Wikidata:Requests for comment/Notability policy reform - Wikidata

Wikidata:Requests for comment/Notability policy reform - Wikidata
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Wikidata:Requests for comment
An editor has requested the community to provide input on "Notability policy reform" via the
Requests for comment
(RFC) process. This is the discussion page regarding the issue.
If you have an opinion regarding this issue, feel free to comment below. Thank you!
Wikidata’s current
Notability Policy
was drafted in 2013. Since then, the project has grown and the world has changed. We understand Wikidata, what it can do and what its place in the Linked Open Data web is, better. All of this led to discussions about what data should be in Wikidata, what should be in the larger Wikibase Ecosystem and what should maybe go somewhere else entirely. This RfC is meant to create an improved Notability Policy.
Context
edit
What has changed since the initial drafting of the policy
edit
Wikidata has grown to 120 Million Items and 16.000 active editors
Wikidata has reached social and technical scaling issues (see
Wikidata:Requests for comment/Mass-editing policy#Context
for additional information)
The Wikibase Ecosystem has matured, with Wikibase Cloud and Wikibase Suite now being viable alternatives for hosting knowledge graphs that are tightly interconnected with Wikidata
What can we learn from other projects
edit
Looking at other Notability Policies of other Wikimedia Projects, a few things stood out that we might want to take into account:
Wikimedia Commons
: It clearly calls out the aim of Commons to ground the policy. It also specifically mentions some content not being a good fit for Commons because there are other projects that handle it. It talks very clearly about requiring use of the files or at the very least requires files to be realistically useful for educational purposes.
German-language Wikipedia
: It has
de:Wikipedia:Relevanzcheck
where people can ask before creating a new article if it would meet notability criteria.
There is a general theme of requiring reliable, independent, secondary sources.
There are projects that define notability generally for all topics (like Wikidata does now), while others go deeper into specific notability criteria for specific topics.
The benefits and problems of the current policy
edit
Based on previous discussions there are a number of positive and negative points to the current policy.
Benefits:
Small number of criteria
: makes it easier to understand and to remember
Wiggle-room for marginalized knowledge and more
: There is benefit to the current vagueness. It gives admins room to make judgement calls.
Problems:
Differing interpretations of criteria 2
: Some people see it as a carte blanche (everything can have an Item); others interpret it much more strictly. Admins report not being able to be consistent even within their own decisions. It is also harder to objectively evaluate than criteria 1 and 3.
Level of consideration is mismatched
: The policy works at the level of individual Items but issues are also (even more so) caused by collection of Items even if every individual one of them is notable. We don’t have good ways to draw boundaries about what from a class we want in Wikidata and what we don’t.
Enforcement burden
: Admins spend a lot of time arguing over the interpretation of and enforcing the policy. People not acting in the best interest of the project create Items to promote themselves, their business, etc, causing more clean-up work for admins.
Detachment from reuse
: Reuse is not really considered in the criteria but reuse is at the core of what Wikidata is about. Additionally, Items get deleted as not notable despite being used in other projects.
Round 1: Questions to determine changes to current policy
edit
Following are a number of questions that need your input to help draft the new policy.
Questions and discussion that was used to draft the new policy
We should require reuse or at least the very real potential for reuse
edit
Votes and comments:
I create items for structural need in projects outside the Wikimedia ecosystem, and when they are deleted it blows holes in my data, but how would anyone know, unless you modified wikibase to allow me to record use of items. And sometimes I'd pick up poor items with SPARQL queries, but my using them is not validation of their worth. So recording use beyond the curated Wikipedias and Commons is very hard.
Vicarage
talk
17:02, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
No, I think this is the wrong direction. Furthermore, "reuse" without stricter definition is pretty meaningless, and would be exploited for nefarious (in Wikidata's sense) activities easily. —
MisterSynergy
talk
17:36, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree with MisterSynergy that "reuse" without stricter definition doesn't make much sense; so, waiting for a clearer definition to give input :) --
Epì
dosis
18:10, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
So9q
talk
22:40, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I fully agree as well. Clear definitions are important. Otherwise, it won't work. --
Gymnicus
talk
23:49, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Agree with that. Self promotion can easily be entangled by reuse in wikipedias and by SDC, and of course Google Knowledge Graph. --
Lymantria
talk
10:08, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Uh, I support MisterSynergy statement this sounds like wrong direction. I oppose
require reuse
Jerimee
talk
20:11, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I like the idea that items be reusable, but I don’t feel this principle is well defined. We need to have a clear definition of what this principle means, or it will become another source of self promotional disruption.
Bovlb
talk
19:51, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree with other comments that we need a more concrete definition of "reuse". In particular, since Wikidata is a source for AI, Google Knowledge Graph, and other services, I'm concerned that one could say that since the data is used by them,
anything
in Wikidata has potential for use/reuse. That would make this requirement meaningless.
Mcampany
talk
03:16, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Does reuse meant it have to be queried somewhere? Because what seem not used today, might be needed tomorrow. And do we have data on each items of how they were used? If we put this in the notability, then we have make sure we could at least be held accountable when someone ask "how do you measure reusability on my item?". —
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
03:56, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I understand one of the core purposes of Wikidata is to be a “hub of hubs”. I’m not sure how connecting multiple outside sources to each other can be defined as reuse, but it’s clearly valuable. -
PKM
talk
23:21, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Can't have a notability discussion without having a link to
User:Multichill/Questionable notability Wikimedians
. Something that happens a lot: A Wikimedian shows up on a couple of events. Photos of this Wikimedian end up on Commons. Someone creates a category on Commons for the Wikimedian. Later someone creates an items for the Wikimedian. Do we consider this valid reuse?
Multichill
talk
14:37, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Interesting case. My item should probably be in that list.
So9q
talk
22:46, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I believe most users choose Wikidata for (self)promotion simply because they deem everything in Wikidata is
implicitly
by design
) reusable. We'd really need to specify what (very real potential for) reuse / reusable means from our POV. --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
11:49, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think most people who do so, do so because they read an SEO "expert" telling them to do so.
Andy Mabbett
Pigsonthewing
);
Talk to Andy
Andy's edits
14:52, 4 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think this could be made more concrete along the lines of what
User:Vicarage
suggests above. We already have the
on focus list of Wikimedia project
(P5008)
property; perhaps we need a new "re-used by" property that points to an external project or database or some such that could record this information. There would then need to be some qualifying criterion around what external projects are understood to imply notability. We already have this to some extent with identifiers - some identifiers are instances of
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
to indicate this. So we could identify external projects that imply notability similarly.
ArthurPSmith
talk
16:38, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think the above are all very valid points and there is definitely a lot of judgement to it. How are people feeling about instead of making it a hard requirement we incorporate it into the introductory text? I am imagining clearly stating that we don't just collect data for the sake of collecting data but that we do so because we want to enable people to use that data to build applications and gain knowledge about the world. (Wording to be improved.)
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
14:54, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
IMHO this is surely reasonable, although just putting it in this way into the introduction will not make a big difference from a practical point of view - but since other points will make a difference from a practical point of view, this seems fine to me.
Epì
dosis
10:15, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
The discussion at
Wikidata:Project_chat#CiteQ
may be relevant. How can we discover re-use, does citing a text make it notable?
Vicarage
talk
21:09, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
And if mere citation is a justification of structural need somewhere in the ecosystem, that's such a low bar that how could we justify keeping any content out
Vicarage
talk
17:32, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I already agreed with MisterSynergy's points above. Now I'd like to elaborate a bit more on my position. Without a truly strict definition of "reuse," even simply integrating the Wikidata object into OpenStreetMap would, in principle, constitute "reuse," even though both are user-generated content. This would open the floodgates to misuse, as is already evident in the ongoing deletion discussions of the objects
Heidecamp
(Q125884670)
Grand Decameron Panamá, A Trademark All Inclusive Resort
(Q111415198)
Grand Decameron Panamá, A Trademark All Inclusive Resort
(Q111415198)
and
Guardian
(Q63367814)
. --
Gymnicus
talk
11:09, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
As you can see from the data object
Heidecamp
(Q125884670)
, "reuse" in OSM is already considered a structural need in Wikidata, for example by admin
Fralambert
. This is incomprehensible to me, because OSM is user-generated data and there are no relevance or notability criteria. --
Gymnicus
talk
18:18, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft in the accompanying text but not as a criteria because of the raised issues around gaming it and definition issues.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
While reuse is a desirable outcome, a serious evaluation of an actual or potential reuse for each item seems like too much to ask to editors. Maybe there is no reuse case yet for some items, but this opportunity could arrive in the future. This requirement can limit the not-yet-imaged possibilities, and that’s not as desirable.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
16:56, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
C3r098
talk
16:53, 26 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
: Please use the standard ~~~~ signature so that your comments have a timestamp and the reply link.
ArthurPSmith
talk
18:09, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
We should consider the size of the complete data set when making decisions about individual Items
edit
Votes and comments:
I think this is intended for cases like "all known stars" or "all the scientific articles ever published", which presently could not go into Wikidata at least for technical reasons; in this sense, I think it makes sense considering this criterium in a future change of the notability policy; however, an item could be considered part of many different datasets, each of a different size (like, for a scientif article: all the articles published in the same volume, or in all the volumes of the same journal, or in all the volumes of the journals treating this topic in language X, or in all journals treating this topic in all languages etc.), so we should be very careful on applying this IMHO. --
Epì
dosis
18:14, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I think you have a point here, but I don't think the carefulness is a hindrance. We just need to be explicit about which set we are talking about and be clear that we don't fall into a scope creep.
Ainali
talk
10:02, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I think this clause related (somehow) to the reusability clause above. One issue popped in my mind is "when theres only a subset of the data in the Wikidata, what will persuade us to use that instead the complete data in its original source? Does Wikidata will serve as 'short preview' to the complete data set?" but I do agree
Support
if we must consider the size of data. —
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
12:16, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
We should fix the wikibase-backend to scale as the community wants instead of limiting creation of new items. See
Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Notability_policy_reform#Is_there_anything_we_missed?
below for details about the work on a new wikibase-backend that scales beyond 1bn+ entities.--
So9q
talk
22:29, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I agee. Given the current policy lasted over 10 years, making decisions over this scale based on current capacity limitations is the wrong reason.
GrimRob
talk
18:08, 30 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
think
this is somewhat redundant - the word 'notability' implies that the entity in question stands out from others of its type in some way or other. So inclusion can't be just accepted based on being a member of a (very large) group, there must be some narrower criteria involved. Perhaps the notability text should say something like "member of a reasonably sized class, not one of billions"?
ArthurPSmith
talk
16:48, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think WD has a clear goal to be comprehensive, more so than an encyclopedia, and we'd not want to use a notability argument to cherry pick members of a class, when the minor members have a structural need to complete the set. But its completeness based on extending current data sideways, so we can say to users that we can only accommodate 200m items with current technology, and our roadmap to that anticipates your item won't make the cut. The problem is our uneven coverage of knowledge, to be hard-nosed we should offload swathes of items already in the system to other projects, but that's technically and socially difficult, and until then someone can always say "but you let X in, why not my Y". And while we can rank notability within a field, its much harder across fields. Our graph system is best for spotty, complicated data sets, uniform ones like stars catalogues are better elsewhere.
Vicarage
talk
19:35, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Jerimee
talk
20:11, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will not incorporate it into the policy draft as a criteria but will mention dataset size in the accompanying text as something people should think about.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:19, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
This should be carefully considered in light of Wikidata's scope and main goals. One of them is to serve as a general knowledge base, and currently, this is one of the most critical aspects of Wikidata, since the extensive use made by third-party apps and AI models. A general database in which items are highly curated in order to keep only “notable” items from a data set faces the risk of determining an exclusionary selection with potential biases. The risk is greater than on Wikipedia (where this dynamic already exists and creates well-documented biases). An incomplete database can lead to even more biases when it is reused for research and other purposes. Furthermore, bias can spread beyond Wikidata to study results, apps, and more. P.S
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
I know that I'm coming late to the discussion. I'm responding in general to the answers, not directly to your take-away comments (which I really appreciate to read).
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:05, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
We should change the wording of criteria 2 to say “can be described” to “is described”
edit
Votes and comments:
WD:2 criteria 2 needs a wider overhaul than just minor wording changes. Here is a good starting point:
MisterSynergy
talk
17:38, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
good first step, but I agree with MisterSynergy that probably we need to change it more than this; I add another good starting point,
. --
Epì
dosis
18:19, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree that it needs an overhaul, per MisterSynergy.
Ternera
talk
19:27, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree about this wording, and also suggest changing identifiable to identified.
Bovlb
talk
19:53, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Yes, I agree with that. Those two small changes could be implemented quickly and already make the situation clearer.
Ainali
talk
09:58, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
So9q
talk
22:35, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I agree with Bovlb.--
Yuriklim
talk
09:22, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
One thing that may be worth making more explicit is how criterion 2 contributes to maintainability. N2 functions as a test of researchability: whether other editors can independently verify, revisit, and correct an item over time. Items that cannot realistically be re-researched tend to become high-cost to maintain, prone to low-quality statements, and difficult to challenge or improve. Clarifying this purpose may help us to align the wording of N2 with what we want it to achieve.
Bovlb
talk
16:27, 4 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
A step in the right direction. I would also welcome a wider overhaul. --
Jklamo
talk
08:18, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
A good idea. --
Fralambert
talk
22:23, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I welcome a wider overhaul as per above.--
So9q
talk
22:35, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Matěj Suchánek
talk
11:39, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
حبيشان
talk
20:21, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Not sure what this change is meant to achieve. The current wording is "can be described using serious and publicly available references". If sources exist then the item is notable. An item having no references is not justification for deletion. Force editors to add references at the point of creation
Piecesofuk
talk
10:37, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I guess this change may indeed make editors think about adding references from the very start if sitelinks and a structural need are not assumed. --
Wolverène
talk
07:16, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
. This is a small change, but it will make the definition clearer. Some editors interpret "can be described" rather like "may be described", so they do not care a lot about notability of their items and, for example, are just adding the online database identifiers, believing it is pretty enough. As an admin who is active on the RfD, I would like to see that an item's subject is
almost certainly
notable, not just
likely
notable. --
Wolverène
talk
07:08, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Strong oppose
Because this negatively impacts underrepresented knowledge. We need more flexibility. See Mariana Fossatti's comment below.
Spinster
07:32, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
as others have said I think this could actively harm knowledges that have been deliberately marginalised, or are not recorded in Western intellectual traditions. Wikidata is a great opportunity find ways to be inclusive of them
Lajmmoore
talk
14:10, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate this change in the policy draft and include additional changes suggested by Bovlb.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:20, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Further clarification is needed for this proposal. What is suggested as a small change in wording seems to play a major role in solving an important problem. But what are we solving for? Why is this wording the required solution? In any case, some proposals previously shared, such as limiting notability only to items that have identifiers, will narrow Wikidata scope drastically, putting at risk the capacity of editors to cover marginalized topics. Often, editors who cover such topics can’t find the item's external IDs in mainstream databases, and many identifier properties, especially from Global South institutions, are not yet available on Wikidata. Also, in order to make good descriptions in marginalized topics, we have to navigate across invisibilized, fragile and fragmented sources that are spread across multiple materials. It is fair –and important– to ask for references, but it is also important to admit items with essential statements based on initial research, keeping them open to further improvement. We can do better in signaling where more references and maintenance are needed, in order to refine and improve the existing data (automation could be helpful here).
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should require new Items to have at least the statements required to establish notability
edit
Votes and comments:
Harsh given we have so many items already that don't have that. And in a world of bots and AI, many items might be created in anticipation of waves of bot updates that could be some time away. Scurrying around at creation to find mentions elsewhere would encourage random facts being added, like references being to obscure newspaper articles some are so fond of. Better to consistently back-fill across a class from notable sources.
Vicarage
talk
16:56, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree with Vicarage that this could backfire, but IMHO the pros are more than the cons: after an item has been created, and some time has passed (say one day), the creator should have added to it sufficient data to demonstrate that it is notable. --
Epì
dosis
18:22, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
But, admins should not delete empty items minutes after they are created (time should be given for the creator to fill the item).
