Nine years after a 2015 explosion at a Texas chemical plant, federal safety regulators still cite it by name — and Wikipedia still gives it a standalone article as a result. A product recall that filled forty outlets for a week this spring has no such page; the coverage folded into one paragraph on the company's article within a month. Both events cleared the same first bar: wide, independent, reliable coverage. Only one cleared the second, harder bar that decides whether an event gets a page of its own.
That second bar is Wikipedia:Notability (events), shortcut WP:EVENT. It runs alongside the general notability guideline rather than inside it — a company or a person can clear GNG on an event's coverage, and the event itself can still fail its own, separate test, because WP:EVENT asks something the general guideline never does: did anything about this outlast the week it happened in?
The section that usually settles it is WP:LASTING. An event that changed a regulation, set a legal precedent, or kept turning up in later writing about something else clears it. An event that produced forty stories in seven days and nothing in the fifty-two weeks after does not, regardless of how many outlets ran the first batch. A companion section, WP:ROUTINE, rules out most of daily news by default — a single collision, a routine court filing, a quarterly miss — unless something about it mattered past that one cycle.
Two further tests work alongside the lasting-effect question. WP:DIVERSE asks whether independent newsrooms in different places picked the story up on their own, rather than one outlet's report getting reprinted off a wire. WP:GEOSCOPE asks how far it traveled — a dispute that filled every paper in one county is a different case from one that reached the national business press. Depth counts too: four hundred words examining what the event changed outweighs four hundred words repeating the same line from the same press release, however many times that line got reprinted.
A specific event is usually not notable merely because it was widely reported when it occurred. What matters is whether the event has had a lasting effect.
The chemical-plant article keeps clearing WP:LASTING because safety regulators cited the incident by name for years afterward while justifying new inspection rules; its sourcing runs past the week of the explosion into congressional testimony and federal rule-making records written long after the smoke cleared. The recall never grew that second layer. A search a year on turned up the original forty stories and nothing else — no lawsuit, no regulatory action, no retrospective. An editor merged it into the company's article and redirected the title, and the merge held because nothing later arrived to argue otherwise.
A company that wants a bad week to stay a paragraph, not become its own article, rarely needs to argue the coverage away. WP:EVENT does that work on its own, given enough time. The stronger move is patience: let the routine-coverage window close, then propose a merge on the talk page citing WP:LASTING directly, rather than nominating the article for deletion and inviting a debate about whether the original coverage was reliable. The merge discussion only has to answer one question, and a year of silence has usually already answered it.
