Wikipedia:Topics to avoid

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

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Although Wikipedia aims to be the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia articles must adhere to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, with extra care given when writing about living persons or other contentious topics. Unsourced or poorly-sourced information should be verified by reliable sources, otherwise they may constitute original research or synthesis and should be removed. Articles that do not appear to meet the general notability guideline or any subject-specific notability guidelines can be deleted.

Even though Wikipedia is not censored, there may be very rare cases where Wikipedia has to omit certain information regardless of its coverage in reliable sources. This could be for either of these reasons:

The Wikimedia Foundation has been sued for defamation and ordered to remove content the plaintiff considers defamatory.
The dissemination of information about a living person who is currently being harmed or threatened may violate their privacy or contribute to ongoing harm against them.

If a consensus is formed to exclude a topic on any such grounds, the community can counter inclusionists by ignoring any rule they may cite.

Examples

Certain information about Caesar DePaço

On 5 August 2025, local Portuguese courts ordered the removal of information from the Portuguese and English Wikipedia articles about Caesar DePaço relating to crimes the subject allegedly committed in 1989, an organization he allegedly founded, and his alleged dismissal from a civil service post. Although the English Wikipedia article can no longer comply with the neutral point of view policy due to these removals, the information can still be found on the Spanish Wikipedia article.

Harassment victims accused of crimes

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A previously-unknown individual becomes the target of a long-term harassment campaign whose participants expose their personal details and attempt to create a Wikipedia article about them, but the article is deleted as an attack page under CSD G10. Years later, the target is accused of serious criminal behavior and receives coverage in sources for that. WP:AVOIDVICTIM warns us that:

[I]ncluding every detail can lead to problems—even when the material is well sourced. [...] This is of particular importance when dealing with living individuals whose notability stems largely or entirely from being victims of another's actions. [...] Wikipedia editors must not act, intentionally or otherwise, in a way that amounts to participating in or prolonging the victimization.

This means that, if bad actors have unsuccessfully tried to maintain a Wikipedia article about their target in order to harass them, recreating that article (even in draftspace) would help those bad actors, and whoever does so may be considered an accomplice to harassment, even if they don't have the same bad intentions. Per WP:HNE, discussions about sources that mention that person may violate the harassment policy if comments about persons are gratuitous to determining source quality.

Per WP:BLP1E, we generally should avoid having an article on a person when [r]eliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event and [t]he person otherwise remains, and is likely to remain, a low-profile individual. If a living person is covered by reliable sources in the context of a harassment campaign against them, and any apparent notability they have attained for other things (e.g. creative works, subsequent allegations of criminal behavior) is a consequence of that campaign and not something they had attained beforehand, then they were arguably only notable for being targeted by that campaign and are thus an unsuitable subject for a Wikipedia article.

Per Wikipedia:Notability (people) § Crime victims and perpetrators, people who are known only in connection with a criminal event or trial should not normally be the subject of a separate Wikipedia article if there is an existing article that could incorporate the available encyclopedic material relating to that person. However, if there are no appropriate existing articles, the criminal or victim in question should be the subject of a Wikipedia article only if:

As the victim of a crime, they had a large role within a well-documented historic event.
As the alleged perpetrator of a crime, their victim is a renowned national or international figure or the motivation for [or] execution of the crime is unusual—or has otherwise been considered noteworthy—such that it is a well-documented historic event.

The historic significance of an event is indicated by sustained coverage of [it] in reliable secondary sources which persists beyond contemporaneous news coverage and devotes significant attention to the individual's role in it. User-generated or self-published works about the person or event—such as wiki articles or forum posts—will not contribute towards the person or event's notability. They have to receive significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of them.

"What if they are notable?"

Even if sufficient sources exist such that notability is no longer a concern, there would still be a dilemma:

Per WP:DUE, mainspace articles must fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. If most coverage about a living person in reliable sources mentions that they have been accused of a particular crime, an article about them must give due weight to those allegations.
Per WP:BLPCRIME, if the subject is not a public figure, then editors must seriously consider not including material ... that suggests [they have] committed, [are] suspected of, [are] a person of interest in, or [are] accused of having committed a crime, unless a conviction has been secured for that crime. If a living person is only notable for alleged crimes and they are not a public figure, giving due weight to such allegations in an article would be ill-advised.
If the subject is a public figure, then per WP:BLPPUBLIC: If an allegation or incident is noteworthy, relevant, and well documented, it belongs in the article, even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it.

In short, DUE favors including information about the allegations if the subject is high-profile, whereas BLP favors omitting such information if the subject is low-profile. If editors disagree about whether the person in question is low-profile or high-profile, they may not be able to agree that an article about that person would satisfy both DUE and BLP at the same time.

If an otherwise-unknown individual becomes the victim of a harassment campaign whose perpetrators intend to to present them to the world in a negative light, and that individual is later accused of criminal behavior that gains them more notoriety than their status as a target of harassment, a Wikipedia article about them that gives due weight to such negative reporting might be perceived as a product of the campaign. If consensus was ever established to keep such an article and give due weight to the negative stuff reported about its subject, the Wikipedians who insist on doing so might be accused of being aligned with the campaign, and that might make Wikipedia look bad.

Topics that no longer have to be avoided

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WP:FORMERTTAWP:FORMERTTA

Kidnapping of David Rohde

After New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in November 2008, the Times requested that the world's media refrain from publicizing the abduction and asked Jimbo Wales for help enforcing the media blackout on Wikipedia. For a time, Jimbo had an unnamed administrator remove references to Rohde's kidnapping and prevent already-published information about it from being disseminated further.

Ghyslain Raza's name

In 2002, Ghyslain Raza made a video in which he used a golf ball retriever to imitate the lightsaber moves of Darth Maul from the Star Wars prequels. After the video went viral, Raza became a target of cyberbullying, and he distanced himself from the video until May 2013. Up until then, editors had been reverting additions of his name out of respect for his prior wishes.

David Cawthorne Haines

On 2 September 2014, the SITE Intelligence Group found a video titled A Second Message to America that depicted the Islamic State's execution of Steven Sotloff. In the next scene, the individual who executed Sotloff was shown holding another prisoner, British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines. To protect Haines' privacy while he was still alive, mentions of his name on Wikipedia were suppressed, the AfD discussion about the Wikipedia article about him was closed early, and the subsequent deletion review was redacted.

ANI–WMF lawsuit

On 21 October 2025, the content of the article about the Asian News International v. Wikimedia Foundation lawsuit was made unavailable to readers per the order of the Delhi High Court. The article remained unavailable until 9 May 2026, when the Supreme Court of India set aside the High Court's order.