Wikipedia talk:Schools/Defunct

Minimum bar on # of sentences - poll

We've had a few comments that our proposal's lower bar on the number of sentences is too low. I'd like to get a quick poll of opinions on where we should set it. My opinion: "3-8 sentences" is OK as it is but maybe 3 is a bit low; I'd support changing it to "4 or more" or possibly "5 or more" if it helps build consensus, but further than that seems counterproductive. flowersofnight (talk) 11:38, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- It is not acceptable to introduce such arbitary criteria for schools which are not applied to other articles. One sentence can provide useful information. CalJW 10:46, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - One sentence may be able to present useful information, but it almost always does not. And I think you would agree that one sentence is nowhere the measure of a quality article. I would be hard-pressed to think of a one-sentence article that would be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia. Denni ☯ 02:26, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - Mostly Harmless. DeathThoreau 15:16, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - Isn't that the point of the Stub tag? Short articles get marked as stubs and then improved, rather than deleted due to some arbitrary standard which is really aimed at enforcing the (nowhere near consensus) view that no articles of that particular type [schools in this case] should be on Wikipedia Cynical 12:28, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Unfortunately, they do not necessarily get improved just because they have a stub tag. I am working to categorize the thousands of school stubs, but most of them were created a long time ago and never touched in the 6 months since being marked as a stub. There has to be a better way to improve articles! --ʀ6ʍɑʏ89 21:50, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pleading for examples

I'm not fussed by the particular number (although I'd rather five than three) as much as their content. What exactly are we talking about it these sentences, anyway? - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 11:43, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would personally say anything that is beyond location, name, school type (middle ...etc...). Stuff about its founding, facilities, history, alumni et cetera would be totally acceptable. For example:

ABC primary school is a primary school in West Uckingham, Uckinghamshire. It teaches from ages 7 through to 11. On a main road, it is easy to get to by road but by other means, is rather rural and obscure.

That's three sentences but wouldn't be accepted as such because all it says are name, location and type. Adding a few sentences like:

Famous for teaching pupils like Arnold McBaker and Victoria Wales, it is seen as a centre of excellence in the field of the performing arts. It was founder by Frank Abercromby in 1894 along with its sister school, ABC Secondary, which later closed due to lack of students.

In my opinion, that would bring it over the border and make it easily keepable in its current position. Just my two very English pennies. --Cel e stianpower ^háblame 11:59, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense. See my vote above also. Proto t c 12:19, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, that gives me something to work with, at least. The line "seen as a centre of excellence" fails WP:CITE, compounded by the ambiguity of a term like COE. In fact, that is exactly what I see puffing up quite a few of the existing school articles, and what I'd like to see avoided. As to it's founding... well, everything was founded by someone, wasn't it? Unless the founder passes WP:BIO I don't see the encyclopedic nature of that line either. However, if we presume that there already exists an entry for ABC primary in ABC district, these two lines take up very little extra room. - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 23:25, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think you might find thar 'seen as a centre of excellence' is actually a factual description of the schools prospectus for attracting pupils, and might be exactly the kind of thing someone interested in researching local schools wanted to know Sandpiper 00:56, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing factual about the label "Centre of Excellence". Please re-read WP:CITE and WP:WEASEL. Saying "it is seen" without saying by whom or providing references to support is the problem I have with this line. Anything that doesn't meet our core standards obviously must be excluded. - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 01:17, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
"Seen as a centre of excellence" doesn't pass NPOV muster in my book unless there are cites showing who sees it that way and why we should care. School articles still need to be held to the same quality standards as all articles, even if we allow short ones. flowersofnight (talk) 01:23, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That was just an example I gave, it isn't a real school. What I meant by Center of Excellence was a random award that is given out - like The "Schools Achievement Award" and of course it would be cited. By is founding, I think the last bit is the most important, how he did found 2 schools, one of which closed down. I'm sorry if it was a bad example but I don't see ho we should disucc the notability of a non-existant school. --Cel e stianpower ^háblame 11:48, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think, to avoid different/varying interpretations of what counts, it might be worth making the proposal excessively specific, and explicitly naming some of things that never count, and some things that always count (regardless of whether the source is the school or an outside source). For instance:

Items that never count: Sentences stating school colors, team names, mascots, mottos, any contact information, standard district school mission
Sentences stating this would always count:
- notable alumni, program that most schools in areas don't have, sentence about founding (beyond "founded in Year X")
- Unique school mission/purpose *if* and only if it's a charter, private, or special-purpose school; which has a mission/goal different than most schools in area.

