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Comment by yichi | Hacker News Reader

Bands which sold 3 copies of their CD tend to have no reliable sources indicating its existance even, with no sources, how is anyone able to ensure that it even exists? (Perhaps I should of reworded that). Notability criteria in a nutshell, basically means, the subject of the article needs to be mentioned by some reliable source. If we had no notability criteria, then we simply have no ways to ensure that the subject of the article exists or even real.

Note: I'm pretty much summarizing what's on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N If you think I'm biased, please read the policy directly on Wikipedia itself.

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The notability criteria are rather stricter than that. There are plenty of individuals and nouns that assuredly exist but which are not "notable" according to Wikipedia. The criteria wording is "significant coverage" in outside sources, so not only does your band have to have one article written about them, but many, in different outside sources, before Wikipedia won't delete your entry.

Iirc, the multiple-sources requirement came in because of some cases where there was exactly one "reliable" article on a subject, but it was hilariously bad, like an article on a fringe physics theory in some popular-press magazine that made the mistake of taking it seriously, or an article on a person that paints them in a very negative light. So the worry is that without more that one source, Wikipedia just amplifies bias by parroting what one source says, because the one source gets cited, but the rebuttals don't exist in a citeable form. That can happen with more sources too, but at least there's more chance of sources disagreeing when they're >1.

Despite it being phrased as "notability", to me it's the "verifiability" requirement that's a better argument: there should only be Wikipedia articles on things where there exist enough good sources to write a reasonably well sourced article. That's more of a pragmatic than a philosophical decision; not "this subject deserves/doesn't-deserve an article", but rather "we have/don't-have enough sources to write a good article about this subject".

That's an apologist revisionism take on what Wikipedia notability criteria is.

That is why the notability criteria came into existence, but it most assuredly isn't wielded like that any more.

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