 | This is an essay. 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. |
 | This page in a nutshell: The operational culture of WP:ITN can seem confusing or dysfunctional to newer participants who are finding that their good-faith nominations are being snowed out by opposition from more regular users. This essay serves to document and explain this culture in a way that clarifies the process, provides advice for participants, and seeks to reform WP:ITN/C towards being friendlier and more accessible. |
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Wikipedia:In the news is one of the most visible sections of the Main Page. The purpose of ITN, as stated at the top of its page, is to direct readers to articles of suitable quality that reflect recent or current events of wide interest. On paper, this is a simple and concise purpose, one that lends itself to providing a steady stream of content for the Main Page, since current events by definition happen all the time, and Wikipedia editors are predisposed to update articles reflecting current events. This meme factor is a self-serving, organic process that, in theory, means any newsworthy story for a decently-updated article will get posted to the Main Page.
In practice, this is not the case.
Scroll a bit further down on WP:ITN and you will be led to Criteria. Although Wikipedia has documented policies on notability and significance, these are not the policies by which outcomes of discussions on ITN/C are governed. As it turns out, it is not sufficient that an article exists without being deleted, is in the news and/or is sufficiently updated. In order to comply with ITN's interpretation of WP:NOTNEWS, the content being covered needs to be significant or, as some other editors prefer to state, "encyclopedic". The ITN-specific definition of significance is one that is hotly contested, as is inevitable when you have editors and readers from many different backgrounds, cultures, nationalities, or ethncities. While the "updated content" section of the criteria is only 300 words long, the criteria for "significance" is over 900 words as of July 2022. And even then, significance includes a lot of noncommittal phraseology: "contentious", "no rules or guidance", "highly subjective", "case-by-case basis", and most importantly: "The consensus among those discussing the event is all that is necessary to decide if an event is significant enough for posting."
Far from having an operational bureaucracy and a concrete process, WP:ITN and its nomination vehicle, WP:ITN/C, operates primarily on highly subjective localized consensus.
The result is that over the years, mostly due to having a regular number of users who have been through the nomination process many, many times, there's an unwritten rules culture as to what items generally will or will not get posted.