Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability

This is a WikiProject, an open group of Wikipedia editors. New participants are welcome; feel free to talk to us! Guide to WikiProjects Directory of WikiProjects

WikiProject Notability Welcome to WikiProject Notability! We are currently working on an enormous backlog of 215 months for 55,865 articles and need your help!

The Notability Project is a WikiProject based on Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability. The aim is to get more editors involved and to support those currently involved in fixing, merging, or deleting (as a last resort) apparently non-notable articles with the ultimate aim to correctly place all articles based on their verifiable notability. The project also aims to simplify the filtration process and explain it more clearly so as not to confuse newcomers and to encourage participation.

WikiProject Notability aims to sort articles of unclear notability by improving articles that are notable and then removing the notability tag. If the article is non-notable with no significant coverage in reliable sources found after searching and is inappropriate for a merge then deletion is sought by either Speedy deletion, Proposed deletion or Articles for deletion.

Articles assessed to be Featured articles or Good articles have already been carefully checked for notability, and to a lesser extent so have B class articles. Therefore, articles of unclear notability are mainly in the stub class, start class and to a lesser extent C class categories.

We welcome input from any editors who would like to help out, either on a regular basis, or one or two articles when you have time. The greatest contribution to the project is inviting members, as this helps build support and ensures that there are people to clear the backlog.

The chart below shows the recent history of the backlog. It includes articles not undergoing a deletion process that are tagged with {{Notability}} or a variant. At the beginning of the day (UTC) on 1 November 2026 there were:

• 55,388 articles with topics of unclear notability,a change of −2 since the day before

At the current average rate of 4 articles per day, it will take 13,847 days to clear the backlog, finishing on 29 September 2064. (raw data)

1. Find an article to work on. In Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability, every article appears, sorted alphabetically. Many editors choose to work on the oldest articles first, so that articles will not sit around too long in the category - for this, choose Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability. Alternatively, the to-do list at the top of this page should contain the very oldest set of articles. Or you could use Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability/Listing by project categories, listing articles by WikiProject.
   ::User:SD0001/shortdescs-in-category can be used to view short descriptions of pages in the categories – so that you can pick articles you're comfortable with.
2. Check to see if the article contains a copyright violation. There are a few red flags that indicate text was probably illegally copied into Wikipedia - this actually happens quite frequently. User:Kjkolb/Copyvio has a quick guide and you may also like to use copyscape.com or Earwig's Copyvio Detector for finding copyright violations. Instructions for reporting violations are at Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
3. Check to see if another article exists on the subject. If so, then you can consider merging that article to the original.
4. Find sources if none are cited in the article. Make full use of Google Books, Google News, Google Scholar, Google Web, JSTOR, LexisNexis, and any other search tools that you may have access to. Use variations on the article's title and other keywords from the article. The {{find}} template could be useful in this regard.
5. Evaluate! You can mainly use common sense, but please adhere to the guidelines of WP:BIO, WP:CORP, WP:BAND (from where the most frequent violations come), and other notability criteria. If the article meets notability requirements, or if the article simply needs expanding, remove the notability or importance tag and replace it with an appropriate tag. If not, the article might need to be deleted.
   1. Please use deletion as a last resort.
   2. If the article meets speedy deletion requirements, add the appropriate db tag.
   3. If the article should undeniably be deleted, add {{subst:prod|Your-reason-here}}, replacing "Your-reason-here" with an appropriate reason.
   4. If the article might encounter some controversy when being deleted, add {{subst:afd1}} and then proceed to follow the steps to file an AfD discussion.
   5. Do not remove the notability/importance tags during one of the above deletion procedures.
   6. If an article is kept as the result of an AfD discussion, the {{notability}} tag should be removed. {{importance}} tags indicate that some rewriting of the article is required and should not be removed until that has been done. However, if the result is "no consensus", retain all tags, as the issue is not decided.
6. Enhance your edit summary As soon as you are done sorting, add to your edit summary:

Sorted as part of the [[WP:WPNN|Notability wikiproject]]!

Please add your signature to the bottom of the list of project members.

There is a userbox that you can add to your user page once you join:

There is a template that you can add to a user's talk page to invite them to join this project:

{{WikiProject Notability Invite}}

displays as

We thought you might be interested in WikiProject Notability. Please join the WikiProject and help us to clear the backlog of articles.

• Wikipedia:Notability
• WikiProject Reliability
• WikiProject Stub improvement
• WikiProject Unreferenced articles