Ternera
talk
19:30, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Agreed. For what it's worth, English Wikipedia's
New Page Patrollers
are required to wait until an hour after a page has been created before nominating something for deletion unless there are serious content issues, like BLP privacy issues. Perhaps something similar would make sense here.
Mcampany
talk
03:07, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I feel that it is reasonable to expect editors to add a claim within fifteen minutes of item creation, but I normally do not delete empty items until an hour after the last edit.
Bovlb
talk
03:34, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Agreed. 1h is reasonable.
So9q
talk
22:32, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
with the caveat about reasonable time for item enrichment. I find the argument against weak, as empty items are even more of a burden than someone at least trying to add relevant links. (People acting in bad faith is a totally different thing and is a pest regardless if they are creating empty items or adding statements to them.)
Ainali
talk
10:06, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
As a counter example there were 294
Flower-class corvette
(Q404394)
produced, collectively they won the Battle of the Atlantic, I have created entries for 290odd of them. The class is widely described, but generally collates the members, with individuals featured in random scattering of articles across Wikipedias and other naval sites, but I'd struggle to find a source that mentions them all. There is a structural need to have articles on the class and all its members, but it would be frustrating if when adding the last few members they were challenged because of poor documentation. If WD is to be comprehensive, it is inevitable it might contain results that were merely entries in lists elsewhere, and so not amenable to formal property assignment. I suppose a line in a table in a URL could be used as a reference or qualifier to a
instance of
(P31)
statement, but it feels clumsy.
Vicarage
talk
10:27, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
And we should have a uniform way of reminding users of this requirement. --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
11:38, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Strong support
This is a very important requirement. I don't see any problems with this as long as we give enough time to add the statements. --
Yuriklim
talk
12:40, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Sure, with a reasonable time allowed to get those statements in.
ArthurPSmith
talk
16:50, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
Not just statements. Sitelinks are also very important. It is completely acceptable to have an item with nothing but a sitelink.
Midleading
talk
17:13, 7 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Weak support
The new item should have at minimum an
instance of
(P31)
or
subclass of
(P279)
with at least one suitable reference that establishes notability. This should be enforced at item creation.
Piecesofuk
talk
10:42, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Easy improvement. --
Lymantria
talk
10:17, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Weak support
I agree with many of the caveats above.
Jerimee
talk
20:19, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment: In theory I like the idea, but in practise what would this actually mean?
StarTrekker
talk
09:07, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I very much endorse Mariana Fossatti's comment below: we need flexibility and leeway for underrepresented knowledge, for those communities that haven't had and don't have the privileges and resources to create or maintain sources in the first place. It would also be extremely helpful if it would be made easier and more transparent for beginners how they should do this in practice (i.e. what kind of statements are needed as a minimum; what one typically fills in, etc)
Spinster
07:39, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft. I will add a timeline for when these will need to be added. I will also expand it to include sitelinks, not just statements.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:22, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
What would these statements be? Who would decide? These decisions are usually not made by marginalized communities that often see their knowledge erased. It is completely reasonable to require that the item have enough statements to be recognized and distinguished from another item. And for sure, empty and barely outlined items, impossible for other users to understand and improve, can simply be removed. But introducing notability checkings at the level of required statements can exclude things we don’t want to exclude from Wikidata, and could create a lot of work in order to establish and assess the particular notability criteria for every knowledge domain. Automated statement suggestions, or tools to signal missing statements, are better routes for the improvement of Wikidata. Existing tools, like Recoin, are already helpful for this and could be expanded.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:09, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should give the Wikibase Ecosystem a more prominent place in the text to explain alternatives to adding data to Wikidata outside the notability criteria
edit
Votes and comments:
as of now the Wikibase ecosystem is just a small paragraph below the three notability criteria; probably yes, at least link to some more documentation besides wikiba.se. --
Epì
dosis
18:24, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
Ainali
talk
10:08, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Comment
"the Wikibase ecosystem" is not really an established feasible fenomenon yet if you ask me (yes different wikibases exist, but they are not notable nor interlinked in a way that the notion ecosystem suggest). See also my bullet below
Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Notability_policy_reform#Is_there_anything_we_missed?
One already exists: Wikibase Cloud. But a wikifarm needs some sorts of governance, otherwise somebody can e.g. create a Wikibase to dox Wikimedians. I am not sure whether Wikibase Cloud is well prepared to handle such issues when it happens.--
GZWDer
talk
08:43, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Yuriklim
talk
12:30, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
but federation is still far from complete - we need to be able to have item-valued statements where the items live in a different wikibase. Until that is implemented federation is not a great solution for many use cases.
ArthurPSmith
talk
16:52, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Info: The Wikibase Suite team is working on this and they showed a working demo at one of the last Wikibase Live Sessions. See
File:Wikibase Live Session November 2025 - Federated Values Demo.webm
. So yes I agree and it's in progress. I don't think this should hold up this part of the policy update.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:04, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Ooh, that's excellent news!!
ArthurPSmith
talk
18:54, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
In addition Wikibase should be able to use local and remote items/properties together. Currently if Wikidata property is used no local properties can be used.
GZWDer
talk
11:35, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
How many of the current Wikibases will still be around in 10 years? How many communities have the resources to keep a Wikibase lively, with critical mass, maintained, up to date, funded, over more than 2-5 years? Wikidata is the place that offers impact, persistence, longevity, visibility and direct interconnection. I am especially worried if we will redirect small underrepresented communities to Wikibases.
Spinster
07:47, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft in the accompanying text.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:23, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
The Wikibase ecosystem should not be seen as a repository for the unwanted items. Instead, we should explain its potential to create alternative ontologies and different ways of modeling data for specific needs. It’s great to make Wikibase more prominent and publicize it, not to show to potential editors the Wikidata exit door, but to make them aware about even more exciting possibilities if they want more customization and control over how to collect and organize data communities.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:10, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should encourage people to flesh out and improve existing Items over adding a lot of new Items
edit
Votes and comments:
Having WD with a uniform coverage within a topic would be so useful for its credibility, even if the coverage across topics was variable due to the enthusiasms of its contributors. Can we assess items a period after their creation, and consider culling ones who never acquired detail or were never integrated into the overall structure. Orphans are of little use to us, while time could show the value of unpromising items.
Vicarage
talk
16:40, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
It seems reasonable, but it will remain a suggestion (of course we cannot prevent users from creating new notable items instead of just improving the existing ones). --
Epì
dosis
18:26, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I think we should let people edit the areas they are interested rather than pushing people to edit existing items they may not care about. Overall, it is not concerning to me if people are creating new items.
Ternera
talk
19:31, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I agree.
So9q
talk
22:12, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree.
حبيشان
talk
20:35, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree.
Rtnf
talk
02:36, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Agreed. I have a draft of an essay about this at
User:Bovlb/Quality before quantity
Bovlb
talk
19:58, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I did not read it extensively, but skimming the headings this looks very good! Would you be willing to create a RfC about this to gather feedback and make it official?
So9q
talk
22:42, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
My next step is to polish it a little more and publish it as an essay. :)
Bovlb
talk
21:20, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I totally agree with this sentiment, and would welcome both WMF and WMDE to spend resources on this, but I am not convinced it fits in the text around notability.
Ainali
talk
10:11, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I could imagine just a simple sentence somewhere like "Please consider fleshing out and updating existing Items and not just creating new ones."
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:09, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
In many cases improve existing items needs creating new ones.--
GZWDer
talk
08:44, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Of course. And I don't think that we should prevent that. What I would personally like to push against a bit is people only importing half-baked new Items and then everyone else being left with cleaning up.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:07, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I think having a complete set can be more important, rather than a part set of more polished items.
Secretlondon
talk
15:10, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
if this refers to new editors. Before editors can add new items they should have a good history of editing items, eg minimum number of edits over a period of time, with few reversions
Piecesofuk
talk
10:47, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Strong oppose
per Secretlondon and this is currently usually the case for various applications / types of items. --
Prototyperspective
talk
18:04, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft in the accompanying text with caveats.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:23, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Encouraging improvements is always good. However, this path should not make it more difficult to create new items. Both the creation and improvement of items should be equally welcome. Nevertheless, it would be great to make it easier to use tools to improve and maintain items. The Wikipedia home page is a good example of this, as it invites editors to make small improvements. This is an opportunity for new editors to gain experience.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:12, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should make it explicit that people should not create Items about themselves, their business, etc
edit
Votes and comments:
Support
Vicarage
talk
16:35, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
probably linking
Wikidata:Self-promotion
which could be edited from an essay (as it is now) to a policy. --
Epì
dosis
18:28, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Yes, it should be a policy. Would you be willing to update it?
So9q
talk
22:31, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I agree with Epì about making
Wikidata:Self-promotion
a policy.
Ternera
talk
19:25, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
Mcampany
talk
03:08, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
Ainali
talk
10:11, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Strong support
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
12:18, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Weak support
, would perhaps be better if there were a board to request non-conflicted editors to evaluate a topic other than
WD:CHAT
Arlo Barnes
talk
23:08, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
People should not create items to promote themselves or anyone else. However I don't see a problem with people creating items about themselves, it they are notable.
Yuriklim
talk
09:52, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
my home Wikipedia has
nl:Wikipedia:Zelfpromotie
. (suspected) Self-promotion is a valid reason to nominate an article for deletion. Maybe we should have something like that?
Multichill
talk
14:42, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Yes, sounds like a good idea.
So9q
talk
22:12, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
So9q
talk
22:11, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
People are really bad judge of their own notability, this statement should include their relatives (parents, children, siblings) --
Fralambert
talk
22:11, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I like your addition of close relatives.
So9q
talk
22:30, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
GrimRob
talk
18:12, 30 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I hope this text (or its derivations) can explain why some companies and business have items and others not.
Happy New Year 2026!
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
14:58, 7 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Minoa
talk
11:21, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
But only for new editors
Piecesofuk
talk
10:50, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I might support if this proposal was writ simply as "no self-promotion," but as currently stated? This will do little to discourage bad actors, and might serve as a barrier to entry for good actors.
Jerimee
talk
20:39, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
if refers to the new editors
(those with less than e.g. 1 year from the account creation). In theory, you may create an item about yourself if you are definitely notable and you are not trying to create a vanity page with a sort of a photoalbum and a bunch of useless facts -- would be intresting if someone writes an essay about this. The newcomers can not be objective when it comes to themselves, while those who are familiar with the policies for a long time can be. --
Wolverène
talk
08:00, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
This is a minimum, IMO. Wikidata items are so easy to make that anyone with a COI should be able to request an item on the entity they want.--
Jasper Deng
talk
20:53, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Something may be good to do regarding this subject but I think it needs to be more nuanced. For example, what about mass data imports that include data about something the user is involved with? Often, users are interested in the broader type of thing that they're doing and this would hamper such. Also, if people create items about notable subjects themselves that sounds like less work for the rest of contributors so is not per se a problem. Maybe require that users may only create at most few items about themselves and if they create several/many that were later found to not be worth to have items, then that could be sanctioned. I don't see how users creating items about themselves is currently an actual problem or does anything to even just slightly reduce the number of items this is why I don't see the need to deliberate on and create a good-quality policy on this matter. If users caused trouble, warn them. --
Prototyperspective
talk
22:54, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft and include close relatives.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:24, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
It would be very regrettable if this precluded the authors of scholarly works, or their publishers or employing institutes, from creating items about their works.
Andy Mabbett
Pigsonthewing
);
Talk to Andy
Andy's edits
13:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
As long as the article has serious references, creating articles about people's identities or activities does not seem to be a major problem. At least, not to the extent that it is a problem on Wikipedia, where editors who write about themselves can introduce serious biases and imbalances into the article's narrative. The structured nature of Wikidata is less vulnerable (not immune) to the introduction of distorted narratives.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:14, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I am late to this discussion, so thanks to Lydia for allowing me a chance to add a comment. I'll disclose that I do communications consulting work on Wikipedia and occasionally on Wikidata, so the matter is of professional interest to me.
My suggestion is that Notability and conflict of interest (COI) are worth considering separately: Notability is about scope; COI is about process. An item either is within scope or it is not, and the identity of who created it should not be a determining factor. Otherwise, we have an arbitrary standard that is exceedingly difficult to enforce. Instead, it's better to focus on requiring disclosure and third-party sources.
I also agree with Mariana that Wikidata is inherently less vulnerable to promotional manipulation: Wikipedia can be subtly promotional through word choice, framing, and emphasis, while Wikidata's structured property-value pairs are more constrained (a statement like
Company X → headquarters → City Y
is either accurate and sourced or it isn't).
Rather than entangling the two concepts, where COI is concerned I would suggest Wikidata look to how Wikipedia has handled this issue (see:
WP:PSCOI
) and revisit the
RfC about COI
from 2015, as well as review the existing policy
Wikidata:Disclosure of paid editing
and user essay
Wikidata:Self-promotion
to address this subject with greater care.
WWB Too
talk
21:59, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
In some Wikimedia projects it is allowed to edit COI content as far as it is acknowledged (=white hat editing). So if they create, say a notable Wikipedia article, why couldn't they add the Wikidata item too? Or add a new item for an old Wikipedia article? The statement was about "creating", not "editing". Was it intentional? I'm sure that if the paid/COI Wikidata editing is forbidden, there will be black hat editors. (I'm a paid editor myself which I've disclosed here). Take a look at how new Wikimedia Commons files are added - what kind of things are asked from the downloader.--
Jjanhone
talk
20:02, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think this wording is extremely vague, I guess my question is not having this rule currently causing an unmanageable issue? As written this could really limit a huge amount of valuable knowledge being added to Wikidata, especially ones that could be considered commercial or private knowledge institutions.
We want this information on Wikidata but explicitly excluding the people who know the most about these collections (and often have the only access to the raw data) doesn't seem like a very good approach at all. Wikipedia and Wikidata are very different, only allowing non involved individuals to add data from some institutions is not a complete solution, especially for datasets which change. Importing whole datasets from knowledge institutions is needed at the very least for completeness of queries. These are a few practical examples I can see that would probably not be allowed under this quite vague wording:
Museums/archives adding items about objects in their collections if they link back to their collections database as a reference.
Universities or other academic institutions adding information about academics who work at their institutions.
I've also seen others suggest that we make
Wikidata:Self-promotion
policy, I think this not a good idea, especially "Wikidata only includes topics that are already notable in independent, reliable sources", this would create a really significant barrier to underrepresented knowledge where the information is held by only one institution eg minority cultural institutions.
Thanks,
John Cummings
talk
21:50, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
It's creating an untenable amount of people creating items about themselves or their companies. This should be distinguished from making an item about something you
possess
like museum artifacts.
We should not indiscriminately include all knowledge in the world, since we are responsible for the accuracy of our database.
Jasper Deng
talk
21:53, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should link to the Lexeme Notability criteria
edit
Votes and comments:
Support
(I guess they are
Wikidata:Lexicographical data/Notability
) --
Epì
dosis
18:28, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
Ainali
talk
10:11, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
So9q
talk
22:17, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Yuriklim
talk
12:31, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Yes, they are very clear (thanks to those who developed that page!)
ArthurPSmith
talk
16:30, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Lymantria
talk
10:19, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft in the accompanying text.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:24, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Accompanying text: We should encourage people to ask if they are unsure if the Item they want to create is notable, especially if they want to create a lot of new Items.
edit
Votes and comments:
Support
but where? I would guess a subpage of Wikidata:Notability, like
Wikidata:Notability/Questions
; please not directly in the Project chat to avoid flooding it even more. --
Epì
dosis
18:30, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
but are we prepared to answer them promptly? Unlike Relevanzcheck in dewiki, Relevance Check in WIkidata could be flooded in minutes. I think we need to limit the check to item that related to series or datasets, or generational data.
I suggest we make something like basic checklist for notability criteria, yet how do we limit the interpretation?
