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Wikipedia:Source assessment

{{Shortcut|WP:SOURCEASSESS|WP:SOURCEEVAL}}

This is a place to collect sources and assess the notability of subjects that do not (yet) have an article on Wikipedia, or whose article was deleted. If a subject isn't notable yet, a source assessment page is still appropriate: new sources may pop up in the future, but sources you find today may become harder to find due to link rot, so having a list of sources can be helpful in this case. It's also nice if editors don't have to dig up all the sources from a deleted article all over again when new sources surface and the subject becomes notable. When a user asks why a certain subject doesn't have an article, linking to a source assessment (or suggesting the creation of one) can also be helpful.

The idea for this was first suggested on the idea lab village pump (and now boldly created).

For all source assessment pages, see Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Source assessment/.

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Scope

Examples of when a source assessment page can be useful:

  • An article or draft for the subject has been created multiple times by different people. A source assessment page can be used to show people why a subject is not notable.
  • If a subject could somewhat plausibly become notable, a source assessment page is helpful to keep track of sources. This may be interpreted fairly broadly: for example a few interviews in notable magazines or media with tens of millions of views total. No, we're still not interested in your garage band. Keep WP:PROMO in mind.
  • For subjects that already have an article a source assessment page is sometimes useful. It can be used to organize and filter sources you've found before adding them to the article. It can also be used to keep track of bad sources that should not be added to the article.

Guidelines

  • Create a subpage of this page for the subject that needs to be assessed.
  • Add {{tl|Workpage}} at the top.
  • Avoid describing the subject in detail on this page. These are not drafts or articles. You can say what it is in one line ("ACME is an American company which makes household cleaning products.") but don't describe why they are notable. Avoid summarizing the sources you link, unless that's needed to show what they contribute to notability.
  • Don't make the subpage look like an article and avoid images.
  • Use {{tl|SAT}} and {{tl|SA}} or, for simpler cases, make a bulleted list of sources. You can create multiple headers and move items from the list from one header to another to order them.
  • Using citation templates rather than bare links is useful, to give context for the source and to help if the link breaks.

Assessing sources

The WP:SIRS rubriq from WP:NCORP (Significant? Independent? Reliable? Secondary?) may be helpful as a structured assessment of sources.

{{Excerpt|Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies)|How to apply the criteria}}

See also

Category:Wikipedia workpages