Even though I'm being really specific, I think the above would discount a high percentage of sentences of the typical new school stub (or sub-stub). Also, the above isn't designed to be exhaustive (its not close to that), just a clarifier for common things. But, I still support the proposal, even if doesn't get this specific. --Rob 15:46, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good ideas here. I propose that we limit the sentences that count to "sentences containing substantive and distinctive information" and use these as examples of what does and does not qualify. flowersofnight (talk) 16:11, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- I like the word "distinctive" as long as "locally distinct" is adequate. For instance "Teaches English in American City X" is not distinctive. However "Only school in American City X to teach Cantonese" is distinctive (though only at a local level). I fear the word "substantitive" would have many different interprettations. A lot of articles I regard as highly substantitive, are dismissed by others as not being so. That's why I like focussing on a list of what's deemed unsubstantitive/trivial, to avoid such disputes (but there's no need to list everything that's non-distinctive, as I think there's less dispute in that area) --Rob 17:13, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Most of the information that never counts would be obvious at the district level, or equivalent, pages. Check out the following page Hatboro-Horsham_School_District. It seems that much of the table content and the school district introduction covers a lot. The information space then leaves room for sentences that give further details beyond the obvious. It seems that a school should break out to its own page when this cell in the table is too full. I would suggest that more than four lines would be too much for the information cell. Interestingly that would probably turn out to be about three or four sentences. David D. (Talk) 17:22, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - That is a nice-looking example of a district article, though I think it wouldn't serve as well if it were a larger district, because the table format precludes a table of contents-- if it gets much over a page, it would become harder to find a particular school. Also, the table format might tend to discourage expansion of individual school entries. Note, by-the-by, that the district article contains info on the local HS that the HS article lacks (the enrollment). Mwanner | Talk 22:40, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - I think Miami-Dade County Public Schools would be an example of something that might get to large (as if it weren't already). It's got a bunch of schools that qualify for merging, but I haven't a clue of where to fit it all. To be fair this is the fourth largest in the country, so its not a typical example, just a big example. --Rob 22:48, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - On a technical/procedural note, we're saying that merged schools would be left as a redirect... back to the district that they are linked from? That's bad. How do we handle that? - brenneman ^(t)^(c)
        They don't have to be, but why not? That's typically what's done in a merge. -- Mwanner | Talk 00:16, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        Is it? Air Base Elementary School would be a re-direct to Miami-Dade County Public Schools, but there would still be a blue link for Air Base on that page that, when you clicked it...would take you to the top of the page you were already on. That's what I meant. - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 00:40, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        I believe the standard is to bold the entry in the article when there is a redirect into it. So, Air Base Elementary School whould just be bolded in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. No looping links. But this does point out a weakness in wiki in that a redirect only goes to the top of the article. Vegaswikian 02:41, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - See Clark County School District for a large district example. As to finding a specific school, I think all browsers have a search in page option so that is not hard. Vegaswikian 01:12, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Well, yes, that's quite the district. Of course, it wouldn't be bad at all if we left out the elementary schools. With the elementary schools, it looks like the table format is the only way to go. Of course, you could have Clark County School District high schools, Clark County School District middle schools, etc. -- Mwanner | Talk 03:17, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        I'd object to splitting school district articles apart. I think it is important to have the district information in a single place. Vegaswikian 03:24, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
oppose The proposal runs counter to requirements for notability on other topics on WP. This sets far too low a bar for articles on one specific topic, and exempts school articles from the standards all other topics are required to meet. I would be much happier if a school qualified for a separate article only if it was more notable than the average school (something like the WP:BIO professor test, I'd be happiest if it was in the top few percentiles for both schools and professors, which would require historical notability (NB I am *not* notable)). The minimum number of sentences threshold is an attempt to require some notability like property while placating those who insist that all schools are notable. The boilerplate "Keep this school it is important, all schools are notable" AfD comments suggest that all school articles will grow quasi-boilerplate to meet whatever length requirement is imposed. Just imagine trying to use a length requirement as the deletion criterion to keep vanity bios out. I think the plan to document all schools, fire departments etc, is pure cruft, maybe satisfying to some hobbyists, but a waste of time that generates no knowledge what's wrong with Wikipedia. It's a symptom of editors who have nothing to contribute to any subject of note, either historical or not, who then engage in vanity by proxy by documenting whatever trivia that has had an impact on their life. Pete.Hurd 16:28, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Directories of schools

I've been thinking about this compromise for a while, particularly Trollderella's well-stated defenses of it, but also some of the criticism. In particular, some of the things that got me thinking was Daycd's table-of-schools merge examples, this non-article listed on AFD, the current AFD arguments over lists of people by ethnicity/religion (as well as the lists of WWI vets), and this recent comment by rob.

And, while I'm glad to see that progress is being made, the merge-substubs-keep-stubs proposal above is not, in my opinion, a workable one.

Wikipedia is not a directory, and it should not be made into a directory of schools.

Any such directory is doomed to be hoplessly incomplete. The world has tens of thousands of accredited schools, and if fifty editors (an unusually large Wikiproject, for a subject-specific Wikiproject) made a dozen verified, complete stubs a day (which would be a full day's work, when compared to a real data-entry job), it would be years before every school had a directory entry. This isn't a proper article, mind, but simply the stub standard proposed above. I'm curious how long it's taken rob to make some of his (excellent) school articles, but it goes without saying that any but a tiny fraction of schools will ever have that treatment, and the vast majority will never be covered at all.
Each of these school articles is a likely target of vandalism. Even if all of these stubs were made, we would need a large Wikiproject just to defend all of these articles from vandalism. How many school stubs come to AFD crammed with vanity, attacks, or other nonsense? Each of these stubs would be likely to invite such vandalism.
Most of the data is of transient interest, and will rot, either quickly or eventually. Data on racial composition of the student population goes out of date slowly. Names of principles go out of date quickly. Schools close often, and new schools open often. School colors, mascots, mottos, even district assignments change, and there's no central verifiable source for much of this info.
It would never be useful as anything but a directory. These lists would never be useful to anyone save for someone looking for duplication of a primary source, or for (parents of) prospective students. Wikipedia is not the place to extrapolate trends from the demographic information, so many of the suggestions of "Well, isn't there a story behind these statistics?"
There's no good way to organize this information hierarchically. I know rob is frustrated with saying this and being ignored, but "district" does not mean the same thing everywhere in the US alone (let alone the rest of the world), and districts are often reorganized with no news mention other than the local level. Some districts are huge, including hundreds of schools, and some include only a high school and the lower schools that feed into it. (Unlike the other four points, this one is actionable if someone comes up with a way to organize them. Most of the suggestions to solve this problem have been fairly nebulous.)