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
12:22, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Yeah we probably don't want people asking about every single Item. But if they are doing larger sets etc I think it'd be good to make it as easy as we can to get a check on them before creation instead of cleaning up afterwards.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:12, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Sometimes I wish Wikidata had
a centralized “big document”
that clearly explains what kinds of data are currently allowed to be entered, specifically what “niches” exist, along with a “
model item
(P5869)
” for each niche. For example: humans, books, stars, species, sports clubs, historical events, wars, accidents, disasters, diseases, anatomical structures, and so on. Ideally, this document would also allow users to revise it by proposing new kinds of data they want to add to Wikidata, perhaps while streamlining the process of proposing the important properties required so that such data can be properly integrated into the Wikidata ecosystem. With this approach, Wikidata would not be built by endlessly adding new properties, but by developing it niche by niche as the smallest “working unit”. For instance, a region is sometimes well known for specializing in producing “something”, whether natural resources or a concentration of a specific industry producing particular goods. People might want to add this connection to Wikidata, such as region X being known for producing apples, while region Y is known for producing movies. Instead of guessing which property to use to add this relationship, they could consult this “big document” to see whether the current Wikidata model already supports such a relationship, and if not, propose it. I imagine this would require an “active duty” maintainer of the document who has a strong understanding of the current Wikidata ontology and can respond to new proposals and questions.
Niryhpr
talk
09:42, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
A separate subpage for these sorts of requests, also for merge requests and maybe a place to ask whether items should be deleted before they're added to WD:RFD
Piecesofuk
talk
10:58, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Weak support
Only if they want to create hundreds of new item. I worry that policies like this, as gentle and reasonable as they sound, can potentially be a real barrier to entry to conscientious new folks. A potential new user might think to herself "ok, I'm not sure, let me think about it some more" and never come back.
Jerimee
talk
20:38, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
per Piecesofuk. --
Wolverène
talk
08:21, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will incorporate it into the policy draft in the accompanying text with a clarification that this should only be done for large batches.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:25, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
It sounds reasonable to offer better orientation for newcomers to Wikidata and also for more long-term users exploring new knowledge domains. Wikiprojects are a great space for that, and would be good to have access to them from the Notability page. For a single item or just a few, guidelines and resources should be enough. For a bulk upload of new items, it would be desirable to get community insights.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:16, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Process: We should only let registered users create Items
edit
Votes and comments
(see also
Wikidata talk:Requests for comment/Mass-editing policy#Restrict entity creation to logged-in users
Support
, and with a track record of edits, to avoid the drive-by problem.
Vicarage
talk
16:41, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
, but a very low limit such as 3 item creations per day and temporary user should be okay. —
MisterSynergy
talk
17:41, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Comment
general support but, as I said in the other RfC (now linked at the start of this paragraph), we should keep in mind IPs (now temporary accounts) creating new articles on Wikipedia and wanting to connect them to Wikidata - and these items are surely notable; so if we restrict this, there should be some kind of exception for this case. --
Epì
dosis
18:33, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Agreed. We would need to make an exception for linking Wikipedia articles. See some previous discussion at
wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2023/06#Throttle_item_creation_by_anonymous_users
Bovlb
talk
20:02, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
idem MisterSynergy if we could limit the creation allowed by temporary accounts. --
Fralambert
talk
22:16, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
We should fix the wikibase-backend to scale as the community wants instead of limiting creation of new items. See
Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Notability_policy_reform#Is_there_anything_we_missed?
below.--
So9q
talk
22:29, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
idem Bovlb, we need exception for linked wikipedia articles and other sister project
The preceding
unsigned
comment was added by
Empat Tilda
talk
contribs
).
Oppose
prefer MisterSynergy proposal.--
حبيشان
talk
23:19, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Creating items to link articles in different languages should always be possible by anyone no matter who they are or how many they create.
Midleading
talk
17:19, 7 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I think some types of edits, like connecting established and well sourced Wikipedia articles to Wikidata, are not controversial. However, there are just as many caveats as advantages to this idea, and therefore, how the throttle or conditional editing would work for temporary accounts needs to be discussed in detail to avoid deterring new
and
constructive contributors. So I cannot declare a position on this now. --
Minoa
talk
11:35, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Question: Assuming we can technically solve the issue with sitelink changes from other wikis by non-registered users, how do people feel about this then?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:15, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
prefer MisterSynergy proposal. Lydia Pintscher's also sounds good, but I'm not sure I understand it correctly.
Jerimee
talk
20:43, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Question: Is it possible to maybe create some "new items created by IP editors" page where registered users can check on newly created items by unregistered users? Imho setting a limit on IP editors creates the issue of possibly stifling the positive/helpful IP editors who only do constructive work. It would be better instead if we could keep track on IP creations.
StarTrekker
talk
09:04, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Contrary to the very idea of Wikimedia projects. --
Lymantria
talk
09:15, 19 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will not incorporate it into the policy draft. I will do some more research with the developers to see what we can do about throttling the creation of new Items by new accounts while not breaking Item creation from Wikipedia and co.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:27, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Attribution of edits is now managed with temporary accounts across Wikimedia projects, in order to mitigate privacy concerns. Let’s continue with this general privacy-friendly Wikimedia approach, especially to protect those who need a safer edit environment.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:18, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Process: We should take the intent of the Item creator into account when making decisions about notability
edit
Example: Someone gaming the system by creating several Items and connecting them in order to fulfil notability criteria 3, even if the Items would otherwise not be notable
Votes and comments:
Establishing intent could become so bureaucratic. Assume good faith for members in good standing. Do we record statistics of how many items each user had has deleted, to trigger different levels of oversight?
Vicarage
talk
16:47, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
the intent of this is good, but it could also be difficult to apply, as Vicarage says; anyway, probably we should probably try to enlarge a bit "structural need" in order to make it more difficult to game it. --
Epì
dosis
18:35, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
If someone creates multiple items or redirects the same item to itself, we can already check that and delete/unlink all of the items. Checking their intent seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
Ternera
talk
19:35, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
This seems to conflate two points.
While it is often easy to classify a contribution as promotional, we should avoid going down the path of mind reading and doxxing.
We routinely bulk delete groups of items that connect to each other, as not a valid case of N3, but it is harder to investigate.
Bovlb
talk
20:08, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I support the idea of this, but am not sure how we implement this in a good way. Perhaps this kid of gaming can be mentioned as an example of bad faith editing?
Ainali
talk
10:34, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
Like Ainali, I support the idea of this, but am not sure how we might implement it.
Jerimee
talk
20:46, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will not incorporate it into the policy draft.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:29, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Process: We should let WikiProjects narrow down (but not expand) the general notability guidelines for their area
edit
Votes and comments:
Notability so depends on the specifics and data volumes a project is designed for, and seeking agreement could stultify things, so let each project have its own criteria.
Vicarage
talk
16:43, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I would specify some minimal criteria for notability criteria established by specific WikiProjects, specifically: they should be easy to find (i.e. at least all linked from one place), easy to read (some kind of standard structure), and they should be established by at least 10 users (to avoid important decisions being taken by too few users). I agree that these thematic guidelines by WikiProjects should be only restrictive in comparison with the general ones. --
Epì
dosis
18:39, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Support
I think this is a great idea, but I think we need to figure out a way to be able to point from the general criteria to WikiProjects that have found consensus for narrower ones in their field. (We don't want to spring this as a surprise on someone who went to the general page and read it.)
Ainali
talk
10:45, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
We should be wary of letting one wikiproject declare that something is not notable, when another wikiproject considers that it is. Conversely, we should be wary of a wikiproject existing just to declare that everything in a given field (Wikiproject SEO Experts? WikiProject YouTube Influencers?) is notable.
Andy Mabbett
Pigsonthewing
);
Talk to Andy
Andy's edits
19:02, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
The point of multiple WikiProject viewpoints are a good one. And I think that it can be solved by not allowing a WikiProject restrict another one. That is, if one WikiProject finds some type of concept notable, but not another, the second WikiProject can abstain from creating items, but not stop the first one.
Ainali
talk
20:01, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Regarding the point of declaring everything notable, they still shouldn't be able to expand the general notability policy.
Ainali
talk
20:01, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I have always liked the ideas of WikiProjects, or in general,
associations
by topics (music, Sweden, influencers, ...) as place to gather all sorts of resources (showcase items, list of properties, do's and dont's, ...). But now I am a little reserved because this could introduce sort of a
backdoor
to the general policy (i.e., a possibility to overrule what we are trying to reform right now). --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
12:20, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Do you even have this worry if we only allow them to narrow the general criteria? Do you have an example of something that could be problematic?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:18, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
For example, in far-off foreign lands over there (OpenStreetMap), there are several cases where local-specific groups create and enforce their own local rules that actually contradict the global rules agreed upon earlier. Normal unaffiliated users might get confused by these conflicting rules, but in most cases, local groups enforce them more strictly than the “global police” do, and they can even band together to push back against site-wide moderators.
Rtnf
talk
06:52, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
It can still be source of disagreement between admins and regular community members with a field of interest ("we consider this notable regardless"). I'd prefer if we had rules that the whole community agreed upon. Scoped guidelines could be handled by appendices/addenda. --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
10:05, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I don't see the need for notability policy expansion. The two benefits listed at
The benefits and problems...
are truly valuable benefits. Problems should be addressed without sacrificing ease of use.
Jerimee
talk
21:02, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
. Sounds like an attempt to implement something for which I would criticize Wikipedia the most -- like the decisions on what is notable made by some certain group of people (who are BTW not experts in their area IRL and not obligated to be), can be more valuable than the general notability policy. No, it is wrong. --
Wolverène
talk
08:56, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Inclined to agree with Wolverène here.
StarTrekker
talk
09:06, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Question
From what I've gathered from my work here at Wikidata, there are already subject areas with modified notability criteria. As far as I know, schools are considered notable per se. Such per se notability would no longer be possible under these new rules, would it? --
Gymnicus
talk
10:57, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
per Wolverène. --
Prototyperspective
talk
18:06, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
This would compound systemic bias against minoritised knowledge. —
OwenBlacker
talk
; please {
{ping}
} me in replies)
13:55, 2 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
(Sorry for being so late in responding.) I generally support this idea. The notability guidelines are quite high-level so there is benefit in making them more specific in general areas. If a project makes their guidelines such that some other aspect of Wikidata is negatively affected, then they would be subject to discussion and revision.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
talk
15:06, 24 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Take-away for policy drafting:
I will not incorporate it into the policy draft to keep the simplicity of the current state.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:30, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Round 1: Other questions and discussion
edit
Questions and discussion that was used to draft the new policy
How can we rely more on tooling and automation for notability checking and processing?
edit
Record number of deleted items per user, to trigger different oversight levels.
Vicarage
talk
16:49, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Can you elaborate a bit more please? I imagine that if a user is showing up on such a list their contributions are already being heavily scrutinized and we miss out on the users who don't get their Items deleted even if they should? Maybe I am missing something.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:21, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I’m a big fan of tooling and automation. I have a gadget
user:Bovlb/notability.js
that tries to assess notability, and I have been working on developing a better version. In particular, wider use would require caching, checking of outside databases (e.g. SDC, OSM), and smarter checking of N3. Policy should be operationalisable, but should not be constrained to be automatable. I have also been working on some ways to detect ill-advised bulk creation sooner.
Bovlb
talk
20:14, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Great. I believe @
Addshore
also has a script. Maybe he can share that as well.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:22, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Indeed, my WIP version is at
User:Addshore/RFDHelper.js
·addshore·
talk to me!
10:30, 21 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Bovlb
I'd be more than happy to try and work on this together, perhaps we should start a thread up on a different page, or telegram etc?
·addshore·
talk to me!
10:31, 21 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Automation should always be combined with human review. On the other hand, automated notability tests based primarily on whether the item has identifiers should not be the only signal that the item is not notable.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:22, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
there are lots of reports at the moment with potential issues, but getting people to look at them is another matter. I think some way of flagging up potential problems is important. The problem is if you can see the code you can easily work out how to avoid the rules. There just aren't enough people willing to review as things stand either. Something might emerge in the future which might help.
GrimRob
talk
18:18, 30 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Do you have additional suggestions for how to tighten/clarify criteria 2?
edit
Copied from above so that they aren't lost:
and
should be considered as starting points. --
Epì
dosis
18:40, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
I'm a fan of the suggested policy update laid out by @
Bovlb
in the conversation linked above.
Ternera
talk
19:37, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Me too
So9q
talk
22:09, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Extreme case: remove criteria 2 altogether and just use 1 and 3: criteria 1, an item must have a Wikipedia article; criteria 3 an item "fulfills a structural need" for example, an item is a named entity contained within a Wikipedia article. Alternately criteria 2: an item passes criteria 2 if it is the subject of a reputable encyclopaedic or biographical article, book etc., or is the subject of a widely reported event. A reputable source must have a Wikidata item that passes criteria 1 or 2. Also, non-alias Wikipedia redirects should also pass criteria 2
Piecesofuk
talk
11:03, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
For companies, we should clarify how to treat sources that are serious, but indiscriminately include every company in the country, such as government registries. There's currently a debate on Admininstator Noticeboard about it:
[1]
. I think the intent is that they should not establish notability?
For shcolarly articles, we also need to clarify what's sufficient to establish notability. Currently there are bots mass importing article items with just DOI, does this mean that DOI is enough to establish notability? What if there's no DOI but equivalent other identifier, such as Russian E-library ID?
MSDN.WhiteKnight
talk
15:47, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
A DOI alone
must not
be sufficient to establish notability, given that some organizations like Zenodo indiscriminately assign a DOI to any document uploaded to their service.
Omphalographer
talk
21:53, 18 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Maybe the general issue that motivates the proposal of tightening the notability criteria (the problems identified by Lydia) could be addressed at the level of data modeling and in Wikiprojects scope, where we can find more concrete definitions and boundaries for specific knowledge domains. For instance,
WikiProject Books
use a “a two-layer framework, consisting of work and edition”, keeping outside of their scope particular volumes. It is clear that Wikidata can’t be a book inventory, even when library catalogues have IDs for each volume they host. Maybe for this delimitation problem, it is useful to reflect again about Wikidata scope and goals, having in mind the simple idea that Wikidata is not an exhaustive inventory for each knowledge domain. And perhaps we should take another look at the idea of a general knowledge database, considering it afresh with the benefit of years of experience. It should be one that doesn't leave behind marginalised knowledge and doesn't reproduce unjust biases, while keeping a broad but also simple and transparent delimitation criteria.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
17:25, 23 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
With due respect, a blanket reform is still needed. The community will not be able to track every decentralized tightening of the notability guidelines and the project-wide one is still much too lenient.
Jasper Deng
talk
20:52, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Is there anything we missed?
edit
When we will discuss the draft of the new notability policy, in the same discussion we will also necessarily have to discuss about the items already existing that will be outside the revised notability criteria, and specifically: 1) how to find them; 2) what to do with them (keep them for some reason; simply delete them; delete them and move them elsewhere [where specifically?]). --
Epì
dosis
18:42, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
Maybe we should consider somewhere the case of items which met criterium 2 at the time of their creation and does not meet it anymore (i.e. they are based on a reliable online source which has perished in the meanwhile and has not been archived, or only partially); do we want to keep them? Probably not. Cf.
Wikidata:External identifiers/Obsolescence
(draft) for more context. --
Epì
dosis
18:54, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
reply
The Wikibase Ecosystem has matured, with Wikibase Cloud and Wikibase Suite now being viable alternatives for hosting knowledge graphs that are tightly interconnected with Wikidata
Is this based on the needs of the Wikidata community or is it a pipe dream? From what I have understood talking to the Scholia team and knowledge experts this idea about ontologic federation is currently an unknown thing.
The Scholia team decided to ABANDON WDQS after the graph split of scholarly items because the federation in SPARQL did not work (timeouts, hard to know where the items reside, etc.). I consider the Scholia team to be SPARQL experts and if they can't get it to work I very much doubt anyone else will. Wikibase Suite in it's current state is NOT able to reliably integrate with Wikidata in my opinion. I tried setting up a Wikibase.cloud wiki multiple times and get it integrated, but the federation UX is nowhere to be found.
