors from their positions, but then agreed with Dugwiki that it was appropriate to wait a while so that the debate at WT:N could finish. Given that even WP:N lacks consensus support (the straw poll came up about 40-60 against the guideline), I doubt this one (which is more restrictive) could ever gain consensus support. -- Black Falcon 23:16, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Getting the best of this into WP:N:

The following is written at WP:N

"Several journals simultaneously publishing articles about an occurrence, does not always constitute independent works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information."
"The "multiple" qualification is not specific as to number, and can vary depending on the reliability of the sources and the other factors of notability. For example, several newspapers all publishing the same article from a news wire service is not a multiplicity of works. , while several researchers or journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles do constitute "multiple" sources."

I see some contradictions that should be clarified between those statements. (phrase struck per Dugwiki suggestion)--Kevin Murray 16:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

The main difference is in the final sentence of the second paragraph above where it states that "... several researchers or journalists all doing their own research on a single subject and writing their own separate articles do constitute "multiple" sources." That statement should be removed, I think, as contradicting the other statements. The spirit behind the previous statements is to avoid situations of media centric zeitgeist where something insignificant happens to receive simultaneous brief attention. It is also fairly unlikely that several researchers or journalists would simultaneously release detailed articles or research findings on important subjects on the same day. What is much more likely is that the similar publications would be released on different days over some intervening time.
So I would suggest removing the sentence fragment indicating that "several researchers all doing their own research on a single subject ... constitute multiple sources". Leave the other statements intact. Dugwiki 15:36, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Potential combination to one paragraph:

"The "multiple" qualification can vary depending on the quality of the sources. Several journals simultaneously publishing articles about an occurrence, does not always constitute independent works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information. Specifically, several journals publishing the same article from a news wire service is not a multiplicity of works.

--Kevin Murray 17:07, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I like that wording, Kevin. :) Thanks. Dugwiki 17:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Status of the page

Reviewing the opinions expressed about this page, I see a majority supporting the basic principles behind the page. I see some concerns about the mechanisms of the proposal and some opinions that it is either redundant or unnecessary. I actually see relatively few opinions that actively oppose the basic premise of the page.

Rather than leave this tagged as "rejected" (which, I believe, gives a false impression of the actual conclusions reached by the community), I propose to rewrite the page - to drop it back from a proposal to an essay that more fully descibes what editors mean "Wikipedia is not WikiNews". The current version will, of course, remain in history for anyone to review. Any thoughts? Rossami (talk) 21:37, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

It is a fine idea to preserve the good work and collaborative editing which went into this proposal by preserving it as an essay. This would make it easier to incorporate any good ideas into whatever guideline such as WP:N or WP:AI remains when the dust settles. General standard 3 in WP:AIexpresses some of the ides which arose from this guideline proposal, except for downgrading news feature items about cute animals, wierd water cooler stories, and children who are the subject of searches, all of which gain TV and newspaper space but would never be found in a traditional encyclopedia, and just generally seem more suitable for Wikinews than for a permanent place in Wikipedia, just as we would probably not create an article for a similar story of 50 or 100 years ago, even though it was the subject of numerous newspaper stories over a period of days.[User:Edison|Edison]] 00:17, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I have no problem with this becoming an essay as long as it reads like an essay, not a policy in sheep's clothing. I think the most important aspects of this have made it into WP:N, but would certainly support efforts to incorporate the inclusion of other important aspects. --Kevin Murray 01:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I have no objection to a guideline on the subject either (e.g. we have WP:WINAD as policy even) but if it's not an (intended) guideline it needs a new name. WP:NOT WikiNews is de facto policy, at any rate, and should go without saying. >Radiant< 08:31, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
As I have argued above in the section "Rejecting this proposal", this proposal is not like WP:WINAD. Whereas WP:WINAD addresses the content of articles, this proposal targets the nature of their sources, irrespective of article content. I agree about the name change. Leaving it as "Notability (news)" could create the false impression that this is an official corollary of the other notability guidelines. Also, if this is made into an essay, this version of the page should still exist as a record (i.e., we shouldn't move this page to a new title and simply replace the current tags with {{essay}}). -- Black Falcon 16:20, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Archive 1
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