These reasons are why Wikipedia is not a directory in general. WP:NOT is policy, and these are the reasons behind that policy.

Such a directory would ideally be NPOV, verifiable, and factual. However, there is a reason that "that something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia." I agree that this information may be useful (directories are useful), but it is far, far beyond the scope of this project.

I'm happy to defend, amend, or even abandon this statement if someone is willing to refute it, and I'm aware it doesn't offer an actionable alternative to the above no-content-lost merge proposal. I suggest anyone who wants to make a similarly lengthy refutation make a subheader below, to better thread the discussion. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 15:46, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We are talking about making an encyclopedia of schools, one which is as comprehensive as possible. All universities are kept, are we "not a directory" of universities either? Kappa 16:22, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- "All universities are kept" isn't a policy, to steal Trollderella's line, it's a consequence of other policies and practices, ones which don't necessarily apply to all lower schools.
  
  Universities are encyclopedic in the Britannica sense, with great individual influence on history, literature, and culture; if you want a policy reason, I can't imagine an article on a proper encyclopedia that would be an unexpandable stub, per the deletion policy. If there were a univeristy article with no reasonable hope of being expanded into a proper article (degree mills come to mind), I would want to delete it. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 16:51, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - ;) But havn't we agreed that if it looks like it can't be expanded beyond a very small stub we would merge it? Trollderella 16:57, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - And then we're back to making directories. I wish I had a solution to this dilemma. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 17:02, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - It's not a directory, it's a list of article topics, some of which have articles, and some don't yet. Trollderella 17:48, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        Not all schools are going to be able to sustain an article. This isn't a question of notability or importance or merit or whether it "deserves" anything; some (likely many, possibly most) articles about non-post-secondary schools do not have sufficient verifiable info to make a proper article, and as such will be unexpandable stubs, per the deletion policy. There's no way to make lists that cover every member of a set that includes some members that can sustain an article, in the hopes that some more will also turn out to be able to sustain an article. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 18:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It is nonsense that it won't be complete, at least for schools in the English speakind developed world. Wikipedia is less than five years old, but it already has thousands of articles. Traffic is growing dramatically. Deletionists are so impatient. CalJW 10:49, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- It's insulting that you reject my considered objections to only the proposal on the table with a glib "Deletionists are so impatient." You also don't answer these two problems:
  - It's a moving target. As fast as info is added, info goes out of date. The problem isn't just creation, it's maintenence. This isn't a problem with proper articles, but with directory-only stubs or lists.
    - There is no reason to suppose this will be a major problem long term. As the user base grows more effort will be focused on maintenance. CalJW 05:05, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - Making and maintaining a complete directory is still far beyond Wikipedia's scope or mission. Wikipedia is not a directory. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 19:12, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - Did you come here to work or did you come here to argue? If the latter, please allow us to get on with our work. Denni ☯ 02:33, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Are you speaking to me, or CalJW? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:39, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        Sorry, AMiB - I was talking to CalJW. I think you and I are on the same side of the argument. D e nni ☯ 01:58, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        Your work of deleting other peoples' work? How about you leave them alone? CalJW 05:05, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rob's reply to Directories of schools

Any such directory is doomed to be hoplessly incomplete
- Worse than incomplete, out-of-date. It takes 5 minutes to copy/paste (initially) complete data from a spread sheet of schools, yet it may take an hour to compare two long lists to see that just one single line needs to be added/removed/updated. As for your comments about the time taken to make separate school articles, that's not an issue. If individual school articles are made slowly, that's fine, and its even good. There's no rush to make an article for every school. Almost every school can have a good article, and we should allow any such article, and not worry if there will every be one for every other school. Every new encyclopedia article makes wikipedia better, regardless of what we're still missing. I've never heard anybody propose a good way of picking which schools could, or couldn't ever have a complete school article (except for availability of verifiable information, which is always essential). It's really just a matter of an editor wishing to make one. I beleive the number of school editors will grow substantially, as more people find schools in wikipedia, and what counts is we grow the number of editors and articles in a balanced manner; by somehow discouraging sub-stubs.
Each of these school articles is a likely target of vandalism.
- Strongly disagree for school articles. Overall schools are *vastly* less targetted by vandals. They're substantially easier to maintain. There are many famous articles, where the large majority of edits are reverts of daily vandalism and POV-pushing. Back when I watched the Michael Jackson article, it not only had daily vandalism, but it was *permanently* and continuously in error in terms of sales figures (it's literally not possible for sales numbers to go up, and down, back up, and back down again). There was nothing I could do to fix the situation, and I simply unwatched Michael Jackson, as its a lost cause. However, 99% of school articles I've fixed are still fixed. Oddly, I've never had to fix the article for the high school I attended (one "test" was undone by the tester themself), but some students at the same school have done a substantial amount vandalism elsewhere (I've read). Now on the other hand, large district school lists are subject to sneaky vandalism, as are all excessively large lists; since a plausable change in a big list rarely is questioned (this is a huge problem throughout wikipedia lists).
- Presumably then we should delete the articles on George W. Bush, Terrorism etc. as these are all targets for vandalism? Cynical 12:31, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - You missed the point. Who has these schools on their watch list? How many have Bush on their watch list? David D. (Talk) 18:36, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the data is of transient interest, and will rot, either quickly or eventually.
- Simple, cut back on the transient stuff. I really don't know why some Americans track if "50.23% the student body is Ethnic-such-and-such". Also, I suspect the populartion of good old Perth, Towner County, North Dakota has changed by a large percentage since the year 2000; but there's no harm in the article, since its clearly stated for which year the number applies to.
It would never be useful as anything but a directory.
- Yes, if you mean the district list. No if you mean school coverage in general. Wikipedia is explicitly not a guide, or a directory, because we *don't* want to be utilitarian. If you criticize a an article for being a "directory" or "guide", don't criticize it for its lack of practical use. We're also not a tourist guide, or hotel directory. Calgary, Alberta won't help you pick a hotel to stay, book a flight, or provide "new visitor tips", so what good is it? Well, when you visit Calgary, you wont seem like a clueless outsider, and you'll know what kind of place it is (culture, politics, geography, etc). You'll also be able to have an informed conversation about Calgary, and/or with Calgarians. The article might help you decide if Calgary is the kind of place you wish to go to. But, practically speaking it will do little to help you get to Calgary. This is intentional, and good. By the same token a good school article, will not help you enroll your child in school today; you'll have to follow the external link for that data. It will explain the nature of the school, it's uniquness (even local uniquess), and its accomplishments. It will tell you some NPOV stuff the school may not wish to tell you. When you do lookup the pnone number (in the phone book, not wikipedia) and talk to somebody, you'll actually be informed about the place your talking about.
There's no good way to organize this information hierarchically.
- Oh thank goodness, somebody else said this! Rigid hierarchy doesn't work. Things are always more complicated than they first appear. There are countless ways of categorizing schools, that are unrelated to geopgraphy/jurisdiction/districts such as Category:French language schools in Alberta, which is very useful, as it puts related schools together, despite being in different school districts.