My current conclusion is thus:
the "ecosystem of connected Wikibases" is not a feasible idea that has gained any mentionable traction
. Even if the federated properties + values were to gain adoption it would result in a split of the community and Wikibase Suite does not support RDF streaming so the triples cannot be integrated e.g. by combining multiple streams in a single QLever instance.--
So9q
talk
22:08, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
This could all work, but only if there was a good way of really federating subsidiary Wikibases with Wikidata, and an easy way to get changes out of the subsidiary Wikibases, and some way to set up SPARQL services for the combination of Wikidata and one or more subsidiary Wikibases. But I don't see much, if any, action on any of these.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
talk
19:10, 2 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I don't see scaling Wikibase anywhere above. I recently started to work on
wikibase-backend
(built using Python, FastAPI) which scales to 1bn+ items and it is as of writing nearing MVP state and already capable of:
CRUD entity operations
scaling the metadata database to 1bn+ entities (using sharding in Vitess)
scaling to 10bn+ revisions (S3 compatible backend based on Ceph)
scaling to 1 trillion statements (S3, deduplicated)
entity locking and archiving is supported
entity redirects are supported
full RDF output is supported (98% complete as of today 🥳)
I added cost estimates to the repo and they are looking very promising. The current monolithic Wikidata architecture cannot scale to 10x the current number of revisions. It has reached end of life a number of years ago and neither WMDE nor WMF has done anything about fixing the root cause (band-aids, investigations and disaster plans don't count 😉).
This new backend if finished and implemented may very well be a
game-changer
for the future of Wikidata and notably not one that break current tools like the "ontological federation" effectively would. It most probably also be easier for the new Wikidata Platform team to operate in a sustainable way compared to the current legacy architecture where manual pooling and installation of servers is needed.--
So9q
talk
22:08, 1 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Although an overhaul to WD:N is being discussed, I think we should also consider reforming WD:RfD (requests for deletion). Re-posting
my earlier ideas
IMO the process should be split into
nominations for deletion
and
requests for (speedy) deletion
. Nominating would involve sending a message to the creator and letting them know what is wrong and what they should do in order to not have their item deleted (cf.
User:Bovlb/How to create an item on Wikidata so that it won't get deleted
). The discussion could be held on the user's talk page or the item's talk page (which can be categorized, so that there is a general overview of currently or previously nominated items). Having these discussions on
WD:RfD
is very unfriendly (it's a long page with many threads, it takes long to publish a comment there, it's sensitive to accidental structure changes because we have bots maintaining it, etc.). The process of nominating could also be automated which I think is desperately needed.
See also
User:ChristianKl/Draft:ProposeDeletion
. --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
11:42, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
on this and this for raising the issue!
Epì
dosis
17:29, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
See also
Wikidata:Speedy deletion
for further proposal to reduce workload of RFD.
GZWDer
talk
13:00, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I like the ProposeDeletion draft :)
So9q
talk
22:55, 5 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Another ongoing problem is that some long-term spammers have learnt ways to game N1. I see two common patterns.
One pattern is to upload photos to Commons, create a category there, and then use the existence of that category to justify a Wikidata item. In some cases, the existence of the Wikidata item is in turn cited on Commons as a reason not to delete the category, creating circular notability between projects.
Another pattern is to create articles (often machine-translated) on smaller Wikipedias. These projects often have limited administrative capacity, and cleanup can take a long time, during which the article’s existence is used to satisfy N1.
These approaches are inexpensive for the creator but time-consuming for communities to resolve.
I’m not sure what the best long-term fix is, but one small improvement might be to change N1.4 by dropping the first word, so that it applies to all items rather than only category items.
Bovlb
talk
16:17, 4 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Can't items with a commons category can still be deleted under N1:4? Also, spam articles from small projects can be added to
meta:GSR
for global sysops to delete if there are no active admins. The request page is closely monitored and spam is deleted within hours usually.
Ternera
talk
03:38, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
No. Only category items can be deleted under N1.4.
Not all smaller projects are handled by global sysops. There's a middle group of projects that choose to be independent, but unfortunately struggle to handle backlogs.
Bovlb
talk
05:21, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I see that the reuse criterion does not seem to go through. I do not know myself whether this is good or bad, but probably the most known / the biggest case of reuse is Open Street Map which uses Wikidata to translate all features it shows into many languages (which is important because it uses the native language for every country - I have just been one week in Cairo, and it is difficult to use without fluent command of the Arabic alphabet). We probably should have a position on which entities are important for us and which ones we want to host. Note that the vast majority are not related to self-promotion, though some (like shops) can be.--
Ymblanter
talk
20:24, 5 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I didn't see any mention of unpatrolled edits. There are now so many unpatrolled new items that even blatant spam or vandalism can survive a month and then just sit there for years until someone stumbles across it. My preference would be for these items to remain tagged as unpatrolled permanently until someone actually checks them. —
Xezbeth
talk
09:48, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I would
Support
this.
Epì
dosis
11:23, 6 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
This is a technical limitation that cannot be lifted. But there are bots taking snapshots, like
User:Pasleim/notability
. --
Matěj Suchánek
talk
19:01, 7 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
How the Wikidata community should assess, assure, and support the notability of editing activities that are part of projects funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. When there is less clear explanation or visibility of the project context, such editing activities may be misinterpreted as spam or non-notable, despite being carried out within an approved project. Example of such happenings are
here
and
here
. We should be able to "guide" or "advise" those projects, like how to filter data that are notable enough, or to help them create proper attribute. Usually what happens are only request for deletions or questions of notability in user talks. I think we should enforce that such projects need to have clear plan on the method they used, the data, the source, and perhaps example plan of final result that they want to achieve.
Happy New Year 2026!
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
09:08, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
How Wikidata should allow sufficient wiggle room for items originating from countries or regions with limited access to standardized reference infrastructures, such as Indonesia or other Global South countries. In the absence of widely used authority identifiers or centralized reference systems, for example VIAF, ISNI, national libraries, or the Library of Congress, data that are locally valid in context may still fail to meet Wikidata’s notability criteria, which can affect items such as Indonesian landmarks, for example, religious structures.
Happy New Year 2026!
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
09:08, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
In this and the mass-editing RfC, and the underlying move towards federated Wikibases, I am extremely concerned about knowledge equity, and about the sustainability of underrepresented knowledge. We risk to even further replicate existing biases in knowledge production, to continue to keep communities with less or no resources out of the picture, and to deprioritize knowledge and data that has been left out of the historical record due to structures of power and privilege. How many Wikibases with underrepresented knowledge will still be up and active, will still have resources and critical mass in, say, 10-15 years?
Spinster
10:31, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Barriers to contribution for those who actually have valuable stuff to contribute. In my work (on cultural subjects, even in well-resourced countries), I see all the time that Wikidata is seen as a difficult and high-barrier project to contribute to. The current RfCs risk to result in even more barriers. It would be helpful to focus: create very strict and punitive barriers to those who actually actively undermine Wikimedia goals; and on the other hand aim to become much more welcoming to more contributors who have Wikimedia-aligned knowledge to contribute.
Spinster
10:31, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
With the increase of Wikidata items create for solely SEO purposes, we should create an essay to explain Wikidata policies regarding this so admin could just refer to them when deleting items.
Happy New Year 2026!
Yamato
Shiya
大和 士也
Talk
Contribs
15:24, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think this needs to be considered alongside criteria 1 and 3 and also what "serious and publicly available references" means. Also how do changes affect external projects:
Integration with Open Street Map
and small academic projects like
and
on focus list of Wikimedia project
(P5008)
There should also be clarity at other sources of item creation, for example Open Refine, QuickStatements,
and
Piecesofuk
talk
11:13, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think there is a larger impact on GLAM work that I can't see yet in the discussion above: 1) my perspective is that I used to work at a museum in the UK where the collection was catalogued, but there was no online collection and it was very little published. With closer constraints on notability objects it sounds like parts of this collection couldn't be integrated. I imagine this would be an issue for others outside of the UK. 2) I have another concern, which relates to the short-term state of GLAM funding in the UK - say an organisation wanted to do some Wikidata work, and got a 1 year grant to do so, and set up a Wikibase, in my experience once the 1 year post holder is gone it's unlikely that anyone in the organisation would either have the skills or interest to continue. I would
strongly
question whether this policy change would be sustainable for collaborators.
Lajmmoore
talk
14:19, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
& a general point, what happened to
wanting to represent the sum of all human knowledge
? It feels like this is a contraction of purpose
Lajmmoore
talk
14:21, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
reply
Round 2: Context
edit
Below is the proposal for the new policy based on the discussion in round 1. Please add your votes, questions and comments below.
There are office hours on the following days to talk more about the policy if you are interested (though the binding votes and discussion need to happen in this RfC):
February 26th 2026 at 5PM UTC
March 2nd 2026 at 9AM UTC
March 4th 2026 at 5PM UTC
The calls will happen at
Round 2: Policy proposal
edit
Wikidata is a knowledge graph, providing general purpose data to the Wikimedia projects and the world at large. Wikidata’s data is intended to provide a basic understanding of the world for humans and machines.
This policy defines which entities can be described in Wikidata.
An item is acceptable if and only
if it meets at least one of the three criteria below
It contains
at least one valid
sitelink
to a page on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, or Wikimedia Commons.

It refers to an instance of a
clearly identified conceptual or material entity
that is described using
serious and publicly available references
. The minimum criteria:
At least one external identifier: The subject is associated with one or more identifiers that are assigned or curated by an independent authority, and that meaningfully distinguish the subject from others. Identifiers that are self-assigned, or can be obtained without editorial review (such as typical social-media profiles) are not sufficient on their own. OR:
At least one reference, independent from the subject: The subject is the topic of significant, independent coverage in serious and publicly available sources that support a meaningful identification and distinction from others. Routine listings, directory entries or being quoted in an interview about another topic do not constitute significant coverage on their own, and additional independent sources might be required. Self-authored descriptions, and marketing or promotional material are not considered serious and independent sources.
It fulfills a
structural need
, for example: it is needed to make statements made in other items more useful.
New items must have the statements necessary to be clearly identified or sitelinks that show that they meet at least one of the above criteria within 24 hours.
Creating items about yourself, your close relatives, your business and other entities you have a conflict of interest with
is not permitted.
Please consider
edit
Wikidata’s data is maintained by a community of people like you. Please be considerate of their time and effort. This is important for the long-term health of the project. Before creating a lot of new Items:
Spend some time editing existing Items to get an understanding of data modelling and best practices first.
We value quality over quantity
Think about where and how your data will be used. If your data is used in a Wikimedia project or another application, chances are higher that it will be kept in good shape long-term and Wikidata’s overall data quality stays high.
Consider what the complete set of Items would be that you are working on. Wikidata is not the right place to describe all stars in the universe, every human on earth, etc. Narrow it down to a reasonable set of notable entities and discuss with the community in case of any doubt.
If you intend to create a lot of new Items and are not absolutely sure if they meet the notability criteria, please ask for additional input at
Wikidata:Notability/Questions
Do not try to game the system. Such efforts are frowned upon and will only lead to your Items being deleted.
Knowledge equity
edit
We do acknowledge that certain knowledge has been and is being structurally marginalized. This leads to less coverage in reliable sources and therefore an increased barrier to demonstrating notability. In our effort to make more knowledge accessible to everyone, we take this limitation into consideration when making decisions about the notability of an entity.
Options besides Wikidata
edit
If your data does not fit Wikidata’s notability criteria, we want to help you find the perfect home for your contributions. Wikibase Cloud and Wikibase Suite might be a better fit for your data. Together with Wikidata, these form the Wikibase Ecosystem, a network of specialized communities, each collecting and maintaining data for the world in their area of focus.
Data in any Wikibase instance becomes part of the Linked Open Data Web and accessible worldwide. In addition you have more flexibility in how to model your data and who gets to edit it. Visit
wikiba.se
to explore which platform best suits your needs, and check out our
showcase
to see examples of what other communities have built.
Other entity types
edit
This notability policy covers Items. The notability criteria for Lexemes can be found at
Wikidata:Lexicographical data/Notability
Round 2: Votes, questions and discussion
edit
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
: The self-promotion page is currently an essay. Can we formally elevate it to a policy too? Let's be explicit about proposing that.--
Jasper Deng
talk
10:25, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Jasper Deng
Good point. Would that be a separate RfC?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:26, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
: For time's sake, I think it's okay to be in this RfC as well, as long as it's under its own section and proposal. There also must be a provision for what to do with the notability policy if self-promotion is not enacted as a policy.--
Jasper Deng
talk
10:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I've added a section for it now.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:38, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I like "identifiers that are assigned or curated by an independent authority" but I also wonder what that means in practice. Is a museum an independent authority for art they own? Would it make sense to mention that the identifier should at least have
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
(and never only
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
)?
Ainali
talk
15:26, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think that this is very problematic criterion, because PR agencies will know that they need to by an ISNI before getting a QID. In many countries (perhaps more than not) issuing free PIDs by GLAM institutions is a very politicized process and excludes minorities, politically subversive content and their creators. I do not find this criterion good.
Adaniel
talk
08:30, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think what we want is that people can't just get the ID themselves for themselves. Reading over it again this is maybe covered sufficiently with the rest of the section? We could remove "that are assigned or curated by an independent authority". What do people think?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:24, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
I like the new proposal as it is, I think it reflects well the consensus from the earlier discussion.
ArthurPSmith
talk
17:08, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I agree with ArthurPSmith, but with one fundamental doubt (related to the question raised by Ainali): "identifiers that are assigned or curated by an independent authority" should be clarified, probably with a reference to the presence of
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
and the absence of
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
, and this is probably uncontroversial ... but what will probably be problematic will be assigning one of these two to the properties not already having them, and whilst this is probably easy for most of them, I am afraid for the IDs regarding bibliographic entities: the bibliographic data of a book/article described in a library catalogue and/or bibliographic database are inside this notability policy, if they have no incoming links from other items (i.e. criterium 3)? As of now
DOI
(P356)
ISBN-10
(P957)
and
ISBN-13
(P212)
, as well as others like e.g.
PubMed publication ID
(P698)
or
DNB edition ID
(P1292)
, and in general most of the "bibliographic IDs" (I will try to make precise statistics about this) don't have neither, so the situation of items relying solely on them (I guess some 40 M) remains ambiguous, which is surely not ideal, since we are exactly trying to make it clear the point. As we have opened a thread below regarding the status of WD:Self-promotion, I think opening another subparagraph for the discussion regarding the notability-status of bibliographic IDs would be highly recommendable (or a separated RfC). I also add a related question (although it impacts much much fewer items): if I have a printed bibliography listing some hundreds editions of notable works (e.g. tragedies of Sophocles), or hundreds of books/articles regarding a certain theme, and I want to create all their items using this printed authoritative source, if I understand correctly the policy would allow it; I tend to think this is a good thing, but I would like to make sure this is also the general consensus. --
Epì
dosis
18:18, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
BTW, it should become mandatory ASAP to assign to all newly-created external-ID properties
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
or
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
reply
+1 on the last sentence; we should even make this mandatory in the property proposal and not mark them as ready unless it has been filled in.
Ainali
talk
18:44, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Epìdosis
I would be usefull to add a page like
en:Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources
, in case there is contestation one way or another. Like I seen a RfD using
‎Organ Index ID
(P13889)
today and I was not sure if it establish or not the notability.
Fralambert
talk
20:59, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
There are identfiers such as
Wikimedia username
(P4174)
that clearly don't suggest notability, others that I think should be accepted as notable (
NRHP reference number
(P649)
and similar) then those that are less certain -
TOID
(P3120)
I think is notable but should generally be added to existing items, or new items with other identifiers,
GSS code (2011)
(P836)
notability probably depends on prefix,
GNS Unique Feature ID
(P2326)
I think is generally notable but can be deleted if we are unable to identify what the ID refers to. Then there are
DoBIH Number
(P6515)
(does not suggest notability because it's self-published or user-generated, but in almost all cases is notable),
GeoNames ID
(P1566)
(does not specify, user-generated so not an indication of notability by itself but ID and history may point to other sources). If
DOI
(P356)
can suggest notability, it can only be for certain publishers, journals or prefixes, or with other identifiers, because it can be used for a
preprint
(Q580922)
predatory publishing
(Q29959533)
, or
user-generated content
(Q579716)
Wikidata:Requests for deletions/Archive/2025/01/16#Q58746840
) -
PubMed publication ID
(P698)
seems to be more selective. There seems to be no consistency with library IDs:
Library of Congress authority ID
(P244)
says it suggests notability but
National Library of Israel J9U ID
(P8189)
says it does not but the reason for that is unclear.
