Wikipedia talk:Notability (events)

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

How should the notability of solar eclipses and lunar eclipses be decided? Ovinus (talk) 21:05, 3 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Option 1: Status quo; stand-alone pages for every eclipse in the 20th and 21st centuries, and including miscellaneous ones between the 16th and 22nd centuries AD.

• Option 2: Establish a range for which eclipses outside that range must meet the GNG, while eclipses within that range are considered notable.

• Option 3: Keep eclipses for which information beyond mere statistics and observations is known, similar to
  WP:GEOLAND. For example, Solar eclipse of August 21, 1560 would be kept because it was contemporaneous with famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, while Solar eclipse of May 22, 1724
  does not have such information (at least yet).

• Option A: Redirect non-notable eclipses to their respective Saros cycles. For example, Solar eclipse of May 22, 1724 would redirect to Solar Saros 133

• Option B: Redirect non-notable eclipses to their respective list articles (e.g., List of solar eclipses in the 16th century)

• Option C: Delete non-notable eclipses.

Discussion

I am opening this RfC after a back-and-forth at

• 4 and B and when B isn't possible fall back to A. We do not need a special, new standard for this subject. Existing policy and process is just fine.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:31, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I am not certain what the distinction between 3 and 4 would be in practice. The older I get, the less fond I find myself of arguments that seem to boil down to arranging acronyms on an imaginary org chart. ("GEOLAND supersedes the GNG!" "No, GEOLAND presumes and clarifies the GNG." "But that would put us in tension with NASTRO, and under the precedent of NBELGIANWAFFLE...") Questions of what makes for a good encyclopedia tend to get lost in the muddle. Is there an example of a case where we really would act differently under option 3 versus option 4?
  talk) 00:58, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Sure, where should Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_1560 go? I agree that it is painful to have a mess of guidelines as we do, and I’m not proposing WP:NECLIPSE here—only how we should deal with the eclipse articles—but as you noted it’s good to get a broader consensus before sending hundreds of articles to AfD. That’s what the discussion is for I’d just like GNG for eclipse articles, period, and believe that would ultimately be best for the encyclopedia to combine the pages. If we can get consensus for that through an RfC then it can be implemented without hassle on individual AfD pages. But perhaps I’m going in the wrong direction. Ovinus (talk) 01:32, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's exactly the example that seemed ambiguous; it seems to me that

talk) 14:52, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

• 4 and B. Eclipses happen and the list of those is well-documented, so any standalone eclipse should show more coverage from the GNG standpoint of why that eclispe is different or the like. --Masem (t) 01:39, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• 4 and B and when B isn't possible fall back to A. I generally agree with most of the comments. I do not think we need be too obsessive in assigning notability standards. If someone thinks that a particular eclipse is worth special attention because it happened on some saint's day for the third time, big deal! It might interest someone and won't bring down the house. Better that than miss something of general interest because of some obsessive regulation.JonRichfield (talk) 05:57, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• 4 and B: I suspect full solar eclipses that were visible from land during the last 2-3 centuries are probably going to be notable, if only because they likely attracted an eclipse expedition. All the others need to demonstrate some level of notability, beyond just a computed forecast. Praemonitus (talk) 00:12, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• 4 and B by preference, otherwise A; next choice 3 B/A. I am mostly thinking of the future dates here. If articles on topics in a "series" consist of 80% boilerplate material and 20% stats that could as well go in a list, and have no realistic chance of being expanded in the lifetime of any current contributor, then those topics should be handled as a table in a higher-level article. Seems pretty uncontroversial to me. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 07:15, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• This isn't a well posed list of options. For option 1, I don't see where this 'status quo' is stated anywhere. There's nothing about eclipses on
  WP:GNG, they only supplement it and provide consistency. If a given topic doesn't generally pass GNG, it shouldn't be listed as generally notable on a guideline page. On option 3, I don't see how this would produce any difference in outcome from option 4 - the necessary additional information would have to come from reliable sources, which would cause the event to pass GNG anyway. Option 2 is arbitrary, unhelpful, and there's no reason to think it would fit with GNG. None of the options propose wording to add to any guideline. Unless I'm missing something, option 4 is already the rule and just needs to be enforced. Modest Genius ^talk 12:50, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]
  • The second part is much easier to consider. Redirecting is much better than a blank deleted page. Saros cycles are obscure and unlikely to be understood by general readers, so redirecting there would be unhelpful. It's far more likely that readers will be interested in other eclipses that occurred around the same time, not related by some multiple of orbit numbers. Option B is the clear winner here. Modest Genius ^talk 12:50, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• 4 and B because GNG matters. I know some people want to discount GNG but it is a core guideline. And redirect is appropriate in this instance to help the reader navigate to the appropriate main article. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 02:53, 6 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: It's worth noting that
  WP:BEFORE searching. Like I've said at the AfDs for the last couple, eclipses have been considered significant events of great importance and portence by basically every civilization in history -- it's pretty trivial to find sourcing for them most of the time, and I think a presumption of notability is reasonable because almost all of them are going to be written about somewhere. jp×g 15:12, 6 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]
  • @JPxG: Yeah, I think this is why special consideration is important, and I apologize for the poor example. Perhaps we should presume notability of past eclipses, because observations of them will be locked up in fairly obscure places, and hence the "range" idea. Ovinus (talk) 22:57, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment/question I initially voted to delete the one at AfD due to my incorrect memory of
  WP:GEOLAND then we could have infinite eclipse articles. Ones in the year 3000AD 4000AD etc. That seems silly. So I guess there needs to be more than that, probably they need to be notable, as per WP:GNG. Right? CT55555 (talk) 01:04, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• 4 and B There isn't much of a point in having a separate page about an eclipse when all the known information about it is entirely predictable. Any non-predictable information would need
  WP:GNG too. So there's no reason to use any rules other than the default. Second choices are 3 and C, but I've talked myself into 4 being the best option; if only a trivial amount of information about an eclipse is known, it makes the most sense to put that on the list article rather than on a separate page, which means that the eclipse has to be redirected there (i.e. option B). --ais523 22:45, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• 4
  WP:CBALL #2 reads: Individual items from a predetermined list or a systematic pattern of names, pre-assigned to future events or discoveries, are not suitable article topics, if only generic information is known about the item. (emphasis dropped) CBALL #1 also applies to future events, with NEVENT deferring to CBALL. As for the fate of the non-notable articles, recommend B, then A for eclipses too far in the future or in the past to have a list by century, then C. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 12:07, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply
  ]