Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:45, 12 December 2005

This page documents an English Misplaced Pages guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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Please edit this proposal.

This page gives some rough guidelines which we might use to help decide if a website is notable, just as we have inclusion guidelines for bands and biographies.

It has been established that Misplaced Pages is not a web directory; in other words, the vast majority of websites and other web topics (eg forums, Internet memes, flash animations) probably do not deserve a Misplaced Pages entry. It is widely agreed that for a web topic to warrant an article it must in some way be notable (for example, Internet Movie Database or Slashdot). This page seeks to establish some criteria to define notability.

General guidelines for websites

A website's impact can be demonstrated by meeting one or more of the following criteria:

1. Having been the subject of national or international media attention;
2. A forum with more than 5,000 users that has made a verifiable impact beyond its own user community; or
3. Having an Alexa ranking of 10,000 or better.

Webcomics

A webcomic's impact can be demonstrated by meeting one or more of the following criteria:

1. Meeting any of the General guidelines for websites;
2. Having an Alexa ranking of 100,000 or better.
3. Having a printed collection listed at Amazon with a sales rank of 100,000 or better or being published in a paper or electronic magazine with a subscription of 5,000 or more (similar to the forum requirement of web sites);
4. Having a forum with 5,000 or more apparently unique members;
5. If a webcomic has been picked up by one of the large webcomic syndicates, it should be included. These include:
   • Keenspot
   • Blank Label Comics
   • Modern Tales and its sister sites: Serializer, Graphic Smash, and Girlamatic
   • Dayfree Press
   • Dumbrella
6. If a webcomic has won a significant award, it should be included. These include:
   • Eisner Award
   • Ignatz Award
   • Webby Award
   • Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards

Note: Alexa rankings over 10,000 may not be accurate due to problems with small sample size . Thus mid-range ranking may not reliably indicate traffic.

Other

1. The article in question must document the notability of the described web topic.
2. Articles describing websites or webcomics should contain information that makes them useful works of reference. For example, is the site important historically? For web comics, a comic that was first in its genre (sprite, manhua, gaming, etc.) would have historical importance and warrant an article.
3. National or international media attention means editorial content produced by a national or international news content provider, with particular weight given to off-line sources of news such as newpapers and national broadcasters. Links, advertisements, advertorials, and user-contributed material such as podcasts, blogs and comments after articles should normally be disregarded. The purpose of this filtering is to ensure that website promoters do not attempt to create references to their website in such media for the sole purpose of establishing notability.
4. 5,000 or more apparently unique members applies to forums which anonymous users can read. Forums which require a user to sign up to read or see messages should instead be gauged by the total number of postings. (A good rule of thumb is three times the number of unique members; so a forum with 5,500 members would need 16,500 posts.)
5. Discussions of websites should be incorporated (with a redirect if necessary) into an article about the parent organization, unless the domain-name of the website is the most common way of referring to the organization. For example, yahoo.com is a redirect to Yahoo!. On the other hand Drugstore.com is a standalone page.
6. Website which are not notable for the point of view of an article, may well be worth a section or paragraph in an article about their syndicate, artist or some other article, and a redirect would be acceptable.
7. The following subjective criteria can be used to justify websites or webcomics:

a An established site or comic which has set a trend. Example: Bob and George, while not the first sprite comic, did inspire many others.

b Having an impact in the "real world." Example: Okashina Okashi has their comics used in the Republic of China, Singapore, and mainland China to teach students English.

c Created by exceptionally notable persons (this primarily applies to web comics).

• Subject-specific notability criteria