Peter James
talk
22:56, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
There are 87 Wikidata properties that have, if my understanding of the properties is correct, contradictory statements on notability: P2429:
eventually complete
(Q21873974)
and P31:
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
).
Peter James
talk
23:48, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Good find! That almost look like a to-do list.
Ainali
talk
06:57, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Worth to mention at this point that the pair of items
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
and
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
is a community effort without coverage by any policy at this point. Anyone can add it to or remove if from a property page, and chances are that nobody would object. This definitely needs a clean-up, and then some continuous policing effort to keep it usable. —
MisterSynergy
talk
14:26, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Sure, I very much agree on this!
Epì
dosis
15:15, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I will add a new section further down to discuss this.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:18, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
On the "
#Knowledge equity
" section: as much as I am aware, this has barely been discussed here yet. While I can generally acknowledge the situation and support that approach, I am not aware how to
take this limitation into consideration when making decisions about the notability of an entity
. Do we have any guidelines how to handle these cases, from admin perspective? —
MisterSynergy
talk
21:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
MisterSynergy
There are many resources about knowledge equity, and there is a lot of experience—and frustration—across Wikimedia projects regarding support for editors working on marginalized topics. However, this has not yet been consolidated into guidelines for administrators, patrols, and for the daily editing/checking work on Wikidata. I see this as a good opportunity to start with something useful and pragmatic in this line. I can to volunteer to outline some ideas to contribute to the conversation.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
14:07, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Can we please have a robust and actionable policy here before we vote this section into policy status? I am otherwise afraid that we create a huge loophole that would allow many nefarious actors to place their undesired content here based on marginalization claims, while actually marginalized knowledge does not have sufficient support for reliable integration at Wikidata based on the proposal above alone. —
MisterSynergy
talk
14:31, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Hi @
MisterSynergy
I do support that we should have a robust policy on knowledge equity, and I commit to work in that direction (and if you want to join me, and others, that would be fabulous). But I don't think we need to have it done to approve the notability policy reform. While I share the general concern about promotional content and spam, I have rarely seen marginalized knowledge being used as an excuse to introduce it (all those tech entrepreneurs creating items for their new AI startup that you can see in Recent Changes all the time, don't seem to be claiming that we should accept them because they belong to marginalized communities). The proposed text, given its place in the policy, does not seem to be a checkbox that automatically grants notability, but rather an aspect to be considered with caution and common sense. Wiki editors have a long collective experience of applying common sense and discussing civically until we reach a consensus on notability. I believe that we can continue to be guided by these principles while we develop a more robust guideline on marginalized knowledge and knowledge equity. Having at least one mention of it in this policy is a big step we should support.
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
18:50, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Agreed, marginalization is currently not a common claim for those who seek entry but are denied/undesired here. However, in past years there was a clear trend to comply with the current notability policy in order to place promotional content here, as promotional editors understood how they could game the system. We are basically here discussing an RfC because the current form of the policy really needs to be overhauled and clarified based on that experience.
As for what is sufficient regarding knowledge equity: I am serving as admin here at Wikidata for almost a decade, and my deletion volume is usually pretty high (I have logged more deletion events than anyone else, by quite some margin). I currently do not feel prepared to consider knowledge equity in deletion discussions and I would welcome a comprehensive guide how to handle such cases. The (proposed) policy requires me to do level up my skillset here. —
MisterSynergy
talk
20:24, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I am going to add a section further down where we can collect ideas for how to address this.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
09:48, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
For book editions, newspaper or periodical issues etc. hosted on Wikisource, sitelink for main namespaces might not always be present. The Wikisource workflow requires transcription, proofreading and transclusion of the entire file to generate a Wikisource sitelink of the main content and that requires time. Presence of
Wikisource index page URL
(P1957)
with or without Wikisource sitelink should be sufficient to establish its notability. Some of the Wikisource related tools are also based on the presence of this property like
Sangkalak
(Q123617697)
Wikisource reader app
(Q133540085)
etc. So, IMHO, this should be documented in the 1st criteria of notability as a footnote. --
Bodhisattwa
talk
13:37, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Are there any objections to this?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:37, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree with @
Bodhisattwa
, because creating a main namespace on Wikisource need more time, it would be better if
property:P1957
could be included in the first criteria. And index on Wikisource using edition/book items to connect to files in Commons or other Wikisources (if translated).
Empat Tilda
talk
18:13, 7 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Finding external identifiers for organisations can problematic. They often don't naturally have a master organisation that mentions them, and if they do, that's often declaration by the organisation itself or a mention on the other organisation's website, but not a formal identifier. For example of the two hundred-odd caving clubs in Britain, perhaps 20 are notable because of their heritage and detail of their research publications, and have content we want to link to with
described by source
(P1343)
. Their parent body,
British Caving Association
(Q4969613)
has a
page
listing them, but there's no formal identifier, and I guess
member of
(P463)
is not acceptable. Only if they are also charities they might have proper identifiers. The same applies for companies and their trade bodies, where paid general directories are of dubious worth.
Vicarage
talk
13:54, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I strongly object to the first point of the notability criteria stating that a link to Wikimedia Commons is sufficient for notarization. We had lengthy discussions before we succeeded in ensuring that administrators do not automatically consider Wikimedia Commons to be notable, and I don't want to lose that. Wikimedia Commons lacks any real relevance criteria. --
Gymnicus
talk
23:18, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
The wording in the draft is exactly the wording that is in the current policy. Commons sitelinks are restricted in the way I believe you are asking for in the subpoints of criteria 1. I just omitted them in the draft because they are untouched.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:41, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
: It's true that officially, nothing has changed regarding the notability rules since 2013. However, there have been certain—let's call them—guiding decisions from the administrators, and I recall that administrators didn't always classify a Wikimedia Commons link as requiring notability. But administrators would have to confirm whether my recollection is correct. --
Gymnicus
talk
22:59, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Every item that enters Wikidata can be roughly classified into a category, such as humans, organizations, businesses, species, stars, chemical substances, books, songs, movies, and so on. I think we can enumerate all the categories that are currently 'allowed' in Wikidata and devise specific notability criteria for each. For each category, we can provide real-world examples of what is notable and what is not. I think we could start a WikiProject to build this kind of 'master guideline,' ideally even reviewing each item from Q1 to Q????.
Rtnf
talk
03:32, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Aside from the huge implications this policy will have for underrepresented and marginalized knowledge, I'm concerned about the process in itself, particularly where the outcomes are so unclear. We all know that once a policy is settled and enforced,
it's extremely hard to roll it back or revert it
; it becomes the new standard regardless of its flaws. As an example, the
research
made by Art+Feminism that spoke to the problems of some of the policies in English Wikipedia has been extremely hard to implement.
How decisions are made is almost as important as the decisions that get made. The way in which this discussion is unfolding makes it very hard to achieve a fair & equitable outcome. The current format, conducted entirely in long-form English, is a massive barrier for a project as multilingual as Wikidata. It effectively silences a huge base of active contributors who have valuable opinions but can't or won't participate in this specific format or language (or that might not even be aware that this is being discussed right now, because they're mainly focused in contributing on the project). Right now, we're looking at a situation where maybe 10 people are deciding the future for thousands of users, including newcomers, that we need more than ever.
If this policy ends up punishing marginalized or otherwise relevant knowledge further down the line, it won't matter that it was "discussed" if the discussion wasn't actually accessible to the people it affects most. Is this actually the best way to approve project policies in 2026, especially one that will have such a tremendous impact on how people can contribute?
If, nevertheless, such a small group moves forward with this, I suggest safeguards are built to prevent long-term damage. First, the policy should only be effective for a set trial period, after which it must undergo a review. Annual reviews on the policy should be conducted to make sure that it remains fit for purpose. We need an immediate "emergency" review trigger if we see the policy disproportionately affects specific groups, like non-native English speakers or newcomers. We also need a clear process to track the "before and after" of this implementation. Without hard evidence of how this affects and changes participation, we won't have the tools to fix it further down the line when the harm becomes clear. Finally, the door needs to remain open for outside perspectives. If an affiliate or an external research group produces solid, evidence-based research on the impacts of this policy, that data should be officially taken into consideration in future discussions about the policy.
Scann
talk
14:36, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
In terms of safeguards, I wouldn't discard the possibility also of running a Central Notice Banner and conduct a proper voting process, similar to how stewards and other bureaucratic processes are run. A policy with such an implication can't be decided between a small group in a page that no one actively monitors; it should be publicly communicated and run as any other important bureaucratic process.
Scann
talk
14:56, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I totally agree.
So9q
talk
00:38, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Supporting
Scann
's comments here, as the existing structural marginalisation of many groups' knowledge would be further baked in by this process
Avocadobabygirl
talk
20:46, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I strongly agree with all the points raised by @
Scann
! Particularly their demand for an emergency review trigger to alert communities very likely not aware of discussions and policy changes that will have potentially huge impacts on their continued presence and representation on Wikidata (and beyond).
OpenArabicPE
talk
10:18, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think that the question is whether this is an improvement and good enough. I say yes to both. The policy should be open to update and reform, which would be the way to fix any problems that it has.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
talk
15:10, 24 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Creation and improvement of Wikidata items is often an important step towards
identifying
what's notable. In training new editors I've always emphasised that this work is collaborative, and the bit of information they add might be supplemented by someone else until there are suddenly enough details and sources for a Wikipedia article to be created. Preventing the creation of items (especially when the criteria reinforce structural issues regarding marginalised knowledge) will make this iterative improvement harder to kick off.
Avocadobabygirl
talk
21:22, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I support @
Scann
& @
Avocadobabygirl
's opinions here.
Winnieswikiworld
talk
22:31, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I absolutely support these opinions, and added a bit more of practical experience on this below, and also how I think that this criteria can backfire and lead to more commercial self-promotion.
Adaniel
talk
08:33, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I don't really see this as an improvement. There should be a clear statement of what each of the notability criteria refer to. To have a set of guidelines that starts with "Note that the guidelines below are intentionally left a bit vague." is not good enough.
My thoughts on Criteria 1: I always understood that Criteria 1 was used for interlanguage links, i.e. to link equivalent articles across different language Wikipedias, if that's correct then shouldn't Wikimedia Commons be removed from Criteria 1 as it's a monolingual project? Also, I've come across some discussion that "small" Wikipedias can be abused by spammers and so Wikidata items shouldn't be automatically created from these.
Criteria 2: I think this needs to be tightened up, something along the lines of "An item passes criteria 2 if it's the subject of an encyclopaedic article, biographical article, newspaper article, journal article published in a widely recognised encyclopaedia, national newspaper, journal. Being "widely recognised" would require at least one Wikipedia article about the encyclopaedia etc.
Criteria 3: From
"Wikidata provides structure for all the information stored in Wikipedia, and on the other Wikimedia projects. [...] All data stored on Wikidata can be used to generate all kinds of automated and up to date lists or tables or other structured pages in any Wikimedia site or elsewhere." The way I interpret this is that any named entity contained within a Wikipedia article (or in another encyclopaedic article etc.) would be eligible to pass Criteria 3, for example a person's parents or school.
External IDs: are a mess. Why are social media sites and genealogical sites mixed in with encyclopaedias? Why do
VIAF cluster ID
(P214)
and
ISNI
(P213)
sit at the top of the External Identifiers list when they're both
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
?.
References: An item shouldn't be allowed to be created without a good reference.
imported from Wikimedia project
(P143)
shouldn't be allowed. The source of a reference should have a
stated in
(P248)
published in
(P1433)
qualifier (or equivalent) which must pass Criteria 1 or Criteria 2.
Other: It should be made clear how Wikidata is used by external projects and what these projects are and how that relates to notability. Especially concerning GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).
Piecesofuk
talk
10:33, 26 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Criteria 1 is not just about Wikipedia and the other multilingual projects. It is there to address all sitelinks that Wikidata has to other Wikimedia projects, including Commons.
For criteria 2 it seems like based on the rest of the discussion here tightening it even further as you are suggesting is not going to get consensus.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
09:52, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I understand why the technical scaling issues motivate a notability policy, but why is a notability policy needed for the social scaling issues? Wouldn't it work just as well to add a new boolean-valued notability property? Then users of the data who want only the higher quality items can restrict to notable items, and other users can search all items. Personally, I'm interested in creative works whether they're notable or not, and I'm fine with lower quality data about the non-notable creative works.
dseomn
talk
20:54, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Because I believe Wikidata is a project that only works and thrives with its community. The more SEO spam, self-promotion, etc we have the less time and attention we can spend on the core of what Wikidata is meant to provide the world: basic general-purpose data about the world. A new boolean-valued notability property I fear will just shift the debate, because we will disagree on which Item should be classified how.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
09:55, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I have been working on GLAM projects in a decolonisation context, bringing collections online and helping surface forgotten, omitted, or unidentified Indigenous people from institutional holdings. In parallel, I have worked on music-industry identifier policies outside Wikidata. From both perspectives, I find the new requirement of having at least one external identifier extremely problematic. The music industry is dealing with similar reforms, and on similar quantities of nodes like Wikidata, and the proposed changed are far more gradual. In music, currently about half a billion sound recordings are available on various platforms, and there are about 2 billion entities that must be connected to them with PIDs to ensure that the music can be legally used and paid. And while there is money in it, the introduction is far more gradual because of the lack of access to registering PIDs.
Over the past 5–6 years, Wikidata has done something remarkable: it has de facto provided a low-barrier, free persistent identifier through QIDs. These QIDs often serve as public nodes where knowledge can start to accumulate, long before a person, object, or community receives a formal PID elsewhere. In many cases, the Wikidata item is precisely what later enables proper identification and the issuing of an external PID. A Wikidata QID is like a condensation point, a particle in the air, that will later attract enough water particles to make a raindrop.
Maintaining PIDs is expensive. The practical entropy of VIAF alone demonstrates that cheap, accessible authority control outside Wikidata is often illusory. If you live in an affluent and inclusive country like Sweden or the Netherlands, identifying, for example, colonial informants or marginalised historical actors may quickly lead to a national GLAM institution issuing a PID. But even in much of Europe this is not the case, and even in the EU I know of countries where access to PIDs via GLAM institutes (far the most frequent case) is politicisied and discriminatory. PIDs are typically issued according to notability criteria defined by state or commercial actors. Entire communities fall outside these systems. On the other hand, talking about self-promotion, PR agencies will quickly learn that all they need for a QID is to buy an ISNI and use it for verification.
There is a growing body of literature showing how Wikidata has democratised access to authority infrastructures.
A think that the sunset criteria and the quality criteria should be much reworked. For example, any item that, after three years, has not resulted in high-quality statements or an alternative PID maintained outside Wikidata could be deleted. But in many decolonisation and community-driven contexts, years are needed between the moment new knowledge surfaces — perhaps through a researcher or a Commons upload — and the identification of corroborating sources, claims, and structured statements. And this is not one day.
I would also welcome a more dedicated, organised space for highlighting new knowledge elements that require corroboration. That would strengthen quality control without discouraging early-stage documentation.
In my experience, many problematic items were created by half-baked bots or mass imports from systems like VIAF — which itself is currently collapsing under inconsistencies and outdated data. Or by people without any experience on editing Wikidata.
Quality indicators could be more nuanced than simply requiring a sitelink or an external PID. For example: the presence of multilingual descriptions, a minimum number of coherent and well-modelled properties, or evidence of structured use across statements. These are better indicators of whether an item is becoming a real node of knowledge.
It would be better to have policies on curatorial policies not on entries themselves. Entries created by human editors who have a track record of having created high-quality entries in the past should be trusted with their judgement. And bots should be much more thoroughly vetted. I think that poor curatorial workflows result in poor quality items, and not self-promotion or the lack of notability of the subject. Who are we to say that a person surfacing from marginalised part of society is not significant? We can however say that a page has no prospect of promoting the accumulation of open knowledge, or that an editor/bot is not yet comopetent enough to create good pages.
