> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject. So what? Importance of a subject is not what WP is trying to fi

> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject. So what? Importance of a subject is not what WP is trying to filter. Wikipedia wants to contain all the important knowledge, yes, but that's impossible to measure or agree on, so there is a set of criteria that act as a reasonable proxy, and you need to accept that the Wikipedia we've got is the one that has those filters. So it goes something like this: content in wikipedia should be "NPOV", it should not be original research (i.e. WP aims to be a tertiary source), and content should be "verifiable". These terms in turn need to be refined, defined, given guidelines, etc. (For example, nothing is truly NPOV, so we need a way to understand how to approximate it, and for example, not all verification is equal (and nothing is perfectly verifiable), so we need guidelines again.) And, as sibling comments have pointed out, there is NOT a preference for "press coverage" and "established media". It's one permitted alternative. > "expert opinion ... like Hacker News and Reddit" I assume that you were joking, or making some nuanced point that I missed, but just in case you weren't... Listen, they let ME write comments on Hacker News and Reddit, you know. They also let experts write at such places, it's true, but how will you know the difference? Yes, there's lots of expert opinion in the world, including e.g. some on HN, but so what? Citations aren't any good if they don't bring some kind of authority, and "some guy said so on HN" is not very convincing. There are certainly circumstances in which a comment on HN can qualify for WP:RELIABLESOURCES . There's lots of good reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About , but if you're trying to "get something done" today, it's too much to read at one sitting. You've gotta just accept that, but then again you shouldn't be trying to "get something done" on wikipedia in a given day.