Wikipedia:Run-of-the-mill

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.

Shortcuts

This page in a nutshell: There are some items that are very commonplace for which sources verifying their existence do exist. But there are so many of these that can be verified given the same sources, there shouldn't be an article on each one, and only those with additional sources deserve articles.

Something that is run-of-the-mill is a common, everyday, ordinary item that does not stand out from the rest. Something or someone that is "run-of-the-mill" is probably not notable.

There are many subjects for which reliable sources independent of the subject exist. There are just so many of these things in the world, which are so commonplace that if an article on each were to be created, there would be so many articles on these alone, possibly more than there are total Wikipedia articles to this day and Wikipedia would be clogged with them, in the sense that it would be harder to structure content and it would make it hard to find notable material.

A street map shows every street within a city, down to every cul-de-sac with just four houses. Every city has several detailed street maps that have been published. In one square mile of an urban area, there are likely to be dozens of streets and there can be hundreds of square miles within a city and its suburbs. It is not practical to create an article on every street as the high volume might overwhelm the capacity of editors to maintain them. Almost every city has police and fire departments. These departments can be so busy that they are mentioned almost daily in the local news but again, they are just ordinary police and fire departments doing their jobs.

Many people have one or more obituaries published detailing the fact that they died, information regarding their deaths and often information about their families and lives. This information is published in a newspaper, a reliable source. But in a single major city, there will be dozens of obituaries published each day.

There must be something unusual, something unique about the subject so that the article does not just read blank is blank (which would essentially be a dictionary entry) and that it does not resemble hundreds of other articles by containing mostly the same words with a few fill-in-the-blanks. Once such notability has been established, the common sources (e.g. a map for a street) can then be used to verify the accuracy of information.

A commonplace item is not worthy of inclusion in an article if the source(s) cited in support of it likewise list exhaustively other items of the same genus, as distinct from source(s) describing or listing the item as independently noteworthy.