--Rob 17:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the vandalism, my point is only that policing a complete directory of schools (with each school getting at least a stub) would be a project on the order of watching half of Wikipedia. It would be a vast project, and its difficulty would increase as the school coverage became more widely reference. (Incidentally, if it wasn't being referenced, that would mean it was a useless directory. Either you have interest and the graffiti that comes with it, or no interest and you're wasting your time.) It is in no way an argument against making articles, but instead an argument against enabling/encouraging creation of stubs.

As for school coverage in general, I don't know if I really know how to write a useful standard to separate expandable stubs from the unexpandable, but we have to do something to separate the stubs that aren't going to become articles from the ones that are. Otherwise all we're making is a half-assed directory. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 18:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we need to figure out in advance? Don't we just let the ones expand that expand? Trollderella 20:27, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Policy reasons or practical ones?

Policy? The deletion policy is clear on what should be done about unexpandable stubs, but AFD has been usurped. Alternately, useful, verifiable, NPOV information is being threatened. Either or both is good. Incidentally, the reason I hate the inclusionists/deletionists fight is because lots of people, myself included, hold both of these points to be important.

Practical? This useless, draining, stupid fight doesn't go away until someone proposes a compromise that reconciles both of the above motivations, with definitions of "unexpandable" and "useful" (in the above policy comments) that more or less everyone can agree on. I don't believe the above compromise accomplishes this, however, and it causes significant negative side effects. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 20:45, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

First, people can have a good faith beleif (based in part on experience) about what stubs have potential and are expandable, and what's encyclopedic, vote accordingly; and shouldn't be labelled as "usurpers" (as was implied above with the AFD process comment). --Rob 11:07, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- AFD has been usurped, not by inclusionism, but by radicalism. You've noticed it yourself, both delete votes on full articles that established the school in the local context quite effectively, and keep votes on articles that didn't even establish that the school in question actually existed. There are too many people trying to create or prevent a precedent for how school articles should be handled, and the voice of anyone who wants to do something other than abolish school articles or protect placeholder substubs (don't mind the hyperbole) is drowned out. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 14:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Next, on vandalism, this is a nice catch-22. If they're not vandalised, you say there' useless and unnoticed, and if they are, they're a drain. Of course, the same catch-22 applies to all articles. A more useful approach in judging the "burden" level of articles is looking at ratios: good-edits-to-bad-edits (vandal/revers/POV-bushing being bad). Schools do pretty good on that compared to others. I can think of many types of articles, that have as many good-edits as the typical school article, yet have far more bad ones (which is a maintenance burden). --Rob 11:07, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- This is getting offf the point. A directory of schools would have the problem I outlined above. Encyclopedic treatment of schools would not, any more than anything else on Wikipedia does. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 14:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
With articles come editors. If Wikipedia limited ourselves to Britanica-only topics, we wouldn't have less of a maintenance problem. We'ld have more of a maintenance problems, since we'ld have a small fraction of the editors we do now, and the number of editors (aka maintainers) wouldn't grow much. Nobody signs up at Wikipedia just to revert vandalism. They have an interest in select areas of editing, and help out in others (including anti-vandalism in articles beyond their interest). You seem to ignore that those editing schools are as likely to work/improve things elsewhere. This isn't some zero-sum-gain rsource allocation issue. There are better options to dealing with vandalism, than deletion. --Rob 11:07, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- My comments above are the problems with the above compromise, not a general argument about school coverage. The compromise will make hopelessly incomplete, useless directories that wouldn't serve any purpose a plaintext list of schools in Wikipedia: namespace wouldn't, but even if complete directories could be made, they would be unmaintainable.
  
