Ok, fair enough. Britta touches on some of the issues, but not in its entirety. Notability is about a) requiring there be at least one reliable third party sour

Ok, fair enough. Britta touches on some of the issues, but not in its entirety. Notability is about a) requiring there be at least one reliable third party source (so that the article has a chance of containing verifiable information) and b) ensuring that there is some limit on the scope of Wikipedia. It is this latter one that is the key facet. Whilst Notability is closely related to Verifiability it is not quite in the way britta cast it, but rather related to requiring the material used to define a subject notable (i.e. a significant claim to importance) is verifiable. i.e. the relationship works the opposite way. I was intending to be using a different example, but you took me to mean the Diggnation example: this is my fault, I should have been more clear Ah, my apologies, I'm reading quickly as it is a busy day. Please don't get me wrong; the issue you highlight is a major problem, one I have raised a few times internally with the community. But there has been no easy resolution. It's worth noting that the reliable sources policy explicitly notes that reliability hinges on not only the publisher but also the content and the author. If an author is seen to lack the qualifications, or has a bad reputation, these factor into consideration. With that said; a lot of Wikipedians don't know this. A problem I run into constantly when discussing sources ("Well, it was published by the NYT's so it doesn't matter what their reputation is"). It's not the policy at fault there, but the lack of interest of our own community in the rules... "that dude at Wired that finds this stuff gets him readers" is not somehow more trustworthy than the place he got the information from... The intent of the policies (and bear in mind what I say above as to how much that holds up..) is that the secondary source is used to filter what in the primary material is considered important to the wider community. To take an example: when Microsoft released Windows 8 there was quite an extensive list of new features. Simply recording that isn't what Wikipedia aims to do, instead you would use secondary sources to highlight the new features that were considered by "experts" to be important, groundbreaking or otherwise worth a comment (of course, the full feature list would be linked to as well). I'm not arguing this policy is perfect, nor that it doesn't break down in the scenario you cite, but it does have a solid basis. One other policy is that Wikipedia does not have firm rules (for this very reason) and so you could say that making a convincing argument such as you have should keep the material out. In principle this works, in practice it doesn't but only because of the community dynamics (a whole other problem!). while it means there is some possibility that the information was gathered in a way that we should indirectly trust, as we can't see it we can't verify it, and it is honestly not in any way better than if some random person on Wikipedia just asserted it to us... To an extent it does. Because the reporter who you cite has his/her real name attached to the article and has a public reputation to uphold.