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Many articles assert notability by claiming that the subject has received an award. Oftentimes the award is also used in a secondary manner, with the award website or a passing mention of the receipt of the award in the news being used as an third-party source for the article. However, awards themselves are often not notable or covered by independent third party sources. Awards range from the unquestionably notable, such as the Nobel Prize and the US Medal of Honor to the dubious awards issued by various promotional webpages.
However, if the award is to be used as a notability criteria, and, by extension, an article source, it must itself be considered notable. Specifically, it must meet the criteria by:
- Being covered by multiple, independent, non-trivial sources.
- The award itself must be truly independent from the recipient ( (Turkmenbashi is an example of failing this criteria: he was awarded the title "Hero of Turkmenistan" five times and the Magtymguly International Prize once by his rubber-stamp parliament). There may be a conflict of interest if the award is presented in a small field where most of the eligible candidates personally know each other.
It may indicate an award meets the criteria if there's a Wikipedia article on it, if the article is properly sourced and verified. However this indicator is tenuous at best since Wikipedia is not a reliable source and the article may not have been written yet or merits deletion and hasn't been deleted yet.