  The nice thing about encyclopedic coverage is that it's useful even if not every school is covered. Directories, containing only demographic info, are useless unless substantially complete. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 14:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I agree with many of your points especially the maintainence issues, although, if the goal is to have an entry for every school (i'm not sure this is the goals for Rob and Hipocrite) i don't see individual pages being less of a problem than merged information. Two issues strike me important at this phase of the project. Context is critical. A directory, even if incomplete, can do this well, however, many of the schoool articles that are being currently created to not always have good context. Two the directories serve as a clearly house to address which schools are in, or not. David D. (Talk) 20:25, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - A million tiny stubs or huge lists, either way we have the same problems. I guess I'm calling for something to be done about stubs, and merging into directories just isn't it. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 21:51, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks for clarifying. I think I misinterpreted your comments. I have to admit to being a little overly defensive. I think we agree on the problem with Directories (perhaps the exact definition of a directory isn't always agreed, by on principal I think there's agreement between us). Also, I have to agree that there is obviously a problem with blind votes on all sides, including inclusionists, with the most obvious being voting to keep a non-existant school, on the grounds it might exist somewhere, or maybe once existed; when policy clearly requires deletion due to unverifiability. --Rob 15:11, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is the opposite problem to deleting something for non-notability, when policy clearly does not support that. Trollderella 21:55, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I gave four different meanings of "notability" based in existing policy (such as WP:NOT and WP:DP) above. Requiring notability is not some sort of misuse of the deletion processes, simply a philosphical difference on which policies take precedence when they are in conflict. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 22:23, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi - what I mean, is that 'notability' does not appear in either of the things you quote. It's your interpretation, and, I think, a bridge too far. Trollderella 22:31, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Depending on who you're talking to, "non-notability" is shorthand for "an article on the subject cannot be expanded into a useful encyclopedia article," "an article on the subject would not serve to inform but only to promote," "the subject is of interest to readers other than those who are immediately involved in the subject," or "the subject is of only transient importance." All of these are based in policy (or basic agreement on the mission of Wikipedia, with regards to "the subject is only of interest to the author").

The reason the word "notability" isn't used in those policies is because nobody can agree on which of those things notability is supposed to mean. That said, that doesn't mean someone who is saying "non-notable" does not have a valid reason, just that saying only "non-notable" does not give sufficient information to understand what that valid reason is. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 22:44, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

;) I know what you think it means, one of the reasons that I keep pointing out that it doesn't appear in policy is that no-body agrees on what it means. You are right that saying "non-notable" does not give sufficient information to understand what that possibly valid reason is. That's why it's bad to use it. Trollderella 22:57, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely agreed. Personally, I think any use of "notable", particularly on AFD, should explain the reasoning (if only to allow for dialogue instead of assertions of belief). - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 00:47, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How often it seems we are in violent agreement! Trollderella 00:51, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Notability

I separated this into a new header, since it's not really related to the above header (talking about the usefulness and appropriateness of a directory). I hope nobody minds.

I think part of the problem is that "not notable" is an umbrella term which some people use to encompass several points in WP:DP. Prostitution is technically legal in the UK, however, any means by which a prostitute might find a client are illegal (soliciting, taking appointments, running a brothel, etc.). Thus, while not an actual offence, prostitution is a de facto offence. Similarly, we have rules for people, organisations, companies, bands, products, fictional characters, etc. For all intents and purposes, we have rules for every type of article that a subject has to meet. We don't have the same rules for schools. A mistake some people make is to judge schools next to everything else, instead of simply other schools. The rules for biography are for comparing like for like, one biographical article against another biographical article, based on the fundamental premise that we can't have an article for each of the 6 billion people alive today, and the some 6 billion people that have died before them. Whether or not a band merits an article depends on how it measures up next to other bands. So, why shouldn't we extend the same standard to articles on schools, where the criteria for inclusion or deletion are based on how a school compares with other schools? Part of the problem is this idea of notability, the other part is that one or both sides have a hard core which refuses to compromise. But let's concentrate on the half of the problem we can do. Let's examine some facts.

Any concept of "inherent notability" has to go, because it is a fallacy. To suggest something is "inherently notable" is to suggest "This is important. No particular reason, it just is." Understandably, this is not an acceptable line of reasoning, as it doesn't get us anywhere. It doesn't help to explain a position, and is rather similar to a non-denial denial, except this would be a non-supporting supporting argument. We wouldn't accept it to back up a statement in our articles, why accept it in decision-making? The Pope isn't notable just because he's the Pope, he's notable because he's the worldwide leader of a church of tens of millions. Similarly, Mr. Bush is notable because some 59 million Americans were willing to vote him to lead the last superpower.
Any concept of "inclusionism" or "deletionism" has to go with the "inherent notability". If you have to resort to calling the opposition "deletionists" with a non-dismissal dismissal (i.e. rejecting their argument without a supporting counter - remember the "no valid reason for deletion" we've all seen, even in the face of valid reasons?), you've lost. Similarly, "delete, despite the legalistic inclusionist cabal's efforts to the contrary" is equally invalid. Simply branding your opponent as something undesirable doesn't add to the argument.
Compromise will be a necessity in reaching any form of agreement. If you can't accept the deletion of a useless school stub, then prepare to be excluded from any attempt at a reasonable compromise, as well as the acceptance process. If you can't abide the proliferation of school articles, then your opinions will be of no use unless you lower your bar slightly. Ultimately, the blocking tactics we see from both sides get us nowhere, as well as being an undemocratic way of forcing a viewpoint upon everyone else.
Every set of inclusion criteria we have, for companies, bands, people, etc. are relative. Bush isn't in because he's more notable than some small band, it's because he's more notable than most other people. The WP:MUSIC guidelines judge music articles next to other music articles. WP:BIO compares people with other people. In all of these cases, the criteria by which articles are judged compare like for like.
Any attempt to document every school in the world ever would be entirely unmaintainable, due to volume of subject and lack of verifiable (multiple sources, remember) information.