New entries should be encouraged — but paired with strict and realistic expectations that they mature into properly structured knowledge nodes. As it stands, the proposed policy feels much stricter than many identifier regimes in the music industry, where billions of PIDs determine whose music is heard and paid out, and where there is a monetary incentive to improve the data.
I will try to join the roundtables, although unfortunately the proposed times are quite challenging for me.
08:15, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
Daniel Antal
Oppose
as per Scann above.--
So9q
talk
00:40, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
"Routine listings, directory entries or being quoted in an interview about another topic do not constitute significant coverage on their own" - A number of historical people, places are known little other than their name. So I believe we should limit this term to contemporary entities. (We can consider entities that is only described in any source that is published in last 95 years as contemporary.)--
GZWDer
talk
16:26, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
+1
So9q
talk
18:30, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
: I've had the (mis)fortune of seeing
first-hand
the abuse of Wikidata perpetuated by factions who want to do nothing but promote themselves and their products.
Whyiseverythingalreadyused
he/him
01:34, 9 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
While I definitely support improving the vagaries of criteria #2 and keeping commercial and self-promotional interests out of Wikidata, notability policy revisions must be careful not to conflate these interests with those of good-faith knowledge workers, organizations, and projects that seek to improve public knowledge for the public good. We must take into account the many WikiProjects that seek to increase the visibility of marginalized and/or under-resourced individuals and communities. Wikidata is not an encyclopedia...applying stringent notability guidelines similar to those of Wikipedia could serve to increase existing bias and privilege. Instructions to simply create Wikibase instances ignore the limits that this potentially imposes on organic, global collaboration, as well as the limited time and labor resources that many must contend with. More nuance in “knowledge equity” could greatly help to mitigate these concerns.
Katburl
talk
18:18, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I understand that there's a growth related issue with Wikidata, and that there's nothing that can grow forever without problems (not even the Universe). However, the proposal won't solve the issue (there will still be possibility of endless growth) and will create problems for lots of institutions that are starting now to understand that Wikidata is the place to be. I'm working on projects that will have the idea of linking their collections with Wikidata, and many others are doing the same. The same applies, as explained above by others, to scientific institutions, journals, libraries... the proposed change would make that not possible, or possible and then the policy not implemented (or, even worse, randomly implemented). Are there other solutions? Indeed, there are: let's think that I want to add a bunch of humans. I add the
instance of
(P31)
human
(Q5)
identifier and Wikidata knows that this should be stored in Wikidata/Humans. The same applies to all the WikiCite items: Wikidata/Journals is their place. Wikidata/Taxon, Wikidata/Lexemes, Wikidata/Geo... whatever it's neede to separate entities into buckets when those buckets are large enough... and then federate the query if needed. Of course, there are other solutions, but let's think on how this affects communities, institutions and our reputation, and if the solution is even enforceable or valid in 5-6 years. -
Theklan
talk
08:46, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
The idea sounds intriguing but people are already asking for the scientific article split to be undone. And that is a split that is relatively straight-forward. Splitting out humans for example would have much more far-reaching consequences.
And it is ultimately not just about the query service, where this could be split. It is also about the amount of edits in Wikidata for example, which would not change here.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
09:58, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I agree with
Scann
and
Katburl
's comments above. I strongly prefer technical solutions to technical problems, and the proposed changes to Wikidata's notability policy will do more harm than good. I would be in support of better multilingual community outreach for Requests for Comment in general--it doesn't seem fair to have decisions like this happen only in English in a corner of Wikidata that most everyday editors never notice or see. Decisions made in echo chambers do not serve the entire community. Wikidata is frequently the first identifier to be assigned to notable people, institutions, and ideas. If we need to wait for closed data sources to make an identifier for something first, the usefulness of Wikidata is diminished (in my mind, and in my current Wikidata practices in the GLAM environment). --
Crystal Yragui, University of Washington Libraries
talk
22:12, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Technical solutions are of course part of what needs to happen and is happening. But we also need policy solutions. They have to go hand in hand.
About more outreach: People have done outreach for example in the Latin-American communities to gather input there. And I welcome more. I'm happy to support anyone who does. But ultimately an RfC is how the Wikidata community needs to make this decision.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:00, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I can't support this in its current form. In the last year, I've gotten to know the archivist community well enough to learn what a priceless gift the current policy is to free knowledge workers. Let us preserve artisanal Wikidata production, especially for knowledge equity topics, even as some extra additional care might need to be taken around mass-editing policy. In addition, I don't think it has ever been clearly articulated what non-"serious" sources we are looking to restrict, and if the actual uses would make a technical difference; for example, do we mean video game databases?--
Pharos
talk
19:24, 16 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I understand the sentiment. But the current status isn't sustainable unfortunately. We do need a new policy. Do you have suggestions for how to change the current draft to make it better?
About non-serious sources: For example yet-another-crypto-company creating Items for them and their products based on an article in a crypto-advertising magazine. Unfortunately there is quite a bit more on
WD:RFD
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:02, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Surely we can treat nonprofit/academic efforts differently from commercial/promotional ones? Would you be amenable to a reformulation of the policy that focused on that distinction?
Pharos
talk
16:21, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I am clearly against this two-class system
Oppose
--
Gymnicus
talk
16:34, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
about the actionability of the policy (also the present one, BTW): I also report here
phab:T420316
(adding the possibility to delete items through the REST API); if solved, it will also make possible to add to QS 3.0 the possibility of mass-deleting lists of items (cf.
meta:Talk:QuickStatements 3.0#Feature: delete items
). --
Epì
dosis
10:21, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I have also just requested
an admin-bot periodically deleting surely non-notable items
, as defined by the current
WD:N
Epì
dosis
17:07, 21 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
The current process is sustainable until and unless we establish a more meanful, participatory, community consensus to change it. Also, we are switching to a new SPARQL engine in June 2026 to be finalized summer 2027, in the context that we have been using our current technology with no updates since 2015. Our culture will change so much with expanded technology that the familiar limits which we have needed in recent years do not make sense in the context of greatly expanded, near-future capacity updates.
This RfC is a great start to orienting that discussion, but this RfC is not a representative discussion to make what would likely be a 10-year new strategy for the fundamental nature of Wikidata. The proposed draft changes would significantly disrupt several of the largest and most popular Wikidata community editing efforts, including
Wikidata:WikiCite
; efforts to catalog cultural collections including
Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings
and
Wiki Loves Monuments
(Q1353202)
; efforts to create biographical entries which Wikipedia community projects have done for decades by occupation, demographic, and activist need; and the next-generational institutional collaborations with universities, government agencies, and cultural and research organizations which always have been around but which are growing especially now in the context of greater interest in data science. As an alternative to this RfC to refine our rules, the counterproposal that I would make is to determine what datasets we want to import then design rules to match that, rather than design rules before checking to see what they can import. Before I support rule changes, I would like to get straightforward confirmation that existing Wikidata community projects will remain welcome and encouraged. The text in this RfC seems like it could be top-down disruption of a lot of community organizing, and also I am not seeing much organized community discussion in this RfC.
I see some other people have already stated these points, but I will state them in my own words -
We should not require public database identifiers as an inclusion criteria.
I get the benefit that importing identifiers is super-popular in Wikidata and agree that we should do it, but establishing identifiers is the game of the privileged. Having an identifier does not make something notable, it just means that a thing is more connected to the bias of institutions which mint identifiers. I do not want to either 1) further solidify through Wikidata that concepts matched to external identifiers are more real and worthy or 2) further diminish the value of concepts without identifiers. Worthy sets of items without identifiers include collections at underfunded universities, museums, government agencies, and nonprofits, which includes most of those kinds of organizations in the world. I can compromise: we could have one set of rules which applies to institutions which are high-economic development or commercial; and another set of rules which applies to institutions which are low-economic development or university/nonprofit/research/cultural.
We do not have a Wikidata definition for reliable sources, so we should not enforce a requirement for sources until we establish such a policy.
I agree that Wikidata content should cite reliable sources, but before we require that kind of fact-checking, we need a policy definition on reliable sources, and we do not have one. We have
Help:Sources
which is not a definition and not what we need. I oppose establishing a requirement for fact-checking, in the context that we have so much disagreement on how to do fact-checking or what constitutes a reliable source. We cannot import English Wikipedia's reliable source policy as some are suggesting, for reasons including that Wikidata needs to cite some fundamental databases which are reliable in senses and different ways than English Wikipedia can evaluate. Now is not the place to discuss this, but convening a task force to draft a Wikidata reliable sources policy would be useful.
Prohibit commercial marketing and branding; allow similar activities from universities, cultural/research orgs, and government agencies
I oppose
Wikidata:Self-promotion
. At English Wikipedia, there have always been debates about COI/conflict of interest editing. English Wikipedia has
tens of thousands of COI complaints
, and I know there is a lot of confusion about this, but those complaints are almost all commercial marketing and branding. We have had trouble writing out COI rules, but the reality on the ground is that some COI editing is good, and some is bad. The good kind is for example museums importing data for their collections into Wikidata, or other comparable efforts to get popular and user-requested info into Wikidata. The bad kind, which is 10,000x more common than the good kind, is promoting brands and products. The custom for writing Wikipedia/Wikidata rules is to present extremely short rubrics intended to apply to all knowledge in the world. While short rules make it easy to on-board new editors, they also fail by, for example, differentiating crypto scams designed to cheat Wikipedia from valid and wanted entries for the knowledge collections of cultural institutions. I would like our COI/self-promotion policy to start with intent to support Wikidata editing communities, and to avoid leading with brief rubrics that could constrain the human editorial process here. Let's recognize and welcome institutional partners who have data collections of value, and let's exclude commercial and marketing interests which scammers continually redesign to try to sneak through our rules. I think a better start to our COI policy would be to keep it for humans, by humans, who can readily identify the difference between commercial interests and not for profit knowledge sharing even when a short rule cannot.
Let's remerge the scholarly graph into the Wikidata main graph!
WikiCite is the most popular Wikidata project in terms of institutional partners, external funding invested into the Wikidata platform, count of university staff and librarians contributing, and the single-largest Wikidata community editorial user project. There was a recent Wikidata graph split which made sense in the context of Blazegraph, the SPARQL backend, being at capacity. Wikidata is about to go through a database migration, and after that migration, the benchmarking data indicate that Wikidata has capacity to remerge and complete the (finite, completable) Wikicite project. Wikicite is our best-chance best-idea effort to have a strong connection between the Wikimedia platform and every university and researcher in the world. We need this knowledge and fact-checking, and designing Wikidata's inclusion criteria and other policies to advance Wikicite is a proven high-impact strategic direction to achieve Wikimedia Movement goals. To me, the worst part about the Wikicite graph split was stumbling around for years in Wikidata, finding that we lack community discussion and leadership infrastructure to even talk about major problems when we have them. I wrote about this in "
Wikidata Graph Split and how we address major challenges
", February 2026 in
The Signpost
I am not persuaded that we should make decisions in crisis right now. We have years to talk this through and there is no urgency. We just did a graph split of Wikidata. Also there is a migration from the Blazegraph backend to some other database backend, which should expand the capacity of Wikidata's SPARQL engine at least several times, which further removes urgency.
Bluerasberry
(talk)
17:41, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
That something has to exist first in another part of the wikifamily is wrong and says that wikidata is not an equal part the family, if I was for example going to write an artical about a local politician in wikipedia, I would start by gathering the facts first in structured way in wikidata before writing it out long-hand as an article. It is also a dangerous path to put limits on how people work/think, I am not unusual as an IT engineer to think about the data/database before working on the "frontend" and it as a valid a way as someone who would start with "freetext" first
Back ache
talk
13:43, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Back ache
: Where in the notability criteria is this stated? Nowhere, because being included in another Wikimedia project is just one of three way to achieve notability. So please don't spread such misinformation.
Gymnicus
talk
14:23, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I realise Wikidata is facing some difficult choices at this point. I just want to weigh in with another GLAM partnership perspective. In my advocacy of Wikidata, one of the things I'm most excited about is
Sum of All Paintings
: the idea that Wikidata might point us to all the works by a notable artist, all the art works from different cultures that depict a particular animal or are associated with a particular location. Of course there is more to visual art than paintings and using Wikidata to aggregate other collections is just as inspiring. Such data sets can help with Wikipedia lists such as
w:en:Fabergé_egg#List_of_eggs
or
w:en:Dala'il_al-Khayrat#Manuscripts
, even when the individual objects do not merit a Wikipedia article. "Self-portraits of women" is a query that I use in all my Wikidata training; I talk about how assembling such an image gallery from hundreds of museum or gallery websites would take a ridiculous amount of work.
In my work as a Wikimedian In Residence, I have been involved in multiple activities that the proposed changes might rule out (if I understand the proposals correctly):
Sharing art works
from the eight
Khalili Collections
(Q63160499)
, almost all of which are outside the Western canon of art. There are no external IDs but there are printed and online catalogues that I can point to with
inventory number
(P217)
described at URL
(P973)
and
described by source
(P1343)
. The items don't have sitelinks but most have a
image
(P18)
statement and the Wikidata item supplies multilingual information about the photographed object on Commons.
The sharing of information about
astrolabes from museums and private collections
, led by
History of Science Museum
(Q6941088)
Science Museum
(Q674773)
Adler Planetarium
(Q358052)
who allowed me to add their catalogues to Wikidata. Scholars and curators were excited about this precisely because there is no prospect of a linked-data solution for this information from their sector.
Sharing a heritage register from UNESCO
, where most of the individual pieces of heritage do not yet have their own sitelinks or third-party coverage but the data set can be used to generate list articles for Wikipedia. There is no external ID but I'm using
heritage designation
(P1435)
and
described at URL
(P973)
Cultural institutions, even the best-known ones, are often poorly served for structured data: they might have a web site and print publications but not always a database. Most of their collections' art works lack third-party coverage or their own Wikipedia article, but they are documented by experts and usually published in a form that is regarded as authoritative, in collection catalogues or exhibition catalogues. Most relevantly, lists of items are incredibly useful open knowledge about artists' careers, evolution of styles over time, or different perspectives on a theme.
Is Wikidata saying that it's no longer our ambition to have every painting/ manuscript/ astrolabe/ painted-porcelain-bowl-by-notable-artist in a GLAM collection? Are they to be left to their own Wikimedia project (we can't rely on the cultural institutions themselves to create the aggregators, although they do appreciate them)? Can I create an item for an object to be used in the Commons page for the object's photograph, without having a Commons sitelink?
MartinPoulter
talk
14:58, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
As a relative newbie to Wikidata editing, I completely agree with Martin's comments. One of the troubles notability criteria creates for archive material in particular is that often the catalogue metadata about the archive is the
only
source / evidence that something exists, and peer-reviewed, verifiable works about collections take huge amounts of time to create - it's not something within the scope of most of us working in the sector. However Wikidata has the potential to connect these collections to wider knowledge, which just wouldn't happen anywhere else: it's a much more equitable way of joining up knowledge. I worked on a small project last year which explored the data held in
my institution's College Periodicals to Wikidata
: as a collection, this material is unexplored and little has been published on it. As Wikidata, there is information in there which can connect 20th century London life to all kinds of knowledge. Under the new criteria this project wouldn't go ahead, and neither would a piece of work I'm looking at undertaking this summer creating Wikidata entries for the UNESCO-registered George Orwell Archive. We constantly get news articles saying how 'undiscovered' these archives are when they are actually fully digitised and accessible; using Wikidata as a test case helps us to see what's feasible with these collections, what isn't and where the best place to concentrate Wikimedian in Residence efforts is.
Octavosaurus
talk
16:00, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
I also agree with @
MartinPoulter
's comments. One of the huge benefits I see to Wikidata is the ability to make unexpected connections between entities and create that linked network of data, discovering connections that would otherwise remain hidden. I have worked on 2 small projects so far - one with theses metadata and one with suffrage interviews metadata. Both make important contributions to the scholarly graph, and reveal connections and relationships which would otherwise remain hidden. Under the new criteria we would be hindered in making this connect accessible and both content and connections would be less accessible to researchers - or entirely inaccessible.
