Wikipedia:Notability is not everything

This is an essay on notability and the deletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

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This page in a nutshell: A subject's notability is not the end-all be-all in deletion discussions.

Deletion discussions and !votes at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion generally center on whether or not an article's subject is notable to determine whether the article should be kept, deleted, or something else. However, notability is not everything. Wikipedia's deletion policy says that there are a minimum of fourteen criteria that can be met for Wikipedia content to be deleted, of which only one is directly concerned with the subject's notability. In other words, there are over a dozen reasons for content to be deleted that do not care if the article's subject is notable.

Wikipedia has three core content policies: Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:No original research. These three policies, along with Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, define whether or not any content is acceptable to be included in the encyclopedia. Articles that violate one or more of these policies may be deleted at AfD regardless of whether the article's subject is notable, and the subject having notability should not be treated as a trump card in deletion discussions. In other words, policy concerns do not magically disappear when the subject is notable.

Wikipedia:Notability is a content guideline designed to determine whether or not a certain subject warrants having a standalone Wikipedia article dedicated to it. Topics are presumed to merit standalone articles if they meet the general notability guideline or a subject-specific notability guideline and are not something that Wikipedia:is not.

An article's subject being non-notable is the most common reason for article deletion. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion lists four policies and guidelines that most commonly inform deletion discussions: Notability, Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and What Wikipedia is Not. The AfD homepage also has detailed instructions for divining whether or not a subject is notable.

Point eight is the only reason of the fourteen that explicitly deals with the subject's notability. It can be argued that points six and seven are also related to notability, as a non-notable subject likely has few or no reliable sources discussing it (and hoaxes, neologisms, and original research certainly do not). However, those points are specifically talking about the following policies and guidelines: Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Do not create hoaxes, Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary#Neologisms, and Wikipedia:Verifiability. These are separate from an article's notability.

Of the remaining eleven reasons to delete something from Wikipedia, some are not relevant to AfD and notability as they concern categories, files, templates, etc., which are unrelated to notability as they are not standalone articles. The remaining reasons focused on articles cite other policies and guidelines as their rationale for deletion: Wikipedia:Speedy deletion, Wikipedia:Copyright violations, Wikipedia:Vandalism, Wikipedia:Spam, Wikipedia:Content forks, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons, and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. An article violating any of these policies or guidelines might be brought to AfD if it cannot be improved.

Content on Wikipedia must comply with the relevant policies and guidelines regardless of whether or not something is notable. Any edits or articles that do not meet Wikipedia's core content policies are likely to be challenged or removed, even if they concern a notable topic. An article that meets the notability requirement but has multiple other reasons to be deleted may still be deleted. Notability should not be treated as carte blanche to ignore other policies and guidelines that indicate an article is unencyclopedic.

An otherwise obscure accused serial killer might receive extensive, significant coverage in reliable sources for something they allegedly did, but the BLP policy on criminal accusations states that editors must seriously consider not including material in any article that suggests the person has committed, is suspected of, is a person of interest in, or is accused of having committed a crime, unless a conviction has been secured for that crime. If the article goes into detail about the accusations, arguing that the accused's Wikipedia page violates WP:BLPCRIME is a valid argument for deletion despite the accused being notable.^{[note 1]}

A correct and coherent theory of everything that came to you in a dream is almost certainly notable, but without reliable sources discussing and verifying your theory's existence, your edit BLARing the Theory of everything article to Combined Physical Theory will be reverted and your Combined Physical Theory article will be deleted, not for its lack of notability (remember that it's true and will solve physics forever), but for it being original research/unverifiable.

Alternatively, your Combined Physical Theory article might have reliable sources verifying its existence, but it still might be deleted/redirected/turned into a stub if it hasn't yet been scientifically verified, as Wikipedia is not a crystal ball and can't predict that the theory will be proven correct.

Caesar DePaço is a Portuguese businessman. DePaço sued the WMF in Portuguese court in 2021 over material on his English and Portuguese Wikipedia articles. In August 2025, the Portuguese courts ruled in favor of DePaço and the content was removed from his article as an office action. The article was subsequently BLARed, restored, and nominated for deletion. The nomination led with an assertion that DePaço's notability was not in question, but the court-ordered removal of content made the article unable to comply with Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and that the article should be deleted as a consequence.

The deletion discussion was closed as no consensus. The discussion reaffirmed that DePaço is indeed a notable person, but opinions diverged on whether NPOV was being violated, and if so, what to do about it. A number of proposals were put forward; consensus emerged to put an ambox highlighting the court-induced NPOV concerns on the article and to indefinitely apply extended-confirmed protection to the article, while no consensus was reached on whether or not the article should be blanked in protest of the decision.

As DePaço's notability was never in question, the notability guideline took a backseat to the NPOV policy throughout the discussion. NPOV is not a policy that is mentioned in the 14 reasons for deletion, but reasons for deletion are not limited to those 14.

Over 93,000 articles on Wikipedia were created by the user Lugnuts, more articles than any other editor.^{[note 2]} Most of these articles sat for years as little more than stubs. This led to Lugnuts having his autopatrolled right revoked at ANI in April 2021. Lugnuts was banned by the Arbitration Committee in August 2022. Two requests for comment concerning subsets of Lugnuts' creations have since taken place, one concerning Olympians and another concerning cricketers. Consensus emerged in both RfCs that the articles should be moved to draftspace as regardless of whether or not an individual athlete was notable, 1) you can't mass-delete hundreds of articles at the village pump, and 2) the existence of thousands of microstubs in mainspace is disruptive to the project.

In February 2022, five microstub articles created by Lugnuts about Danish international footballers with the surname Nielsen were nominated for deletion. Each footballer had fewer than 25 caps for Denmark. The nominator cited Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information and the general notability guideline as their rationale. Following some discussion, the nomination was then expanded to include a total of 19 Danish footballers meeting the same criteria; all 19 articles were created by Lugnuts in less than one hour.

The result of the discussion was no consensus and the nominator/interested parties were encouraged to consider draftifying the articles instead. Many !keep voters cited WP:NFOOTY (which is neither a policy nor a guideline) and procedural issues with the nomination. The primary rationale for !delete voters was that the articles violated NOTDATABASE. The general notability guideline was also brought up by !delete voters, but consensus that the articles violated GNG collectively did not form. Today, 16 of the articles redirect to List of Denmark men's international footballers (1–24 caps), one (Arno Nielsen) is a redlink, and two (Flemming Nielsen (footballer, born 1954) and Allan Nielsen (footballer, born 1953)) remain as standalone stub-class articles that have slightly more content than the average Lugnuts microstub.

Les Misérables is a highly notable work which has gained commercial success as a musical. In July 2007, an article dedicated solely to the plot of Les Miz was nominated for deletion. The nominator did not make any comments about the subject's notability, instead highlighting that the article violated the plot summary section of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.

The result was delete. Delete !voters made no major attempt to claim that the plot of Les Miz was not notable, instead generally agreeing that Wikipedia should not have articles dedicated solely to summarizing a work's plot. Many keep !voters cited Wikipedia:Ignore all rules as rationale, apparently aware that the notability of Les Miz doesn't warrant its plot having a standalone article. Today, Plot of Les Misérables is a blue link, but redirects to the plot section of the main article.

• Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions

• WP:ITSNOTABLE, the most relevant ATA to this essay

• Wikipedia:But it's true!