So, facts over with, now some opinion.

Those not willing to compromise should not have a say in the process of drawing up such a standard. Why? Because we already know their opinion, and having them restate this opinion would not help progress towards a standard.
Any criteria for inclusion of schools will not be blanket statements such as "Keep all schools" or "Delete all schools". Any criteria for inclusion of schools will be entirely based on qualities relative to other schools. This means that the fabled "Pokemon test" is out. Of course, some might argue that a school of 1000 students should yield to a phenomenon with millions of followers worldwide in these stakes ...
By restricting schools to those higher up the "notability" ladder (for desperate want of a much better term), we can deal with subjects about which there is plenty of information in plenty of sources which would be verifiable (again, remember that you need a bare minimum of 2 reliable sources to verify).
Any bar need not be as low as the Delete camp feel might allow too much in, nor need it be as high as some in the Keep camp fear. I believe there is a happy medium to be had (and it's not called Derek Acorah), and that the only thing stopping us from reaching it is the "hard core" at the poles. Key to this is to take small steps, and ignore the "hard core" entirely.
Quality over quantity. Any criteria we define should emphasise quality. Previously, too many articles (especially on schools) were content-free essays, containing nothing but filler material about the colour of the wallpaper in the school gym, or what happened when a given character ran into a minor guest star halfway through series 42. There are few things worse than an uninformative stub, and articles which go to great length to explain nothing in particular is one of them. A little filler might be good, but it shouldn't take over the article. A long article that says nothing still says nothing.

Thoughts? A few things in there might seem extreme, but I believe there's some useful ideas in there worth looking at. I would hope it doesn't drive the wedge between the warring factions even further. Chris talk back 04:48, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

~~Have my babies?~~ I mean, um, well said, agree with everything. Extreme lebanese support.
brenneman ^(t)^(c) 05:11, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also would support this wholeheartedly, even with a ridculously low notability bar. I'm just not sure how willing either camp will be if the latest conversation is any indication. However if we discount anyone not willing to compromise as a troublemaker and work from there... we might just solve this and damn the hardliners.Gateman1997 05:17, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in. All I have ever really cared about is quality and context. This is one reason why i sympathise with the delete votes when editors do not finish the job they start. Sure they get cleaned up after Afd but how many don't? These article that don't pass through Afd are the problem. Even some that do get a make over after Afd are still borderline delete [1]. That is why the merge option seemed like an attractive compromise to me. Especially since it was Hipocrite and Rob that started the ball rolling so it seemed possible that a compromise was possible. David D. (Talk) 05:28, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One problem is that while I don't consider myself a "hardliner" others might. ^_^
brenneman ^(t)^(c) 05:36, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A HARDLINER is quite simply anyone who won't move off the positions that A. SCHOOLS ARE ALL WORTHY OF ARTICLES AND INHERENTLY NOTABLE or B. SCHOOLS DO NOT DESERVE ARTICLES AND SHOULD BE DELETED. Anyone with either opinion is a hardliner and part of the problem whether they fess up to it or not. Examples would be counter productive, but we all know who both A. and B. are. I believe there are RFCs against examples of both subsets.Gateman1997 07:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You have to be very cautious in labels of "hard liners", as there are different types of selectivity (topic versus content). There's being selective based on theoretical potential (often based on a vague concept called "notability"). Then, there's being selective based on reality and experience, which I am. I'm quite opposed to blindly accepting any article, school or not. Despite being viewed as a member of the "keep bloc" I have advocated deletion of sub-stubs (or moving them elsewhere out of article space, and call them "requests"). Currently, "needs to be expanded" isn't grounds for deletion, which is why I've often voted keep, even when I would have loved to delete, while still encouraging somebody to write an actual encyclopedic article.
Where I strongly disagree with many, is that if somebody can write an encyclopedic article, with sufficient reliable verifiable sources, on what others happen to consider a typical schoool, I feel such an article should stay, regardless of whether it is considered "notable" or not It seems we have a lot of crystal balls on both sides here. Some pretend that every one-line stub will magicaly emerge into a something great. Others, will insist a well-sourced encyclopedic artcile about a typical school can never become/expand into something encyclopedic, even if it already has.
I've repeatedly been able to make what I consider to be encyclopedic school articles that include ones others would mis-label as "nn". Also, (in my bias/non-modest opinion), I beleive these articles are easily better than the median (not mean) article I see on "Random Article". I'm often amazed at how *some* (not all, I'm not talking of editors in this thread) who insist there's a lack of sources for school articles, think its quite ok to write non-school articles with *no* independent sources. I'm stunned when people vote to keep a town they haven't bothered to verify even exists, or has official status (but are outraged if the same is done for a school article). I'm all for raising the bar on school articles, along with all types of articles; but *some* advocates of raising the bar, may wish to board up their glass houses first. But, even if we can't raise the bar on non-school articles, I still support raising it for schools.
An interesting "notable" case: In Category:High schools in Alberta, the *least* developed of all articles is this one, which had a highly "notable" event (a traggic day-after-Columbine shooting, the first in Canada in decades, with massive news coverage). Yet most other articles in the same category are much more complete, and worthwhile (even without an AFD spurring fixes).
So, I'm all for quality over quantity, but I don't use a crystal ball (aka "notability theories") in picking quality, I actually read the article and research the topic instead.. --Rob 12:01, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Ouch! Strong words to try and get some movement. Can't wait to see how the obstructionists react. Vegaswikian 00:39, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Some clarification here:

