User:Fiftytwo thirty/sandbox

This page gives some rough guidelines intended to be used by Wikipedia editors to decide whether a book, periodical, or other published, non-electronic, work should or should not have an article on Wikipedia. While satisfying these notability guidelines generally indicates a published work warrants an article, failing to satisfy them is not a criterion for speedy deletion.

These guidelines may be considered a specialized version of Wikipedia:Notability, applied to all published works reflecting the core Wikipedia policies, including the following:

• Wikipedia articles must not be vehicles for advertisement
• Verifiability
• No original research
• Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
• Wikipedia is not a crystal ball

Claims of notability must adhere to Wikipedia's policy on verifiability; it is not enough to simply assert that a work meets a criterion without substantiating that claim with reliable sources.

"Notability" as used herein is not a reflection of a work's worth. A work may be brilliantly written, fascinating and topical, while still not being notable enough to ensure sufficient verifiable source material exists to create an article in an encyclopedia.

Coverage notes

Though the concepts of books and periodicals are widely defined, this guideline does not yet provide specific notability criteria for the following types of publications: comic books; graphic novels (although it does apply to manga); music-specific publications such as instruction and notation books and librettos; and exam prep books. Specific guidelines may be developed. Until then, this guideline may be instructive by analogy.

The criteria set forth below do not apply to any electronic works that are web based or otherwise hosted online. All internet content must abide by the notability criteria for web-specific content. Books in electronic form (or e-books), and electronic periodicals including newspapers, magazines, and journals, should abide by this guideline only if they are commercially published. Works that are published both traditionally and electronically and websites complementary to a publication are usually not worthy of a separate article on the electronic portion. For example, washingtonpost.com redirects to the publication it complements, The Washington Post.

Criteria

A work is generally notable if it verifiably meets through reliable sources, one or more of the following criteria:

1. The work has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works appearing in sources that are independent of the work itself, with at least some of these works serving a general audience. This includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books, television documentaries and reviews. Some of these works should contain sufficient critical commentary to allow the article to grow past a simple plot summary.
   • The immediately preceding criterion excludes media re-prints of press releases, flap copy, or other publications where the author, its publisher, agent, or other self-interested parties advertise or speak about the work.
2. The work has won a major award.
3. The work has been considered by reliable sources to have made a significant contribution to a notable motion picture, the visual and performing arts, events, political ideas, religious movements, the sciences, or other fields of study.
4. The work is the subject of instruction at multiple grade schools, high schools, universities or other higher education programs in any particular country.
5. The work's author or publisher is so historically significant that any written works written by the entity may be considered notable. This does not simply mean that the work's author is him/herself notable by Wikipedia's standards; rather, the work's author is of exceptional significance and the author's life and body of work would be a common study subject in literature classes.
6. The work is a reference work, and meets the separate guidelines.

Reference works

Reference works serve a very different function than other works and come to be published through very different processes than do works intended for the general public. They are often highly specialized, so a separate guideline is necessary. A reference work, defined as including dictionaries; encyclopedias; directories; almanacs, atlases, journals, handbooks, and yearbooks; collected biographies; and indexes; including both single volumes (e.g., dictionary); multi-volume sets (encyclopedias), or an indices (periodical indices) that are used for research more than as casual reading, is considered notable if:

1. They are cited by a significant number of other reliable sources and scholars for its informational content, and
2. There is at least one review of the work or other non-trivial source independent of the work itself that allows the article to grow beyond a simple summary.

It is also necessary to consider if the work was published by a reputable academic press.

Other considerations

Threshold standards

Books should have at a minimum an ISBN (for books published after 1975), and periodicals should have an ISSN (for magazines published after 1974). The work should be circulated at a dozen or more libraries and be catalogued by its country of origin's official or de facto national library. Note that periodicals in some countries do not regularly (or at all, in some cases) have ISSNs, though the publication may still be notable. There will be exceptions, works that are notable despite not meeting these threshold standards, but they will be rare and good reasons for the notability of such periodicals should be made very clear.

Self-publication

In this regard, it should be especially noted that self-publication and/or publication by a vanity press indicates, but does not establish non-notability. This would include fanzines and other similar publications. While there are some fanzines which would meet the criteria for inclusion (either the ones listed here, or other notability criteria), most are not going to be notable. By the same token, it should always weigh against an article's inclusion if the publisher or other interested party is the creator of the Wikipedia article. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, Wikipedia:Autobiography, and WP:NOTADVERTISING for more information. Exceptions do exist, such as Robert Gunther's Early Science in Oxford or Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane. Note however that both of these books would be considered notable by virtue (for instance) of criterion 1.

Not yet or newly published works

Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. Articles about works that are not yet published are strongly discouraged and such articles are only accepted under criteria other than those provided in this guideline, typically because the anticipation of the work is notable in its own right. In such cases there should still be multiple independent sources providing strong evidence that the periodical will be published, which sources include the title of the periodical and an approximate date of first publication.

Additionally, periodicals and other serialized works which have only been published for a short time generally do not meet the threshold for inclusion. Exceptions should be rare and accompanied by multiple independent sources showing notability for such a new publication.

Non-contemporary works

From a pragmatic standpoint, the vast majority of periodicals upon which articles are written which invite a notability judgment call and which find their way to articles for deletion, are from the modern era. Nevertheless, the notability of works published much earlier may occasionally be disputed and the criteria proposed above intended primarily for modern periodicals may not be as suitable. We suggest instead a more common sense approach which considers whether the periodical has been widely cited or written about, whether issues or content have been recently reprinted, the fame that the work enjoyed in the past and its place in the history of such publications.

Online bookstores

A book's listing at online bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.com or Amazon.com is not by itself an indication of notability as both websites are non-exclusionary, including large numbers of vanity press publications. There is no present agreement on how high a book must fall on Amazon's sales rank listing (in the "product details" section for a book's listing) in order to provide evidence of its notability or non-notability.

Derivative articles

It is a general consensus on Wikipedia that articles should not be split and split again into ever more minutiae of detail treatment, with each split normally lowering the level of notability. What this means is that while a book may be notable, it is not normally advisable to have a separate article on a character or thing from the book, and it is often the case that despite the book being manifestly notable, a derivative article from it is not. Exceptions do, of course, exist—especially in the case of very famous books. For example few would argue that Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol does not warrant a 'subarticle' on its protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge.

In some situations, where the book itself does not fit the established criteria for notability, or if the book is notable but the author has an article in Wikipedia, it may be better to feature material about the book in the author's article, rather than creating a separate article for that book.

If an articleis split, it should not become a fork article caterining to a single point of view. Wikipedia must maintain a neutral point of view.

Resources

• Clicking on any linked ISBN number on Wikipedia takes you to Special:Booksources where preformatted links for the specific book are provided, allowing access to multiple library catalogues, bookseller databases and other book resources.
• Library of Congress Online Catalog: A searchable database useful in identifying publisher, edition, etc.
• The British Library's online catalogue.
• The Literary Encyclopedia: 3300 profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics and references of 18,000 works.
• Norton anthology of world literature: Useful in the exploration of world literature.
• Worldcat: search for a book in library catalogues. Contains 1.8 billion items in 18,000 libraries worldwide.
• Questia Online Library , allows full-text search, and paid subscription reading access to 64,000+ books and 1,000,000+ journal, magazine, and newspaper articles in their collection. Their strength is full text of recent academic books by major publishers such as Oxford University Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Greenwood Press, along with thousands of older academic books that are available only in larger university libraries.

See also

• Wikipedia:Verifiability
• No original research
• Reliable sources
• Wikipedia:Cite sources
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Books
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels
• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books)