Wikipedia:Notability and due weight
 | This is an essay on WP:NNC and WP:DUE. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: While notability guidelines do not directly apply to article content, the principles they're based on are often relevant for evaluating due weight, and efforts to cite them in discussions should be seen in that light. |
Wikipedia's notability guidelines are widely known and often have snappy, easy-to-remember wikilinks. Because of these things, people often cite them outside deletion discussions, leading to objections that notability guidelines do not apply within articles.
This is certainly true as far as it goes; those guidelines were written with deletion discussions in mind, and weren't originally intended to apply outside of that context. Article content discussions often involve more nuanced decision because there are a wider variety of ways to address due weight issues beyond just inclusion or exclusion.
However, that doesn't mean that notability guidelines are totally inapplicable to article content discussions. At heart, most of them are about evaluating two things: whether we have enough sources to even cover something in a neutral fashion, and whether it is worthy of notice.
Both of these questions are also pertinent to evaluating WP:DUE weight. Therefore, when someone cites a notability guideline in a content discussion, it should usually be evaluated in that light. The threshold for including a mere sentence or paragraph or even a section on a topic within an article is certainly lower than that needed to devote an entire article to it, but the same broad tests can still provide some guidance; and while they might not be perfect measures, most notability guidelines are time-worn and easy to evaluate at a glance as a way of providing a basic intuition of how much attention an aspect might be due.
For example, demonstrating WP:SIGCOV (a lot of information about) or WP:SUSTAINED (not just what's in the news right now) coverage are good ways to demonstrate that something is due more weight; likewise, WP:ROUTINE coverage or coverage that is not WP:DIVERSE (more than just the usual sources repeating the same few things) might not support giving an aspect much weight. In discussions over due weight, these are not red lines the way they often are for notability, since the threshold for including a brief mention is lower, but they're still valuable, and it's appropriate to cite them in arguments.