A founder once sent over a folder holding ten years of a food-relief program: annual reports, meal counts running into the hundreds of thousands, letters from families and a few local officials thanking the charity by name. She wanted to know why the Wikipedia draft kept coming back declined.
Nobody reviewing it doubted the work. What surprised her was that doubt was never the point. The guideline draws a line most people don't expect, between whether a subject deserves recognition and whether independent sources have already given it any. Wikipedia does not rank causes by how much good they do; it records what outside sources chose, on their own, to write about.
The folder itself, however sincere, was the charity's own account of itself: reports it wrote, letters it received, a newsletter it published. All of it primary. None of it independent of the subject, no matter how many pages it runs to or how specific the numbers inside it are.
Notability is not a measure of a subject's importance, fame, or worth, but of whether it has already received significant attention from sources independent of it.
Independent attention arrives unevenly, and not in proportion to merit. A single viral fundraising moment can draw more press in a week than a decade of steady, well-run service that nobody outside ever profiled. The gap says nothing about which one did more good. It says only which one a journalist, an author, a broadcaster decided, unprompted, was worth covering.
What we ask clients now are two separate questions, not one. Is the work worth continuing? Almost always, yes, and that was never really our question to answer. Has anyone independent of it already written about it at length? That's the only question the encyclopedia can act on, and a folder of the organization's own paperwork, however moving, doesn't answer it.
