User:Thparkth/Exceptional Notability

Our notability policies and guidelines help us assess notability in general cases, but exceptional cases do exist. We should invoke exceptional notability in cases where our policies and guidelines contradict common sense, or work against the fundamental principles of the project.

The purpose of "notability"
Policies do not exist for their own sake, or for the satisfaction of those involved in writing them. Meeting notability policy is not a goal in its self, but simply a means of addressing whether the article will be pragmatically useful inside Wikipedia.

An article is pragmatically useful if it:


 * Will be of interest to a non-zero number of readers. There is no point in having an article that no one will ever want to read.
 * Will be of interest to a non-zero number of active editors on an ongoing basis. There is no point in having an article that is of so little interest that no one updates it, corrects it, or protects it from vandalism.
 * Can be written using information from reliable sources. If it can't be, it is inherently original research, and we don't do that.

The whole complex mechanism of notability policy is designed only to ensure a positive answer to those three questions. If an article does meet all three of these criteria, it will be pragmatically useful to have, regardless of whether it formally meets notability policy.

Remember that notability is distinct from verifiability. Every article must be about a verifiable topic, or there is no way to be sure that it is not a hoax or otherwise made up.

WP:NOTABILITY vs being actually notable
When we as Wikipedians say, "this is not notable" we do not use the word in its common sense. We specifically mean that it does not meet the notability criteria as written, which generally means that it lacks sufficient non-trivial coverage in independent sources. This leads to an odd disconnect with the real world in some exceptional circumstances.

Here is a silly example. An asteroid hits the Earth. 99.5% of the population is wiped out. Civilization collapses. Three hundred years of human scientific progress is essentially lost. There are no TV or radio stations, there are no newspapers, and there are no publishers. By an amazing act of foresight and sacrifice, Jimbo Wales has managed to save and protect a copy of the English Wikipedia article database, and enough computer hardware to put together a functioning instance of the site. He and a number of other Wikipedian survivors manage to forage a generator, fuel, and everything else needed to bring everything up, so that they can begin to access and disseminate the large percentage of human knowledge that they alone possess.

As they sit around in the rubble of a fallen San Francisco, warming themselves around a fire of scavenged ceiling tiles, Jimbo cautiously raises a question that has been on his mind.

"Should we add an article about... all this? About the asteroid, and the impact, and all the deaths, and what happened?"

One of the other Wikipedians glares at him. "You're kidding, right? There's no way that would meet the WP:GNG. No reliable sources."

"Yeah," agrees another. "Sorry Jimbo... it's just not notable."

Finally consider controversies like Old Man Murray. In this infamous deletion debate, Wikipedians voted to delete a verifiable article on the grounds that it was not notable. In other words, the problem with the article was that no one was likely to care about it sufficiently to make it pragmatically useful. But people did care - dozens of new people made their first edit at the subsequent DRV, asking us to keep the article because of its significance to them. Yet, despite the overwhelming pragmatic evidence that this was notable in the real world - the deletion discussion itself received mainstream news coverage - a large number of experienced Wikipedians wanted to endorse the deletion on the basis that the article was not notable according to policy.

We should never privilege policy-notability over real-world notability. That is the definition of bureaucratic creep.

Anything that a comprehensive encyclopedia should contain, can be assumed to be notable
Geology. Childbirth. Love.

There are some topics that are obviously-necessary entries in a comprehensive encyclopedia. The good news is that for the most part, we already have reasonably-good articles on these topics.

Still, this formulation is useful for providing an alternate perspective on notability questions. Instead of a topic belonging in the encyclopedia because it meets notability policy, it is possible to say that if the topic inherently belongs in an encyclopedia, then it must be permissible under notability policy. If notability policy fails to deliver this result, then the policy is at fault.

Anything that affects large numbers of people, can be assumed to be notable
If aliens invade London and begin slaughtering the inhabitants, that is a notable event from the start. It has exceptional notability, and we should have an article about it as quickly as it can pass WP:VERIFY.