This is anessay onnotability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not beenthoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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This page in a nutshell: A source's reliability doesn't immediately make it a good source. It's the content of the source that matters.

Sources having significant coverage are not the same as sources being reliable. It's always important to check the content of the source(s), because if we as editors based notability on reliability, and did not read the source itself, then it would make the SIGCOV section of theGeneral Notability Guideline useless.

Of course, reliability is important. After all, it's probably the most important part of sources, but the content of the sources is arguably just as important. Take a well-known spokesperson as an example. If all of the sources were added because of reliability, you would not only run the risk of almost all of the sources being passing mentions, but also the risk of there being a lot of unproven information on said article.

Keep. All of the sources are from ESPN, a reliable source; therefore, the topic is notable.ESPNisalwaysagoodsource (talk)01:48, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. All of the sources are game articles, so ESPN being reliable does not save those sources.TrivialIguess (talk)01:48, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• "Trivial mentions" are sources that briefly mention a topic, but don't go into any detail about it. For example, saying that "Bill Gates founded Microsoft" would be considered a trivial mention of Bill Gates.
• "Sources with random facts" are sources that don't talk about the statement, but talk about a random fact that has nothing to do with notability. An example would be a statement about a car brand's origin that's sourced from a source that discusses the modern history of the said brand.
• "Synthesis" is when multiple sources are combined to draw a new conclusion. This is a common example oforiginal research. For example, if an article states that "The Rutgers Scarlet Knights football team is one of the two founding teams of college football, but it hasn't seen much success lately," butno reliable source in the whole world says this (including sources that aren't cited in the article), then this would be a new conclusion drawn from multiple sources.

All of the above examples can be written off due to sources being reliable without taking a source's content into consideration. Either they base it on how popular the source is without checking the source's credibility, or they base it on awards, such as theEuropean Newspaper Award. Either way, the result is an article with a lot of sources with any/all of the examples shown above that were added solely for the sake of reliability, which is something Wikipedia generally wants to avoid.

• Wikipedia:Citation overkill
• Wikipedia:Read the source
• Wikipedia:What notability is not
• Wikipedia:Notability is not relevance or reliability

• Wikipedia essays about notability