This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of

This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of a subject. I don't think it's best interpreted as a test for the importance of a subject, although I'll admit that some Wikipedians do view it that way, and some policy pages (especially older ones) seem to do so as well. To me the more defensible line is just that it's a test of whether there exist sufficient sources for an article with its information properly cited to be written at all. If there are halfway decent third-party sources, one can be written, of some kind of level of quality, transitively dependent on the quality of those sources. If there are no decent third-party sources at all, then there is no basis for writing an article, since Wikipedia articles are supposed to be verifiable, i.e. everything they claim should be cited to something other than Wikipedia itself (and not the personal knowledge of the Wikipedian who wrote the article, either). I wrote a longish essay arguing this in some more detail, that the 'verifiability' guideline has basically swallowed the 'notability' guideline in practice. But this leaves a gap of things that are clearly notable, but lack good sources about them. In that case Wikipedia is stuck between not covering a notable subject (bad), or covering it in an article that isn't properly cited (also bad). http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability... The reverse case, where a not-really-notable subject is covered because there are sources, I feel is less bad. If the external world is writing about a subject, then imo it's fine that Wikipedia summarizes what they have said about it. At the very least, many such things (like celebrity missing-child cases and vaporware tech companies and whatnot) are meta-notable for the media attention.