Misplaced Pages

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The following is a proposed Misplaced Pages policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption.

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This essay is a proposition for being a guideline. It attempts to demonstrate both the proposed guideline, and justify the need for such guidelines.

Many wikipedians have debated the issue of notability, or more precicely where to draw the line between what articles to keep and which to throw out. This policy discusses the meaning of notability in the context of Misplaced Pages, assesses the need for debating notability and advises caution in using notability as a criterion in and of itself.

Introduction

Non-notability is a shorthand used by some editors to describe articles whose subject has not achieved sufficient attention to enable editors to verify that it is covered neutrally. Above all, Misplaced Pages is an encyclopaedia, a collection of that which is already known and can be documented from reliable secondary sources.

Common problems advanced regarding articles on non-notable subjects include:

1. The may contain unverified or unverifiable information.
2. They might contain original research.
3. They might represent a biased point of view.
4. They might violate some other widely accepted policy or guideline such as the biographies guideline.
5. They might not be understandable to, or read by, a significant number of people.
6. They may not attract sufficient editors to keep the article up to quality.
7. They clutter categories.
8. They take up system resources.

Some of these are valid, others are not. Misplaced Pages is not paper and the fact that a subject is understandable or interesting only to a few people does not necessarily make it unencyclopaedic. We have numerous Wikiprojects which exist to maintain specialist content areas such as mathematics, history or even Pokémon. Sub-categories can be created for less important subjects. Note that in the end it is policy which matters, especially the fundemental pillars and the core policies of verifiability, neutrality and no original research. And although Misplaced Pages is not paper, there are plenty of other things it's not as well.

Soe reasons why non-notable subjects may not be a problem:

1. They may simply not violate any policies or guidelines.
2. Lack of apparent notability might indicate systemic bias
3. They may be interesting to more people than you think.
4. They may be reoccuring pages that, once deleted, reappear because editors repeatedly think an article should be written about the certain subject.
5. Lack of easy verifiability might be down to FUTON bias.
6. They may be stubs about significant subjects which can grow and improve over time.
7. Deleting non-notable articles may be a controversial and time-consuming procedure.
8. Deleting articles based on non-notability alone may cause some users to be frustrated with wikipedia.

Some of these might be valid reasosns for keeping an article, others might not. For example, we sometimes deliberately keep and expand articles on subjects from lesser-known parts of the world in order to counter our systemic bias. However many times an article on a crank theory is created, it will always remain a crank theory. While it is not our job to predict the future, it is our job to remove biased information that cannot be covered neutrally from reliable secondary sources.

Deleting "non-notable" information may also be seen as frustrating and punishing to (usually new) users for editing - don't bite the newbies!.

Ways of fixing non-notable articles

An article on a non-notable subject can go one of a number of ways:

1. No solution can be had for articles on non-veriable subjects, or topics that directly violate official policy.
2. Articles that lack quality can be tagged as such - or readers can simply judge for themselves that a page is simply not written with the same standards as other articles - a suggested fix is to specially mark articles of quality, and also articles without quality.
3. Categories can be reorganized or further split off to form smaller more specific categories in which to place topics of any amount of fame.
4. System resources should almost never be considered when contemplating keeping information vs not keeping information.

These solutions are proposed to fix any potential problems associated with having articles of varying quality and size on wikipedia - as is the case notwithstanding non-notable articles. Articles are in some cases said to not be able to be written in a NPOV fashion; this can be fixed. Articles on things which "will be significanct one day" may fall foul of wikipedia is not a crystal ball - judge the subject, as it is known now outside Misplaced Pages, not the current or potential content.

One exception is living people - these articles require careful handling, and articles which are uncomplimentary and hard to verify should be fixed or deleted as soon as possible.

See {{sofixit}}

Be bold! Edit the article so that it establishes the importance of the subject. Let's say you come across this stub:

Eric Moussambani is a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea.

Verifiable, factual, neutral, but fails to make any claim of notability. But we know there is more to it than that! How about expanding it to read:

Eric "The Eel" Moussambani is a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who achieved worldwide fame after finishing in the slowest time ever recorded in the Men's 100m Freestyle finals at the 2000 Summer Olympics. Moussambani had never seen a 50m pool before the competition.

