Wikipedia:What is significant coverage?
"Significant coverage" is an important concept in Wikipedia's general notability guideline (GNG) and other notability guidelines. To contribute to a topic's notability, sources are required to provide significant coverage. This page covers how this concept is generally interpreted in practice.
Official definition
The WP:GNG does not technically define significant coverage; there is no statement saying "Significant coverage is books, articles, and other publications that _____ and _____". However, it describes the results as follows:
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
- The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial coverage of IBM.
- Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
Some other notability guidelines provide additional details. Particularly, the guideline for companies and organizations, typically viewed as a more restrictive version of GNG, has a section on significant coverage.
Unofficial interpretations
Wikipedia editors have widely differing interpretations about how much detail is required for a source to qualify as significant coverage, with deletionists tending to have higher standards than inclusionists. The essay Wikipedia:One hundred words argues that sources with at least 100 words of coverage of a topic generally count.
Examples
| Source | Intended article | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| IBM: Colossus in Transition by Robert Sobel | IBM | A book whose main topic is IBM. You could write dozens of paragraphs about the company from this one book alone. Definitely significant coverage. |
| The same book, specifically the single paragraph describing a discussion two men had about Jacquard loom technology, which was one of several things that inspired punched card computers | Jacquard loom | A nice story about computing history, but it doesn't actually say much about Jacquard weaving technology. You could use it to write one or two sentences about the weaving technology. It's an important moment in the real world, but it's not very "significant" in terms of "coverage" of weaving technology. In practice, this is a trivial mention. Jacquard looms are notable, but the notability needs to be proven by other subjects. |
| The same book, specifically the twenty pages discussing Herman Hollerith | Herman Hollerith | In practice, some of these pages are more useful than others, but taken as a whole, you could write multiple paragraphs about this person from this book alone. Definitely significant coverage. |
| A single sentence in a newspaper article, saying that "In high school, he [Bill Clinton] was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" | Three Blind Mice (band) | A newspaper article saying very little about the band. You could write almost nothing about the band from this source. You'd have to engage in WP:SYNTH to say even what decade this happened in (by combining this source with another that says when he was in high school). Definitely a trivial mention. |
| My Life and Hard Times | James Thurber | A book entirely about the subject and his family. You could write multiple paragraphs about the subject from this one source alone. It's definitely significant coverage, but it's also an autobiography, which means it's not independent of the subject, so it doesn't actually matter whether it's significant coverage. |