User:Jytdog/NCORP news

The notability guideline for organizations (called ORG or NCORP) is used to judge the notability of nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

On March 22, 2018, an RfC adopting a major revision of NCORP was closed (permalink), and was implemented later that day. The revision focused on the description of what kinds of sources are useful for demonstrating notability. Earlier efforts had focused on the qualities of the organization itself (for example, the discussion here) but those efforts failed to gain consensus. The idea started emerging of focusing on a better explanation of the kinds of sources that should be used in notability discussions, and in late January Renata, who had made only one prior comment in the series of discussions, provided the first draft of what came to be adopted. (It is just remarkable how things like this emerge from the editing community.)

The new content includes the self-explanatory lead: "These criteria, generally, follow the general notability guideline with a stronger emphasis on quality of the sources to prevent gaming of the rules by marketing and public relations professionals. The guideline, among other things, is meant to address some of the common issues with abusing Wikipedia for advertising and promotion. As such, the guideline establishes generally higher requirements for sources that are used to establish notability than for sources that are allowed as acceptable references within an article."

As it always has, this section emphasizes that the notability of an organization is judged based on there being: The revision explains what each of those elements means in greater detail, and provides examples of sources that are not useful for demonstrating notability -- that fail one of those criteria.
 * substantial discussion of the organization
 * in multiple
 * reliable sources
 * that are actually independent and
 * secondary.

Our mission is to provide the public with articles that summarize accepted knowledge, working in a community that is open to anybody. That mission remains as ludicrous as it ever was, yet the editing community has been surprisingly successful at realizing it. This in turn has led to Wikipedia being used by ... pretty much everybody, as a first stop when they want to learn about something. Our very success has also led to a perception that Wikipedia is a crucial platform for promoting organizations, people, products, etc..

The community has struggled with how to maintain the mission in the face of promotional abuse, and the issues have been endlessly discussed. Raising NCORP and other notability standards has been a common refrain in those discussions. We've done this one; there is more work to do along these lines.

Additionally -- Wikipedia's written policies and guidelines are only valid to the extent that they are the expression of the living consensus of the editing community and to the extent that they are practiced, day to day. With regard to NCORP, please keep the clarifications of this guideline in mind when creating or evaluating new articles, and especially in deletion discussions.