How many independent sources does notability actually require? The question surfaces in almost every deletion discussion that isn't an easy keep or an easy delete — usually because someone has produced exactly one excellent source and nothing else to go with it.
A biotech founder shows up to one such discussion with a single piece of evidence: a four-thousand-word profile a national business magazine ran eighteen months earlier, written by a staff reporter with no prior connection to the company. The piece is long, independent, and published by a reliable outlet. By most readings of the general notability guideline's individual tests, it passes each one. The discussion still closes as delete.
The guideline's own wording is the reason: significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. Sources, plural. Editors rarely treat that as a typo. A single feature, however well reported, documents one outlet's decision to cover someone on one occasion. It does not document that independent attention existed beyond that one choice — that a second newsroom, unconnected to the first, looked at the same person and reached the same conclusion without being asked.
That is also why a longer version of the same profile does not fix the problem. Editors who return to a deletion discussion with 'the magazine actually ran six thousand words, not four' are answering a question nobody asked. Depth establishes that the one source took the subject seriously. It says nothing about whether a second source would have.
One good source proves a journalist's judgment. Two independent sources start to prove the subject's.
The guideline leaves room for genuine exceptions. A single source can carry an article when its depth is overwhelming and no realistic doubt remains that a second source would turn up the same ground — book-length biographies, parliamentary records, court judgments. Practitioners who treat that exception as a rule learn otherwise at the next discussion: reviewers read it narrowly, and for good reason. The exception exists for cases where more sourcing would be redundant, not for cases where it simply has not been found yet.
The practical lesson travels better than the guideline's wording does. A second outlet, even a smaller one, usually does more for a page's survival than a longer version of the first. A coverage search that stops after one great hit has stopped one source short of the test it is actually being measured against.
