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: Not every single thing
Donald Trump does deserves an article. If the latest outrage has no significant coverage in
reliable sources that are
independent of the subject, it is presumed not to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.
It happened again, didn't it?
Donald Trump, "esteemed" former President of the United States, did something stupid/made a weird tweet/"owned the libs"/contradicted himself/etc. Again. Quick, let's add it to Wikipedia! Well... not so fast.
Why not?
As a former President, a lot of things that Donald Trump does are in fact covered on Wikipedia, but
only in proportion to what
reliable,
secondary sources give them. Most chatter on
Twitter and other social media is neither reliable nor secondary. If no "real" media source has covered this latest outrage, stop there; Wikipedia can't cover it either. If there are at least some news stories talking about the issue... it depends. Was this an actual policy change, or just everyday celebrity churnalism? Are the sources heavily partisan ones (far-left, far-right, or opinion blogs)? Per
Wikipedia is not a newspaper:
[Wikipedia is not] a diary. Even when an individual is notable, not all events they are involved in are. For example, news reporting about celebrities and sports figures can be very frequent and cover a lot of trivia, but using all these sources would lead to over-detailed articles that look like a diary.
Even if there is media coverage, if it's passing insubstantial coverage, consider leaving the topic alone – much of news is vulnerable to
WP:RECENTISM. It didn't matter; it'll just be clutter in a year's time that nobody cares about. (More formally, consider checking recency bias against
10-year or 20-year test.) In the case where a seemingly random tweet becoming relevant later – then we can fix it later, too.
Examples (not limited to the US Presidency)
President Trump's tweets about
Eddie Gallagher proved to in fact be an early sign he was going to intervene in the case, and were adequately covered by the media.
Typical complaints
"This topic totally qualifies by all your criteria! Why was my article deleted / redirected?"
"Why are you covering up this horrible crime Trump revealed?" (Or, alternatively...)
"Why was my section on this wild, obviously false accusation that shows Trump is crazy deleted?"
An additional concern with Donald Trump is the "allegations" problem. Per
the biography of living persons policy, if the thing that Donald Trump did lately was "claim negative/criminal things about another living person", that topic needs to be handled very carefully. Sometimes, the allegation is both sufficiently covered in reliable sources as well as unavoidably a notable part of the person's experience (
Joe Scarborough § Media career for an example), but in general, Wikipedia errs on the side of caution – even when the accuser is or was a world leader. Better to say nothing than to say something libelous.