Wikipedia:Availability

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This is a proposed replacement or Wikipedia:Notability, in order to clarify and avoid confusion. Mainly it's a renaming, but it's intended to clear up a lot of misunderstandings that make notability such a problem.

In journalism, there's an old maxim that you can't always write the story you want to, you have to write the story you have the sources for. Wikipedia, with its reliance on material that can be attributed to a reliable source, is no different. We can only have articles on topics for which reliable sources are available. If sufficient reliable sources do not exist, Wikipedia shouldn't have an article on the topic. If they do, why the hell not?

Previously, topics which were considered too obscure to have sufficient sources for coverage in Wikipedia would fall under the banner of Notability. The problem with this is the other implications of that term -- the concepts of importance, or prominence, or historical significance -- that are subjective and inconsistently applied. Futher, it leads to confusion with outsiders who believe that a subject they consider notable ought to have an article, not realizing that there are no sources available which meet our standards. This proposal is an attempt to clarify things, and bring the guidelines used for deletion more in line with both basic policy and common usage in the English language.

Wikipedia should have articles on subjects which have been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other.

Wikipedia should not have articles that fail this criterion, because everything we include must be attributable to a reliable source, and without available sources, whatever material we include will be unreliable or insufficient to constitute an encyclopedic article.

Subjects that pass this criterion ought to be included, because Wikipedia is not paper. There is no limit on how many subjects we may cover. Importance and significance are not bars for inclusion because they are subjective and we have no reason to impose them as limits.

There are several ways to show a subject meets this criterion. The best way is to cite the sources when creating the article. However, even when this isn't done, it can be obvious that important or significant subjects are likely to have already been covered in reliable sources that we just have yet to go out and cite.

(Other criteria, adapted from notability, would go here.)

Other criteria indicate that the sources are likely to exist, but if they don't show up, the article is still liable to be deleted.