The subject is notable! The problem is gone.

Merging

One is encouraged to merge that information which is verifiable, and verifiably significant, onto a main article - so as to make the information easier to find and easier to manage. Once a main article gets too large, its component peices can be split off to form their own articles (forking), although there are some restrictions on this. Leave a redirect behind, with the page history, to comply with GFDL.

However, if there is a significant amount of information that would put undue weight on the main article, it might be better too keep the information on separate pages (although note that sometimes the existence of a separate article in and of itself constitutes undue weight, for example in the case of a minor theory with few adherents).

Userfying

Articles about garage bands whose lead singer matches the name of the user who created the article are a common occurrence on Misplaced Pages - possibly the most common source of non-notable content. These can be moved to the user's space by any editor and the remaining redirect tagged for speedy deletion as a cross-namespace redirect. You can leave a polite notice such as {{nn-userfy}} to explain what you did, and why (and don't forget to {{welcome}} them!).

Transwiki

Some things which have no place in an encyclopaedia can find a happy home in a sister project such as wikibooks.

Tagging for cleanup

The {{importance}} template is one of many standard templates which can be applied to an article which does not establish its importance. See the cleanup resources page for more details of these.

Deleting

By consensus, if an article fails to assert the importance of its subject then it can be deleted, speedily or via proposed deletion or articles for deletion. This is a last resort and should only be used if the subject of the article is the problem, rather than the article's content. Always try to fix content before deleting a subject.

Non-notability is not

Because they often overlap, and because it is sometimes carelessly used, non-notability is often assumed to be equivalent to one or more of the following defenciencies which are not allowed on Misplaced Pages for their own, individual reasons. When deciding an article's worthiness for Misplaced Pages, be sure the article is judged against these specific problems.

Non-verifiable

All information on Misplaced Pages must be written from an accessible and reliable source. While non-verfiable information is often not notable either (such as what I have in my pocket), in many casess non-notable information is verifiable. For example, Qubit Field Theory is a little known quantum theory but is certainly verifiable. Something is verifiable only if it can be substantiated from reliable sources. If the only source about something is its promoter and their press releases, it is not verifiable. Look for mutiple non-trivial mentions in independent academic or mainstream publications: it must be verifiable from reliable secondary sources.

Neutral

Neutrality is non-negotiable. By extension we must not give undue prominence to minor points of view. We must therefore be able to verify that a subect is covered neutrally.

An article may not include information that arbitrarily favors one side or another. However, point of view in non-notable articles (like in notable articles) is most often written by an editor who has knowledge or interest in the subject, and may contain intended or unintended bias. This is a fixable problem, and biased non-notable articles can just as easily be corrected as notable biased articles - provided that the subject has been covered widely enough that there is informed discussion available for reference.

Non-encyclopedic

In a paper encyclopedia, non-notable topics were not included for practical purposes. Misplaced Pages, however, is a very different model not confined by this limitation. Therefore, what is non-encyclopedic in Encyclopædia Britannica is not neccessarily non-encyclopedic here. As defined by a dictionary, an encyclopedia is marked by covering the span of human knowledge. An encyclopedic article on Misplaced Pages is one that is both verfiable and NPOV, but is not original research. Therefore, a non-notable article is not neccessarily a non-encyclopedic article on wikipedia, provided it can be independently verified.

System resources

The financial burden of storage space should not be considered when writing. Storage cost is approximately two million words per penny! Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber (who "maintain overall responsibility for all technical functions of the Foundation, including both hardware and software") has said: "'Policy' shouldn't really concern itself with server load except in the most extreme of cases; keeping things tuned to provide what the user base needs is our job." In the event that Misplaced Pages cannot support itself, a decision will be initiated by server technicians, not editors.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Notability/Proposal - A rejected proposal to not include non-notable articles
• Misplaced Pages:Notability - An essay on notability
• Category:Misplaced Pages notability criteria

• Misplaced Pages proposals