Wikipedia:WikiProject Beauty Pageants/Notability (beauty pageant participants)

This essay is used to help evaluate whether or not a participant in a beauty pageant is likely to meet the standards for notability, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia. The article must provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the pageant-specific criteria set forth below.

If the article does meet the criteria set forth below, then it is likely that sufficient sources exist to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article. Failing to meet the criteria in this essay means that notability will need to be established in other ways (e.g., the general notability guideline, or other, topic-specific, notability guidelines).

The meeting of any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be retained as a standalone article.

Applicable conventions
All information included in Wikipedia, including articles about beauty pageants and their participants, must be verifiable. See also Wikipedia's basic criteria for the notability of people and the General notability guideline. Information about living persons must meet stringent requirements for those types of articles.

Subjects that do not meet the pageant-specific criteria outlined in this essay may still be notable if they meet the General notability guideline or a subject specific notability guideline.

Basic criteria
A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has been the subject of multiple published non-trivial secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject. The criteria on this page are intended to reflect the fact that beauty pageant participants are likely to meet Wikipedia's basic standards of inclusion if they have, for example, won a major international or national competition at the highest level (such as Miss World).


 * Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion.
 * Primary sources may be used to support content in an article, but they do not contribute toward proving the notability of a subject.
 * Some sources must be used with particular care when establishing notability, and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Local sources must be clearly independent of the subject, and must provide reports beyond routine coverage.

Pageant-specific criteria
Winners of Big Four pageants are generally presumed to be notable.

Winners of the national-level pageants which select participants for the Big Four pageants are likewise generally presumed to be notable. Certain independent national-level or supra-national pageants such as Miss America and Miss Europe, by virtue of long establishment and widespread coverage, are also presumed to indicate notability in winners.

As in all subject-specific guidelines (this being an essay), this presumption of notability in line with the above is rebuttable and not a guarantee of notability.

Winners of sub-national level pageants or subsidiary awards (e.g., Miss Virgin Islands, Miss Congeniality, Miss World Beach Beauty) are usually not notable for such per se, even if they have won more than one. This does not stop them from passing the general notability guidelines for such if the coverage for such either reaches beyond local news coverage, or is substantial and persistent.

Beauty pageant participants who do not qualify for presumed notability under the above specific criteria may very well be notable under the general notability guidelines. (See, e.g. Honey Boo Boo)

Non-notable pageants, absent other general notability criteria, are often characterized by:


 * A single competition with no significant system of qualifying pageants
 * Primarily for the selection of a commercial or corporate mascot/model/spokesperson
 * Not a qualifying pageant for a higher level competition
 * Lack of longevity: either very new, or discontinued after a relatively short run
 * Minimal, local, or no television/media coverage

Note that there are pageants that may match some or all of the above criteria but would nonetheless pass the general notability guideline, such as Miss Tibet.