Wikipedia:Notability (biology)

The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption.

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WP:NBIOL

This page in a nutshell: Biology has a number of large kinds of topics

de facto notability

) within certain parameters. This most often comes up when bulk-creating a large set of articles for a kind (e.g. species, human genes, protein superfamilies).

General principles

Determining notability

All members of a kind may be considered notable in some circumstances, and so creating pages for all members is warranted, even if those pages are currently stubs. In all cases, thought is needed. For instance, species are given as an example in the

formally described species, it is probably not true for those only observed from metagenomic sampling, or for most subspecies/strains/cultivars/variants. For other organisms, the lines between species may not even be clear cut

.

Principles that make it likely that all topics in a kind are notable are:

Members of the kind are collated in a well-established, curated and reviewed database or review article (indicates notability to the relevant sci community)
Databases don't significantly disagree on what is and isn't of that kind (e.g.
SCOP and CATH
agree on most members, but there are some conflicting classifications)

Members wouldn't be better listed within an existing Wikipedia page (e.g. subspecies/strains/variants/cultivars could go within their parent species page)

If most members in the kind have only a small amount of information and don't require additional prose, consider a table (e.g. restriction enzyme cut sites)
The kind has a 'manageable' number of members or instances (no idea how to define this). If there are too many members of a kind to warrant individual pages, consider one hierarchical level above (e.g. 41 protein architectures is reasonable, 500,000 protein domains is probably not [1]).

Even if the whole set isn't inherently notable, individual members of the set may still be under

WP:GNG

.

Determining best structure

Even when all members of a kind are deemed notable, it is still necessary to consider the best structure for the information, especially of considering creation of large numbers of stubs. Options include:

An individual page for each member
A summary page with structured information on each member as rows of a table
A summary page with unstructured information on each member as sections
A small number of summary pages with members grouped by some intermediate level categories

Examples

Directly observed species: de facto notable
Indirectly observed organisms (e.g. metagenomics): may still be notable but probably not as a kind
Subspecies/strains/variants/cultivars: usually within the organism's page
Cell lines: probably not inherently notable as a kind?
Human genes: de facto notable?
Mutations: usually within the gene/protein
Protein families & superfamilies/clans: superfams de facto notable, families likely notable? (Pfam 33.1 lists 18259 families and 635 clans, SCOP 2 lists 5840 families and 2783 superfamilies, CATH 4.3 lists 6631 superfamilies and >30000 families)
RNA families & superfamilies/clans: superfams de facto notable, families likely notable? Rfam 14 lists 4069 families and 127 clans.
RNA motifs: de facto notable? Subject of the recent AfD. Closest equivalent are protein motifs, though no database currently collates an equivalent to Rfam's RNA motifs.
Restriction enzyme cut sites: as a kind, most members don't require a prose description and info is typically structured, so just the summary table is appropriate for most.

General principles

Determining notability

Determining best structure

Examples

See also