Being a "hardliner", or a member of a "keep bloc" or "delete bloc" is not what's important. It's whether or not you're willing to move from your current position. I believe that there are a number on both sides willing to shift themselves somewhat on the issue, and it's only the most stubborn that may find themselves left behind.
The list of articles you mention, upon closer examination, seem to be examples of the problem I highlighted with filler material. They are mid-length articles with very little useful content, but rather a high proportion of filler. For one, much of what is said on Alice Jamieson Girls' Academy is very generic, and could equally apply to any other single-sex school. Much of the useful content on Bowness High School can be summarised to one fact, that one of the football team died last year. the same applies for most of those articles, including a few mostly-irrelevant details, with no "claim to fame", so to speak (to quote WP:NOT: Subjects of encyclopedia articles must have a claim to fame besides being fondly remembered ... I believe this applies to more than simply biographies). The only one that really stands out as having some meat to it is St. Mary's High School, though it has its fair share of filler (1924 The head offices of the school district were located St. Mary's Girls School (the 1909 building)).
Please keep to comparing schools with other schools, as with all other classes of article. Small towns are nothing to do with this debate, though you're welcome to start a separate debate at something WP:Settlements.
I'd also ask that you keep rather strictly to topic. Your last statement seems to imply that the rest of us put no effort into this whatsoever.

Chris talk back 12:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, first they're not famous, and my point was that it doesn't require fame to be encyclopedic. Your basically going back a year in time, and going after high school articles that are now consensus keeps. We should be focussed on areas of remaining no-consensus: elems/middles+sub-stubs where there's no consensus, but needs to be one. All sides should compromise in those areas.

Also, its odd you picked the only single-gender school in a 200-school district, which (at the time it was founded) was one of a very small number in all of Canada, and a controvsial idea (private single genders are normal and common and widely accepted, public district ones less so in modern times). If being in group that's a fraction of a percent nationally isn't unique to you, then you've indicated how few schools you would wish kept.

--Rob 13:03, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

On your first point, WP:NOT begs to differ. Maybe "fame" is not the right word, but article subjects do need something to justify an article in an encyclopaedia. More argument over this point will only drift us off the topic at hand, namely to try and establish some keep/delete standards that aren't enforced by disruptive sheep voting.
On the second, that's odd, the article makes no mention of that fact. As for uniqueness, you would have to compare it to other single-sex schools to judge that, comparing like for like (the bit you seem to be ignoring each time). In fact, nobody has actually suggested a good reason why we should not be comparing schools to other schools just as we compare everything else to other things of its type. Chris talk back 13:56, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It does mention that point, it says " It is the only single gender school run by the Calgary Board of Education (CBE), and is one of a very small number of fully public single-gender schools in Canada.". That clearly states why the particular school is special, right at the beginning. So, you have a problem, even when a school article states the school's uniquness. Now I didn't mention there were 200 schools in the board, or (much on) the controversy, but if I did, you'ld call that filler to.

It's not just about comparing like for like, one has to be local or national, not always global. For instance, teaching mainly in Cantonese in school is common globally. Teaching it as the *main* language of instruction Cantonese in Idaho is not common, it is unique and is well worth mentioning. Describing it to readers is useful, even if it has much in common with Cantonese instruction elsewhere. You can't just dismiss that as filler/generic because a million other schools also teach mainly in Cantonese elsewhere (note: teaching Cantonese as a second language, wouldn't be that big of a deal). --Rob 14:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Again, you're confusing several concepts. "Uniqueness" is not in and of itself a measure of encyclopaedic relevance. There is no one quality that is, hence the need to form consensus on what most people will consider to contribute to it (besides the traditional non sequitur "all schools are inherently relevant"). Contrary to popular belief, there is no consensus at all on the issue, except maybe on the very fact that there is no consensus (though of course there may be enough who deny this fact that maybe there's not even consensus on this). A default action is not the same as consensus. More importantly, nothing in Wikipedia, its policies or "constitutions", suggests anything to the tune that we are aiming to cover everything, ever. We do not need an article on every school to be complete. We do need a representative sample of schools worldwide with many different qualities to represent variety. Unfortunately, the schools we do have are mostly (not all, but mostly) the fairly mundane type in the US, about which we could just have one or two articles, e.g. an article on generic High schools in the United States, describing on the whole what an average US high school is like, the typical curriculum, etc. Too many of our current stubs are nothing more than directory entries, or contain mostly irrelevant lists and information (e.g. lists of every extra-curricular society in the school. We don't need to list them all, because Wikipedia is not a guide to schools, but maybe mentioning some of the more unusual clubs might be worth it). We don't need to know who the librarians and their assistants are, where the playing fields are (unless perhaps they're somewhere entirely off the school grounds), or exactly how many students are enrolled from year to year (verging on source data, which would belong in Wikisource if it were of any relevance and interest to people outside a local community and a very small interest area that we don't need to pitch to). Similarly, a reasonable number of people (somewhere into six digits) might want to know that Mozart's unfinished Requiem mass was finished by Salieri, but could care less about what either of them had for breakfast on Mozart's last day. Chris talk back 02:57, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Any attempt to document every school in the world ever would be entirely unmaintainable, due to volume of subject and lack of verifiable (multiple sources, remember) information.
So, facts over with, now some opinion.

