Wikipedia:Depth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some Wikipedians hold that articles need to be of sufficient depth, compared to other articles on similar subjects, to be included in Wikipedia. This policy attempts to define which subjects are suitable for Wikipedia. As such, it is an amendment and clarification of the policies What Wikipedia is not and Check your fiction. It is also a companion to the proposed policy Criteria for inclusion of biographies.

Many Wikipedians might not consider depth a necessary or important qualification.

For individual examples of what people have previously thought should be included in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Precedents.

[edit] Policy

Subjects in the encyclopedia may be seen as a hierarchy, e.g. Science—>biology—>evolutionary biology, as demonstrated by the category system. A general subject area has depth if it easily fits into this hierarchy. The encyclopedia should be written in a top-down fashion so that parent articles are written before their child articles. If a parent article is not very complete, then it is probably better to work on improving the more general parent article than to create a child article, even if the child article would have merit by itself. It may also be a good idea to merge the child article (especially if it contains very little information) with the parent article. In the future, when more content has been added, the articles should be demerged.

[edit] Examples

Consider a 19th century novel Foo, and consider a 21st century science fiction television series called Bar. Both are of approximately equal cultural influence, though one interests Wikipedians more. Wikipedia probably has several articles on Bar, including all of the major characters, technologies, spin-offs, etc. However, it is also likely that the article on Foo is a stub. In such a situation, an article that is informative on a minor character in Foo is inappropriate, but it might be appropriate for Bar. The article on Foo may grow to become better, at which time the article on this minor character becomes relevant.

Or in other words, depth means that fancruft on certain subjects is notable, but on others it isn't.

[edit] Other relevant policies

  1. Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
  2. m:Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia (discussion)
  3. Wikipedia:No original research
  4. Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
  5. Wikipedia:Verifiability#Obscure topics (proposed policy)
  6. Wikipedia:Informative (proposed policy)
  7. Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Check your fiction
  8. Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/Notability and Music Guidelines
  9. Wikipedia:importance