User:ReaderofthePack/YouTube notability
This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Hi! If you're here, it's possibly because I referred you to this page because you're interested in creating an article for a YouTube personality. While this page is oriented towards YouTubers, especially those in the Let's Play community, it can be used to cover the general topic of people who are notable for their actions on any given social media outlet since the majority use the same general guidelines to establish prominence (fanbase numbers, view counts, etc). I'm not going to go too much into general sourcing and notability, as you can read a guideline
Popularity
One of the most common arguments for notability for YouTubers or YT videos is that they have large fan followings or view counts. Unfortunately
Another reason popularity doesn't count towards notability is that this sort of thing is kind of subjective. A person can get attention, however sometimes people get attention for things that just aren't all that notable as far as the overall span of Internet history goes and sometimes can be a bit of a flash in the pan. I've also heard some say that it's becoming common enough for people to gain followings on social media and YouTube, so this isn't considered to be the sign of notability that it once was. It's kind of a tricky thing to really explain overall, but the main thing to remember is that you can't judge notability by follower numbers.
Coverage and establishing notability
The sad fact is that most social media personalities will not gain the type of coverage necessary to pass notability guidelines. There might be multiple reasons for this, not all of which are fair, but Wikipedia needs to have coverage in independent and reliable sources like articles in newspapers or trusted websites in order to establish notability. Even then you have to be careful, since a burst of coverage in a very short period of time might not always be enough, as coverage for one specific video or incident could be seen as
Past cases
When it comes to establishing how difficult it is to pass notability guidelines I always like to hold up
Epilogue
So does this mean that you shouldn't try to create an article? Not necessarily. Just because it's difficult to establish notability and unlikely that there will be coverage doesn't mean that the person or video doesn't deserve an article. My best recommendation is to create an article at
See also
- AfD
- The differences between academic papers and Wikipedia articles
- Author notability