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.

Discussions and !votes at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion generally center on whether or not the article's subject is notable. However, notability is not everything. There are a minimum of fourteen criteria that can be met for content to be deleted, of which only a couple are related to notability. Moreover, just because an article is notable does not mean that the other criteria are to be ignored. Wikipedia's content policies determine whether or not material is acceptable in Wikipedia articles, and go above and beyond notability when making that determination.

Reasons for deletion

14 Reasons Why

Reasons for deletion include, but are not limited to, the following (subject to the condition that improvement or deletion of an offending section, if practical, is preferable to deletion of an entire page):

Content that meets at least one of the criteria for speedy deletion
Copyright violations and other material violating Wikipedia's non-free content criteria
Vandalism, including inflammatory redirects, pages that exist only to disparage their subject, patent nonsense, or gibberish
Advertising or other spam without any relevant or encyclopedic content
Content forks (unless a merger or redirect is appropriate)
Articles that cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources, including neologisms, original theories and conclusions, and hoaxes
Articles for which thorough attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed
Articles with subjects that fail to meet the relevant notability guidelines (WP:N, WP:GNG, WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:CORP, and so forth)
Articles that breach Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons
Redundant or otherwise useless templates
Categories representing overcategorization
Files that are unused, obsolete, or violate the non-free policy
Any other use of the article, template, project, or user namespace that is contrary to the established separate policy for that namespace
Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia

Analysis

Point eight is the only one of the fourteen that explicitly deals with notability. It can be argued that points six and seven are also related to notability, although those points are specifically talking about Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Do not create hoaxes, Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary#Neologisms, and Wikipedia:Verifiability. Of the remaining eleven points, some are not relevant to AfD as they concern categories, files, templates, etc., but those that do talk about articles cite other policies and guidelines as their rationale: Wikipedia:Speedy deletion, Wikipedia:Copyright violations, Wikipedia:Vandalism, Wikipedia:Spam, Wikipedia:Content forks, Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons, and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.

But it's notable!

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.

A hypothetical example

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]}

Examples

Caesar DePaço

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 deletion discussion reaffirmed that DePaço is notable, but the majority of discussion centered on whether or not the forced removal of information violated the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy. The discussion was closed with the article being kept, not blanked, extended-confirmed protected, and tagged with a banner highlighting the NPOV issues.

Danish footballers

Over 93,000 articles on Wikipedia were created by the user Lugnuts, many of which were little more than stubs. This led to Lugnuts having his autopatrolled right removed in April 2021 and to Lugnuts being banned by the Arbitration Committee in August 2022. Two requests for comment concerning subsets of Lugnuts' creations have since taken place.

In February 2022, five Danish international footballers with the surname Nielsen, each with less than 25 caps for Denmark, were nominated for deletion citing Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information and the general notability guideline. The nomination was then expanded to include a total of 19 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, with many delete !votes citing NOTDATABASE in addition or in place of notability concerns while many keep !votes procedurally opposed the nomination format instead of claiming that the articles were notable. Today, one of the 19 articles is a redlink, 16 redirect to List of Denmark men's international footballers (1–24 caps), and 2 have their own articles which have been expanded beyond their creation status.

Plot of Les Misérables

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 WP:NOTPLOT.

The article was deleted. Delete !votes highlighted, correctly, that the topic was notable, yet did not merit inclusion as a standadlone article. Many keep !votes cited Wikipedia:Ignore all rules as rationale, with some claiming that the plot was in and of itself notable separate from the work, but these arguments were found unconvincing by the closer.

Notes

^ There are plenty of alternatives to deletion in this situation, so don't rush to !vote delete, either.

[1] There are plenty of alternatives to deletion in this situation, so don't rush to !vote delete, either.

[note 1]