HelsKRW
talk
09:01, 14 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Comment
I agree with concerns above about the risk of excluding useful and reliable GLAM information based on the currently proposed wording of the criteria, and with @
Daniel Antal
's statement that there are alternative notability indicators, such as coherent properties and well-structured statements and references, which are more likely to make something a useful node than having a single external identifier from limited "recognised" places. In terms of references, which I broadly support us in encouraging, the wording is currently unclear. It is not clear what constitutes "significant", "serious" or "publicly available": I think questions such as the following are not clear to me from the current wording: What is required to indicate "significant"? Some people (e.g. matrons who head all nursing services in an organisation) were not written about at length in any single source, but their importance and interconnection with other data (e.g. historic hospitals) are evident from short but numerous references to their work. In terms of "seriousness", would a publication with a popular audience, such as a general-audience gardening magazine, be sufficient as a reference for the biography of a specialist
plantperson
responsible for discoveries of species and breeding of hybrids? Is the extensive database
Lost Hospitals of London
, widely respected by medical historians, to be taken seriously? And then the availability: if a source is not digitised but exists as a physical item, in a single physical repository where it is available to visitors coming to that place to consult, does it count as "available"? What about if it is digital but paywalled or only accessible to those in a specific geographical IP range - is that "publicly" available?
Zeromonk
talk
11:29, 14 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
To bring another GLAM perspective: I worked for the UK's largest local museum service, which had no publicly available catalogue (due to the design of their IT system). I feel this is pertinent to the discussion, as parts of the collection were designated internationally significant (but not neccessarily published). It seems under the current proposal, these objects would be excluded from Wikidata, unless in a secondary catalogue somewhere? This seems to run against the "sum of all human knowledge" goal
Lajmmoore
talk
18:27, 20 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Eligible wikis
edit
Wiktionary
edit
The proposal like the old policy
Wikidata:Notability
both lack wiktionary in the long list
Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, or Wikimedia Commons
. Wiktionary should be listed although certain namespaces including ns ZERO are excluded. Templates, help pages, appendix pages, etc ultimately should be fully accepted.
Taylor 49
talk
19:04, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Empat Tilda
talk
18:17, 7 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
: sounds good to me
Whyiseverythingalreadyused
he/him
01:34, 9 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
and also support for all other WMF content wikis, current and future; the "long list" is unnecessary.--
Pharos
talk
01:56, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
dring
sim
14:08, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Non-WMF wikis
edit
There should be a subpoint clarifying that technical details of wikis (category, template, modul, namespace, ...) are in scope ONLY for WMF wikis.
Taylor 49
talk
19:04, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Since this is under criteria 1, which is about the Wikimedia projects I believe this is already sufficiently addressed.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
11:47, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
GLAM topics on Outreach-Wiki
edit
Somewhat parallel to the marginalized knowledge discussion above, I have made a proposal for a
representation of GLAM topics on Outreach-Wiki
.--
Pharos
talk
17:37, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Round 2: Make
Wikidata:Self-promotion
a policy
edit
Wikidata:Self-promotion
is currently an essay. To be referenced in the new policy it would need to be elevated to policy. Do you agree with making it a policy?
Votes
Oppose
as per Fuzheado below and Scann above (banner on main page or better organized public vote like the one in Abstract Wikipedia perhaps?). We have 16k editors and only a handful has participated so far. Compare that to the AW vote.--
So9q
talk
00:45, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
What vote has there been around policies for Abstract Wikipedia?
Ainali
talk
06:46, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
there was a naming vote recently. They advertised it and had a lot of participation compared to the number of active editors I would say.
So9q
talk
18:24, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
: see
WD:RFD
and the self-promotion over there
Whyiseverythingalreadyused
he/him
01:35, 9 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
It is hard to make a brief rule which applies to all cases. Almost all of the problems come from commercial entities or individuals doing marketing and promotion. This draft policy is too close to preventing universities, cultural organizations, research institutions, and government agencies from sharing general-reference datasets about their knowledge collections. I think a self-promotion or COI policy should be written to practically prevent marketing, which is 99% of the problem, but also invite certain classes of knowledge organizations to share their collections.
Bluerasberry
(talk)
15:58, 7 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
very bad rules on self-promotion (and their translations/interpretations) have already been weaponized on smaller/medium Wikipedia instances to suppress minoritized/progressive content from civil society organizations by conservative contributors/admins (this remains an issue though it has been recognized for over a decade). Institutions and Corporations have more capacity to strategize visibility (and marketing) without doing simple self-promotion and in-balance in coverage will stay if not just make it even harder for less-resourced.
Zblace
talk
08:18, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Discussion
There is a slight mismatch between the essay and the proposal when it comes to the importance of external identifier. It says "A listing in a business registry or government database may act as an identifier, but it does not by itself make a company notable. Independent coverage in reliable sources is required to firmly establish notability." which is not exactly what the proposal is trying to say with 2.1. The solution is either to soften the tone in the essay, or revert the addition of the "OR" for point 2.1 and 2.2. If they both are required, it is more aligned with the essay.
Ainali
talk
18:42, 19 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I'd say yes to approve the self-promotion policy, but not without a previous discussion focused on it. Maybe it is for another time, but I agree that it should happen sooner than later. Another option to make the mention coherent in this draft for the Notability policy, is to change "not permitted" for "is strongly discouraged", which is actually in line with
Wikidata:Self-promotion
Mariana Fossatti (WK?)
talk
14:16, 20 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I concur with the idea to soften the language – currently,
"not permitted" is too strong
. While I fully support the goal of protecting Wikidata’s neutrality, I believe the current proposal of a hard ban is strategically problematic and out of step with our community norms. I suggest we instead use "strongly discouraged" and move toward a principle-based definition for the following reasons:
Consistency with sister projects: Aligning with established norms like
en:WP:COI
(also using "strongly discouraged") ensures that contributors moving between projects don’t face contradictory rules. A "not permitted" stance on Wikidata would create confusion for cross-wiki contributors.
Value human judgment: Hard bans are often blunt instruments. They risk punishing good-faith contributors who may be the most qualified to provide technical or verifiable data (such as working with GLAM institutions or professional organizations). We should prioritize community oversight and human judgment over rigid prohibitions.
Returning to a "prime directive": Rather than relying on an arbitrary list with "close relatives" or "other entities," we should adopt the principle-based language that once served Wikipedia so well on its COI page:
"When advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikidata, that editor stands in a conflict of interest."
This framing provides a clear, ethical North Star. It focuses on the behavior and intent of the contributor rather than just their identity, which is far more useful for long-term community health.
Fuzheado
talk
19:05, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
The problem with making that “OR” into an “AND” is that we don’t (yet) have a lot of external identifiers for many fields, including government-related directories for basic inventions or historical laws. This is not because those directories don’t exist, but mostly because they are still not digitized further back than the 1990s or so.
Jane023
talk
11:18, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
While it might not be acceptable to create an item about yourself, if others do so, and you are deemed notable, are you allowed to edit your own entry, or your own publication items? Are we just concerned about creation or content as well?
Vicarage
talk
13:57, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
For the purpose of the notability policy only creation.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
15:09, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Wikidata should have a clear COI policy, but the current essay has some real problems. Among them, it assumes as a given that only non-notable entries will be added, that the notability of an item is determinable by who added it, that the COI contributor doesn't have sources, and it is written like a user essay, not a site policy. Compare to the existing policy on
paid editing
, which is much stronger.
For the Notability policy draft itself, I would recommend omitting the following: "Creating items about yourself, your close relatives, your business and other entities you have a conflict of interest with is not permitted." The identity of an item's creator should not determine the item's notability—Notability is about scope, COI is about behavior. Otherwise, my second choice would be changing "not permitted" to "strongly discouraged".
WWB Too
talk
20:19, 23 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
This would need to be worded differently, otherwise it would have serious negative consequences for Wikimedians in Residence (like me), who are in a way a special case in COI but their and their institutions' contributions are important to Wikidata. Also, I don't think a general ban is a good idea, rather something similar to Wikipedia's COI policy, which allows COI editing if that is fully transparent and complies with all other policies.
On a more theoretical level, I'm not sure if I understand the idea of COI when it comes to data. On Wikipedia, having a COI assumes that you are more likely to introduce bias in what you write about and especially in how you write about your subject. In Wikidata, it would be more difficult to overemphasise/overrepresent/distort something, because there is no tone, and adding new items or new statements won't take space from others. I can see how COI could affect what you create new data on but a good notability policy covers that, and if the item is notable, it doesn't matter too much who creates it. --
Adam Harangozó
talk
17:12, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
I absolutely agree with the questioning of COI. Creating a page, a QID is about identification. Who is the best qualified to identify a person than the person itself? Moreover, in Europe where we have GDPR, it could be argued that only the persons themselves, or their authorized representatives can legally make an entry. In Europe, if we introduce COI, the we also have to make and opt-in, opt-out form for every living person. Generally, an informed discussion (for Europe) about GDPR and Wikidata would be very useful, because it would not be absurd to make the claim that in Europe making an entry of a living person without explicit consent from the person is illegal.
Adaniel
talk
08:45, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I'd like to back up and support whast @
Adam Harangozó
has said here: as a fellow Resident, these are crucial considerations when dealing with collections, expertise and institutional knowledge.
EriedgenArc
talk
09:29, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree with the comments made by @
Adam Harangozó
. I too am a Wikimedian in Residence and am of the opinion that a general ban would not be ideal and may negatively impact contributions I and other WiR folk are undertaking that are aimed at improving Wikidata. I would, however, support a COI policy similar to that of Wikipedia. I also support the above comments made on this topic by @
Fuzheado
Ambrosia10
talk
19:25, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree with the comments of @
Adam Harangozó
, particularly the point that "if the item is notable, it doesn't matter too much who creates it". I would NOT support a COI policy similar to Wikipedia, as that has the opposite approach.
DrThneed
talk
20:13, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Organisations that are knowledge-holders (GLAMs are part of the picture but it's wider than that) could easily get caught up in this, if it's applied to items relevant to their functions/collections/etc. People working for these orgs are often the best placed to share the information, and motivated to put the effort in. For example, an organisation might not have public person records with identifiers, but can use their expertise and sources to develop really good items – not as an effort at self-promotion, but because it aligns with their public good mission.
Avocadobabygirl
talk
21:13, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
reply
Very strongly agree with the point.
Adaniel
talk
08:43, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I agree and whole heartedly support the comments made by @Avocadobabygirl.
Ambrosia10
talk
19:38, 10 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Strongly agree with this point.
Fuchsiaflute
talk
15:44, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I wrote this elsewhere on this page, but it might make sense to edit the essay to include an exception for GLAM institutions and their collections, similar to
WP:Curator
on English Wikipedia.
Mcampany
talk
18:31, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
I think a few projects similar to the ontology task forces with the aim of pruning clearly half-made and useless pages (at least marking them as sub-standard and encouraging improvement) would be necessary to pinpoint the problem at scale. Creating a new bottleneck for new knowledge by human actors seems to me arbitrary when half-baked bots are spaming Wikidata with perhaps far more useless, misleading, or resource eating pages, for example, by mass importing data from poorly maintained scientific repositories or VIAF. Wikidata is far too big to create an objective impression by humans, I would suggest evidence-based discussion on this supported by statistics made from well-designed queries. I am not sure that we understand the extent of the problem of self-promotion versus generally mass-importing low quality data --
Daniel Antal
talk
08:41, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Someone created an item of myself at Wikidata, and then an article at Wikipedia. I understand that there are COI if I change things there, but factual corrections, or adding an external identifier (and ORCID in my case) is not problematic. I also changed my birthdate which wasn't accurate. I don't think this is a COI, but good faith edits and, even more important, they improve the accuracy of the database. Should we ban anyone to improve their item or one they are related to (their institution, for example)? That would require a large knowledge of who is who, because I can even change those without logging-in, with a temporary account, and if the data added is correct (an ORCID number), no one will revert it. -
Theklan
talk
08:53, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Oppose
Wikidata is not Wikipedia, and having a Wikidata item isn't equivalent to self-promotion (I'm most concerned with creating items related to an organization one works for or represents). Said another way, creating an item record for an organization or for oneself is not self-promotion. The use of that item is entirely reliant upon how useful it is, and how many connections one can make to other statements and items in Wikidata. The criteria seems rather low anyway (anyone can make an ORCiD ID for themselves...) Further, in the essay there is only detailed guidelines for not creating an item for oneself but very little about "your organisation or your work" which is where most of my concern falls. I have not felt that people creating items about themselves was a pressing issue... is it? Is there data to support that this is a huge problem? Surely the scaling issues are not caused by individuals making items for themselves alone... I feel like there are more important issues we could be tackling. For the record, I have not made an item for myself and would never do so! Thank you for the RFC.
Kind data
talk
15:52, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
For what it's worth, I think that the suggestion of making
WP:Self promotion
a policy is rooted in the regular posts on
RFD
and
Project Chat
from individuals or businesses who want to improve their search engine optimization by creating a Wikidata item. There are two of them in the
Project Chat March 2026 archives
already. I think a lot of the concerns that GLAM affiliates are sharing in opposition to making WP:Self promotion a policy might be addressed if there was a link to
WP:Curator
, a section of the English Wikipedia page on COI, or a section in the essay itself noting an exception for GLAM institutions and their collections.
Mcampany
talk
18:28, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Thank you everyone for the input so far on this. Based on the comments I see the following ways forward:
Soften the tone of the essay and take into account especially Wikimedian in Residence-like set-ups, potentially similar to
en:Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#Cultural_sector
Change the Notability policy draft from "not permitted" to "strongly discouraged".
Change the framing in the Notability policy draft or essay to "When advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikidata, that editor stands in a conflict of interest."
What is people's preference?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:10, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Bovlb
Especially, what is your preference as the author of the essay?
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:11, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Sorry not to be participating actively, but real-life issues are interfering with my ability to spend time on volunteer projects.
My essay is intended to reflect general sentiments commonly held by the community, not just mine, so I am happy for it to become better aligned. In particular, my essays were written based on the old criteria, not the proposed changes.
I am uneasy about "strongly discouraged" because it is functionally similar to "permitted'. Can admins sanction someone for doing something "strongly discouraged"? If not, then it has no teeth.
The change from "AND" to "OR" in the second criterion is significant, and deserves more discussion as it is a significant weakening from the existing criteria. When patrolling item creation, I will typically leave an item if it has either, but I feel that the goal should remain both.
I am very sensitive to the issue of traditionally under-documented regions (knowledge equity), but I stand by the principle that Wikidata should not be the first place that something is documented. If we can't come up with good identifiers and sources, then we're not creating a maintainable item. Unmaintainable items do not further the project.
Bovlb
talk
20:21, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I expressly support point 2. If a data object for a person, a company, or anything else is notable, then every user should have the opportunity to create this data object, even if the user has a conflict of interest. --
Gymnicus
talk
14:08, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Still very much
Oppose
making that a policy, which still looks like a quite out of place Wikipedia policy. I don't see any problem with someone creating their own item or items of people involved in some given activity or project based on ORCID, VIAF or other authorities we regularly use, and it often makes a lot of sense when you are doing some kind of institutional project here. Also, I really can't see how that would be "promotional". In my experience, in some occasions I had to deal with academics wanting to delete their Wikidata item as they thought it would be somehow damaging to them. I
never
had to deal with the opposite case.--
Darwin
Ahoy!
17:46, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Round 2: Marginalized knowledge
edit
There are still remaining concerns around the implications of the draft for marginalized knowledge. This section is to explore ways to improve the draft in this regard.
Suggestions for improving the wording in the draft to reduce the impact on marginalized knowledge while maintaining more clarity about what is notable
edit
Before getting to generalized wording suggestions, let me suggest a very concrete example from my experience:
Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños
(Q17515347)
is a research center of the Puerto Rican diaspora that is based at my university. There are 1,691 people and organizations represented in its archive, and though they don't have unique identifiers, they represent important subjects of scholarly research:
. Are these items still a good fit for the future of Wikidata? (I believe that they should be...)--
Pharos
talk
02:03, 25 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
It all comes back to maintainability. How can another editor verify that the claims are correct? How could we determine whether two items are duplicates of each other? If we cannot answer these questions, then I submit that the items do not belong in Wikidata.
