User:Vaticidalprophet/Notability and quality assessment

In discussions at AfD, GAN, or FAC, the idea sometimes comes up that quality assessment processes (good and featured articles) are unrelated to notability, or don't measure notability as part of the criteria. This is sometimes used to object to interpretations of their criteria, or to support deletion of articles which have passed such processes. While these ideas are popular, they fall apart when analysed in the context of how quality assessment processes work.

What is notability?
Under the general notability guideline, topics are presumed to be suitable for stand-alone articles when they have received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. This is further defined as:


 * "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content; it is not required by GNG that sources be about the subject, but it is required they discuss it in sufficient depth that an article can be written entirely by reference to them
 * "Reliability" is disputed at the borderlands, but generally refers to sources with some form of editorial control and fact-checking
 * "Sources" are defined as secondary (in practice, anything in tertiary sources has also appeared in secondary sources), and no minimum number is given except that there will "generally" be more than one

It is required on Wikipedia that editors only report what reliable sources have said. An article that contains content outside of this band is in violation of at least one of policy or guideline. An article on a subject that has not received significant coverage in usually-independent reliable sources, by definition, can only be one of:


 * A stub with very little content
 * Unsourced or unsourcable; containing substantial original research in the absence of actual sources
 * Biased or opinionated; unacceptably promotional or derogatory, due to use of unreliable or insufficiently independent sources

Articles in such a state, by definition, cannot pass quality assessment processes. Passing a quality assessment process is a strong suggestion that a subject possesses significant coverage in reliable sources.

This can seem arbitrary or capricious, but to understand it, it's worth thinking about why we have notability policies and why they're set up how they are. The purpose of notability is not to delete (or include) whimsically depending on a jobsworthy reading of a text, but to permit high-quality encyclopedic articles that are compliant with our policies and guidelines. The GNG is quite carefully written to exclude articles that couldn't be brought to such a state no matter how hard you tried. If an article is in such a state, and you have doubts about its notability, consider why.

Complex cases
Some forms of notability are not measured in this framework:


 * A very few subjects (e.g. species, geographical features) have a notability line that amounts to 'it exists'. Some such subjects may never be practically able to pass stub status. This is, however, mostly irrelevant to the quality-assessment issue.
 * A very few specific notability guidelines prescribe a higher standard than GNG, which will be discussed in greater depth later.
 * Academic notability is a special case. By the rules as written, it's occasionally possible for an academic to be notable without the use of independent sources.

This last case deserves further discussion. While most SNGs exist in a complicated quantum state with the GNG, NPROF is explicitly separate, and subjects can be notable on NPROF with no requirement to prove GNG. It is possible to write a GACR-compliant article on at least some NPROF-claiming subjects. Such articles are inherently on the least 'broad' end of GA criterion #3 (as little is known about their non-professional lives), but this is also true of some GNG-claiming subjects. This opens the question of the necessity of the independence criterion for writing GACR-compliant articles, and whether it's possible for a non-academic GA to be non-notable due to lack of independent sourcing.

"Independence" is the most complex GNG criterion, and the one hardest to reconcile with the media landscape as it exists (a large swathe of sources we treat as 'independent' for Wikipedia purposes are very likely not in reality). In practice, an NPROF-claiming subject with sufficient material to write a GA does have significant independent sourcing (to, for instance, confirm that awards the subject has received are actually prestigious, or that the subject has actually made a substantial intellectual impact), as explicitly required by the guideline -- otherwise it would be impossible to confirm that someone has done things worthy of note in their career, or to expand upon the nature of their work and views. The "bare-notable" NPROF passes aren't the ones with fleshed-out articles. The untested question is simply whether that sourcing passes "a strict/deletionist interpretation of GNG". In this sense, NPROF can be compared to WP:NBOOK, another SNG with a relatively low secondary-sourcing threshold as written. The purpose of these thresholds is not to sidestep sourcing requirements, but to stress less over them while Writing The Damn Article. We have a lot of quality-assessed articles on books -- must be one of those coincidences.