Wikipedia:Extracting the meaning of significant coverage

Significant coverage is a key aspect of deletion discussions at AfD. This essay aims to break down what our general notability guideline says and implies about significant coverage, and guide people to think about what it doesn't say and how the grey zone of editorial discretion comes into play.

Trivial mentions

Frequently in AfDs participants post a large amount of sources (generally ones that are reliable) and opine a 'keep' argument. That is good. But sometimes when participants do this a large amount of those sources are merely trivial mentions, which do not constitute significant coverage. The general notability guideline states that Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention. It also provides an example to back this up: Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band. It can sometimes be easy to forget that significant coverage is needed when you are new to deletion discussions.

What does constitute significant coverage though?

Whether something is enough for significant coverage is up to the discretion of the editor(s) involved. The general notability guideline is extremely vague on this matter. The only thing it states in addition to the two examples quoted above are "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content and Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

A fair bit can be extracted from those two sentences. The first sentence echoes the premise of the previous section and this widely-accepted essay. The second bit is widely unrecognised and almost never referenced in deletion discussions.