Bovlb
talk
14:44, 25 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
These items are essential to Wikidata’s (and, I would argue, Wikimedia's) future. The items are on a reputable institution's website, and can be linked to, which is already exceptional compared to most of the world's knowledge, and should be amply sufficient. To Bovlb’s point on maintainability: we will only get more maintainers if we become more welcoming. By hosting this data on Wikidata, we show community experts and researchers that they are welcome and belong here.
A general note ... pushing marginalized communities toward Wikibases is ethically problematic; it strongly and actively reinforces existing biases. And just on the practical side: most underrepresented knowledge holders around the world don't have the finances, IT knowledge and critical mass to realistically keep their own Wikibases maintained. Seeing the political reality in most places in the world, that will only become more universal, not less.
By making our platforms less welcoming to diverse data, we alienate the editors needed to maintain it. If we want a global reputation for accuracy, balance and equity, we must invest in growth of our core platforms, and inclusion of data and people, not defensive and selective exclusion.
Spinster
19:40, 25 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
You do not need to motivate why we would want to include marginalized knowledge here, as the community is generally open for it. What is missing is an actionable, concise definition how to handle such knowledge within Wikidata in practice, as we have little experience and policies for it.
Wikidata:Notability
is currently a problematic policy for marginalized knowledge, as it ties notability and therefore inclusion to the presence of external (to Wikidata) sources. This is mainly motivated by verifiability considerations. Without verifiability, we find ourselves in a situation where we cannot answer basic questions regarding a given item such as:
What is this thing?
Does it exist, after all?
Does it belong into Wikidata? Why was it included in Wikidata?
Is it the same as some other thing with a similar label?
Is the information about this thing on its item page correct?
What is a proper definition in Wikidata (i.e. basic set of statements)?
… (and so on)
The community at large is only able to work with data items without sources in the classic sense if we find answers to this problem. These answers would also be a sound foundation for the inclusion of marginalized knowledge in Wikidata that cannot be linked against any external sources.
Please also be aware that besides highly welcomed valuable marginalized knowledge, we unfortunately do experience inclusion of plenty of promotional content, and sometimes also halluzinations/fiction/original research as well as incorrect content with malicious intent, e.g. for libel. Needless to say that this needs to be kept out of Wikidata, and this is currently done by maintaining (some level of) verifiability for each item. —
MisterSynergy
talk
00:48, 26 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I think you are setting the bar much too high. All the problems you mention are valid, but here there is a remote site that contains information about putatively-notable entities that only happen to be missing supposedly-unique identifiers. There are a lot of entities in Wikidata that do not have supposedly-unique identifiers. There are a lot of identifier schemes that are supposed to be unique but are not. So, even ignoring potential marginalization effects, not having a supposedly-unique identifier should not be a bar to inclusion in Wikidata.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
talk
01:53, 26 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
I was not referring to the example by User:Pharos above; I was addressing User:Spinster's comment directly.
We do not expect external identifiers to be present, a simple weblink to a serious source or a reference to serious printed media is easily sufficient. In fact, a Wikipedia sitelink is as well (as the implicit expectation is that there are serious sources provided in that Wikipedia article).
In terms of marginalized knowledge, there is the scenario that no references are possible, e.g. because this knowledge is not codified as we are used to in the western world into any citable (in the classical sense) sources. Verifiability is a challenge then. We need to figure out ways to include this knowledge, without opening the foodgates for all kinds of unwanted content. —
MisterSynergy
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18:57, 27 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
What about an expansion of criterion 2 to explicitly include subjects with a record in a serious academic or GLAM database/catalog, regardless of whether there is an identifier?
Pharos
talk
01:50, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
: Would you like some modified language specifically for criterion 2 along these lines, i.e., would this be something that WMDE would be open to considering? It would be an expansion of notability criteria for marginalized knowledge but one that is limited in scope, as serious academic or GLAM databases/catalogs are rather limited. I'm not sure where to post new language like this, perhaps we could set up a new subsection for specific proposals.
Pharos
talk
18:12, 12 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Yes, please! Let's get all suggestions on the table.
LydiaPintscher
talk
23:40, 16 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
I would very much like to hear the thoughts of editors from any marginalised communities. I agree with
MisterSynergy's
comments that we need to figure out ways to include this knowledge without opening the floodgates for all kinds of unwanted content. But I am firmly of the belief that this "we" should include the marginalised communities that wish to contribute knowledge to Wikidata. The suggestion "Put in place a small group of experts admins can consult for advice on matters of marginalized knowledge" to me implies that marginalised communities will be required to undertake extra steps to add their data to Wikidata. I'm assuming this is meant to apply only to marginalised knowledge that doesn't meet the proposed notability criteria. I worry this suggestion will result in not just the apppearance of but actual "gate keeping" reinforcing the marginalisation we are aiming to overcome. I urge folk to read this insightful
Diff blog
to gain insight into at least some of the challenges surrounding Wiki and indigenous knowledge. As a white/Pākehā woman I don't feel I have the standing nor do I have the expertise to come up with a solution to this issue without consultation with and input from the very communities it will be affecting.-
Ambrosia10
talk
18:13, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
+1 @
Ambrosia10
well articulated
Zblace
talk
08:10, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
+1 @
Ambrosia10
Lajmmoore
talk
18:28, 20 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Input for supporting admins in decisions around marginalized knowledge
edit
The current draft has a carve-out for marginalized knowledge. Admins have asked for support on this matter when making notability decisions. Please add your ideas for what this could look like here.
Create a list of guiding questions admins can consult.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:14, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Yes - this could be one of options, but ideally not the only option. We had admin/oversight role given to people who are mono-lingual, culturally under-informed, very young, on a spectrum, overworked (maybe frustrated with that) and inexperienced in 'real world' social issues just because of their technical skills and commitments to volunteering... so IMHO level of bad judgments this can only be secondary option and used only in high urgency when a huge volume of data from single source is 'flooding' Wikidata and even then ideally not something that gets done by a single person making a decision (or two with similar profiles and shared level of understanding). First guiding question could be: Do you have to make this decision now, fast, alone and is data likely to harm the project before you can consult relevant communities/experts?
Zblace
talk
07:24, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Put in place a small group of experts admins can consult for advice on matters of marginalized knowledge.
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
talk
10:14, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Yes - this could be one of options, though I doubt many people wold volunteer for this kind of work and their diversity would be questionable considering that quantity/quality of volunteers varies a lot depending on economic resources and distribution of wealth across geographies/economies/genders/ethnic/language/xxx-backgrounds. So I can imagine this working better in huge language communities and much worse if at all in niches where we already failed doing more urgent and obvious work...so maybe incremental roll out of this from bigger to medium as test? --
Zblace
talk
07:29, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Proposal for new criterion based on archival records
edit
I would propose the following, as an additional subcriterion under
clearly identified conceptual or material entity
At least one archival record: The subject is associated with an entry in a GLAM catalog or other scholarly reference work. This can be demonstrated by the use of appropriate property statements such as directly connect the subject to a distinct entry in archives, oral histories, collections, or exhibitions.
--
Pharos
talk
23:12, 18 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Try to understand your change, like this
fork
is already notable by our criterion. As any object who is part of a museum collection.
Fralambert
talk
01:05, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
WD cannot be the sum of all the world's cultural databases and catalogues, recording every fragment for every archeological dig. We would be overwhelmed. Even the laudable goal of have a record of every design of manufactured object might require 100 million entries, doubling our database. We might be able to cope with the 10 million paintings in museums, but not the 5000 individual items in the Staffordshire Hoard
Vicarage
talk
06:03, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Vicarage
in theory I would agree, but in practice we already have so many data of so many fields hyper-represented, that over-representation material cultural data is the least of our concerns...maybe it would be good to have the luxury of so many entries that we can off-load this in separate Wikibase for GLAMs if ever remotely close to that situation - no?
Zblace
talk
08:04, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
I've always thought that WD needs to be comprehensive more than it needs to be deep, hence the notability discussion. A GLAM wikibase would be a good idea, but not convinced it should be staged through WD.
Vicarage
talk
08:10, 19 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Noone is advocating for "every fragment from every archeological dig". What many of us are advocating for is the inclusion of (often underrepresented) humans who have entries in archives and oral histories. See the recent
rapid grant for Wikidata-ArchivesSpace GLAM plugin
Pharos
talk
17:39, 22 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
This kind of thing is notable under the current criterion, but it would not be under the new more restrictive policy that is proposed in this RfC. Which is why I have proposed this amendment, so these would still be included. From a marginalized knowledge perspective, I am actually more interested in the lives of underrepresented people documented in archives and oral histories as in my
Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños
(Q17515347)
example above, rather than a standard manufactured object that just happens to be in a museum collection.
Pharos
talk
02:02, 20 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
This is essential for institutional partnerships with universities, museums, libraries, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations which produce knowledge. The Wikimedia Movement needs these partnerships.
Our notability policy does not have to be a few short words which describe all possible editorial scenarios. We need a policy which helps us include millions of cultural and knowledge records, including things interested humans might want to know, but which exclude billions of research records, which are the things that only specialists or analytical bots would want to know.
For example, archeological sites dig up clay pots, but they also dig up tiny fragments of clay pots. Wikidata is a place for the pots which typical humans can comprehend, but we can exclude the fragments which are only comprehensible as a dataset for research analysis. The line is including in Wikidata things that humans would actually ponder as individual concepts.
Separating pots from fragments is not going to cleanly translate to a short Wikidata notability criteria. Importing everything with an institution's identifier is not going to work, because institutions assign identifiers to pots and fragments alike. Also, plenty of reputable institutions do not have identifiers at all, so to require identifiers as a strategy for verification is not viable either.
The point is that Wikidata should bend to match the recordmaking practices of authoritative knowledge institutions, while also keeping Wikidata as a place for humans. We should not firmly design Wikidata policies then exclude the contributions of institutional partners for failure to conform to the systems we newly create.
Bluerasberry
(talk)
16:30, 23 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
Kind data
talk
18:27, 23 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Support
--
Crystal Yragui, University of Washington Libraries
talk
19:17, 23 April 2026 (UTC)
reply
Multi-sensory knowledges
edit
I suspect this isn't quite the right place, but I just wanted to flag multi-sensory data as an area that Wikidata in general is very limited, but there is huge potential. However, despite taste, smell and touch being innately human, there's very little listed here. To give an example - smell-related data has
expanded over the past two years
, but it is dominated by perfumery - because there are many external catalogues for perfumes, but not for more everyday smells (even though we know they exist). Similarly for taste; haptic data is the most scarce. Whilst I understand there are needs for Wikidata to alter, I would really encourage thought to be given to other types of knowledge that we would wish to include (to reflect the world) in the future.
Round 2: External identifiers: When do they support notability and when do they not
edit
As pointed out in the discussion a core part of the new policy are external identifiers. Wikidata has over 10.000 of them by now. Some of them should support the notability of an Item and some should not. We currently do not have explicit criteria or processes for how to decide when a Property should be
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
or
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
. This would be a requirement though for putting a new Notability policy into practice. Based on which criteria should we classify a Property into one or the other group?
as a premise, I would clarify in the policy that, also for identifiers having
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
, the specific entry that is being used in the item X should contain enough data to identify the subject of item X; otherwise, if the specific entry does not have enough identifying data, that specific entry does not imply notability. With this premise, I start to list a few types of properties that IMHO should generally have
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that suggests notability
(Q62589316)
properties with
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property related to encyclopedias
(Q55452870)
and subclasses
with
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property related to a thesaurus
(Q89560413)
with
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for authority control (libraries)
(Q96776953)
and subclasses
with
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for authority control (academies)
(Q107212108)
properties which should always have
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability
(Q62589320)
properties with
instance of
(P31)
Wikidata property to identify online accounts
(Q105388954)
properties for community-written websites (e.g. OpenLibrary, IMDB etc.) for which I don't find a specific property-marker as of now.
I am honestly unsure how to deal with hugely-used IDs like
ISBN-13
(P212)
ISBN-10
(P957)
DOI
(P356)
but surely saying that they always imply notability would be very dangerous; however, saying that they do not imply notability could lead to the mass-deletions of millions of items ... as of now I don't have a good solution in mind. --
Epì
dosis
11:07, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
For example, property
GND ID
falls under
Wikidata property related to a thesaurus
. A data object with this property has been considered notable for years. I certainly use this myself. But nevertheless, you must ask: What rules exist within the
Integrated Authority File
and also within other authority records for creating an identifier? Because this isn't entirely clear for all records. --
Gymnicus
talk
13:58, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
we need to remember wikipedia is a community project, and sites like IMDB get more oversight than a small wikipedia. Often items that appear in a Wikipedia list can be fully fleshed out on a community site. Do we have a property that connects WD items to WP lists. While buildings often have national registers, objects and creative works don't. As for ISBNs given even minor publishers get issued large blocks, their presence is no guarantee of much. I'd work on the principle that external IDs give notability unless explicitly recorded otherwise
Vicarage
talk
13:09, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Vicarage
IMDB don't imply notability is not so bad, since a person in it could be a structural need for a movie. As for book, my cut for notability is if a work as been self-plublished or not. Publisher will often create a ID in their national library, making their author notable.
That kind of exclude most of self-publisher work, but my system is not perfect, as it will imply that all article in a newspaper are notable, which I don't agree.
Fralambert
talk
23:06, 22 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Declaring traditionally (not self-published) works to be notable seems like an eminently reasonable policy for books, as such books presumably have to make it through some form of editorial review; at the very least I'd consider anything more than a few decades old (say, anything pre-2000) to be notable, as such books are highly unlikely to be self-promotional (most self-promotion is done by self-published writers to begin with). A full record of books, at least traditionally published ones, which can be searched by such things as publisher, publication date, genre, etc., is something which, to my knowledge, does not exist (Worldcat comes close, but doesn't quite meet my needs, as it's focused specifically on library records, and searching it isn't as easy as querying Wikidata; ISFDB comes closer but only covers certain genres; others are usually either missing too many books to be useful for my purposes or have poor search functions); I've long wanted a site where I can search something like "books published in paperback in 1977" or "all books published by [insert publisher here]" or "every mystery novel from 1943" or the like, and Wikidata would be ideally suited for this purpose. I normally stay out of policy discussions but I feel strongly enough on this issue to post here, seeing that I mostly edit in the field of books, especially older ones; if we exclude books that are not held in national libraries, for example, we then lose such use cases as finding how many books a specific publisher published in a given year or comparing how many books were published in a given genre over the course of a span of years since the data will be incomplete, and thus inaccurate.
I'll also mention that ISBNs weren't universally in use until sometime in the 70s and many libraries didn't stock paperbacks during the early decades of that format's existence, so some notable books from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s may not have associated ISBNs or library identifiers.
TenebrousFox
talk
08:32, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
Internet Speculative Fiction Database
(Q2629164)
is an interesting case. Its clearly a community resource, and can be astonishingly comprehensive. A search for "
Journey Planet
(Q105759665)
", which a self-published SF fanzine, notable in its field, and has en:WP and WD entries, returns 598 records, as someone has lovingly recorded every article, and every piece of art work. Yet "
Attitude
(Q115888549)
", another important fanzine from 20 years ago, has no entries in ISDFB, and a WD entry because I thought it worthy. ISFDB has multiple identifiers here , but they do not cover all its categories.
Fancyclopedia
(Q42964695)
has an external identifier here, and covers both fanzines, but also refers to the most obscure single page sheets distributed to 100 people. I've no idea how we'd provide consistency of coverage if we apply rigid rules on identifiers, or respond someone argues that a fanzine book review's ISFDB presence equates to an academic journal DOI for a paper. I've been adding fanzines to WD, but my criteria is rather arbitrary, they should have scanned copies online, so the entry has some body.
In lots of fields a WD enthusiast can push the boundaries a long way from the norm, but others, less enthusiastic, can force deletion. Fundamentally, notability is hugely variable in the outside world, and is likely to be so in WD. Individual notability can always be challenged, perhaps it should be considered for a body of work, like 1000 SF fanzines, being useful as a whole and so notable.
Vicarage
talk
11:49, 23 March 2026 (UTC)
reply
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