Actually, that one is an opinion too. There are some of us who believe in the power of Wikipedia to scale up - after all, articles are created by someone. (Robot-created stubs don't count, obviously). More and more people join Wikipedia every day, and more and more people learn how to edit each day as well. Furthermore, Wikipedia *aspires* to being as complete as possible. As pointed out elsewhere, schools are hardly a good example of lack of verifiability - if anything, they are far more verifiable than the average article. All of this means that documenting every school in the world is a realistic goal. Will it ever be reached? Probably not 100% for a while, but that should not preclude the attempt. What in particular makes it unmaintainable? Number of editors needed? Every school has a large number of current and former students, any one of whom probably knows at least 3 sentences worth of information about their school. And it's not as if the articles need constant care and watering once made. I pretty much agree with everything else in this section though, just wanted to air my opinion about this fact. :) Turnstep 00:00, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Let's see, where to start ...

Number of editors required to add enough information on the million or more schools worldwide such that they're not all awful stubs. Remember, we don't have things like census information on this subject that we can mass-insert by bot.
Number of editors required to actually verify given statements at their original sources, ensuring said sources are reliable (e.g. school or authority website will not be due to SPOV), and then verifying the fact behind the statement with a second reliable source.
Categories and lists will either have so many articles in them as to become pointless and unusable, or will have so many levels of depth just to reduce the number of articles in the category to a usable number that they also become pointless and unusable.
Without adequate modifications to the search tool, some searches would become impossible due to a million or more school articles appearing before the article you want.
Every school has a large number of current and former students, but this in and of itself is worth nothing. We have entire countries with millions of current and former subjects (some of these countries are places where the Web is readily accessible by most of its subjects) about which we have nothing other than basic geographical facts.
We are looking at over a million articles here, possibly even two million, on schools alone. en: is currently up to 6,915,539 in total, and it's already difficult enough with the 600,000 or so users we have (a good proportion of which are not even active) to fact-check, verify, NPOVise, update, etc. Then there's vandalism and vanity. Remember that study which showed that on average it takes 5 minutes to get rid of it? Well, it's an exponential function with a very long tail, as the folks who have spent 6 months cleaning up after April 1 will tell you. Then there's all the images, etc. Assuming that only around 10% of registered user accounts are regularly active (and that's probably a very optimistic estimate), that means each person taking permanent care of at least 10 articles, and that's assuming they never contribute to any others.
And it's not as if the articles need constant care and watering once made. I beg to differ. Times change, and the facts change with it. A body of a million school articles will in itself easily require a lot more work to maintain than all of Wikipedia in all its languages does right now. For a start, the body of a million school articles won't contain as many of the easy-fix articles where you can take something straight off the news.

All in all, this suggests to me that such an effort must by necessity be unmaintainable. Chris talk back 02:57, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is NOT Classmates.com

I have been making a huge effort to compromise (I even voted keep for some one liners), discuss ideas and generally try to help this discussion along. Hipocrite's original plan, stated near the beginning of this long discussion, seemed like a good compromise. Yet those most active in school Afd's (the keep voters) refused to come to the table, or came without any intention of looking for a compromise. This still seems to be the case. The keep cabal are their own worst enemy. If the keepers wish to waste ALL their time on keeping every little school in the world that is their problem. If they cannot see they will not stem the tide of school Afd's without a STRONG and UNIFIED compromise solution then that is their problem.

I have tried to make school districts and design layouts that might be useful for a merge compromise. I have tried to encourage people that schools without context is no more useful than google since wikipedia should be more than google. Neither of these efforts seem to be getting even a hint of positive feedback from the so called hardliners. Finally, the latest incidents and accusations of BAD FAITH resulting from votes in the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Birchview Elementary School (Plymouth, Minnesota) are just ridiculous.

I have no further interest in the school debate it is obviously a lost cause. I want to congratulate Man in Black and Rob (Thiver) for making this discussion very interesting and informed. However, I reserve the right to vote delete on really bad school articles, certainly I will no longer be willing to do research (create school district pages and find relevant town articles etc.) to merge mediocre school articles or expand them. I even reserve the right to nominate schools for Afd if they are as bad as the Birchview Elementary School article. Why, you may ask? Its simple, the only way a bad school article will get cleaned up is if it goes to Afd. Prior to Afd they will sit for months with no one editing them.

Wasting time on schools is a fools game. There are thousands of more IMPORTANT articles that need attention.

I'm sorry for this negative attitude which was aprtically inspired by comments from Pete Hurd (above) as well as the following essay I found at User:Freakofnurture/Wikipedia is NOT Classmates.com.

The essay reminded me of what schools articles should be and sums up my frustrations perfectly. David D. (Talk) 17:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Freakofnurture/Wikipedia is NOT Classmates.com

I remain at the table. I do not trust in the good faith of the other parties at the table, as demonstrated by their continual delete votes and their continuous nominations of either perfectly good redirects or stub articles. The proposal I wanted to sign on to does not require me to stop voting keep on on school articles, as merge and redirects are keeps, not deletes this was the CLEAR consensus, and does not require - and in fact is slowed - by the use of AFD. Every nomination for AFD, or vote Delete on AFD is an example of an individual not abiding by the formative proposal above. No, the biggest enemy to any sort of consensus are rogue admins like George who threaten to ignore votes on AFD that they disagree with. Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whoa! Are you accusing me of bad faith!? I revert vandalism to Natural selection by an anon IP, check the IPs contributions and find reverted edits to a high school and that atrocious article. The article was exceptionally bad, and smelled very hoaxy, it was created and solely edited by an anon IP with a dodgy history. AfD is totally approriate. Imagine you came across an article like that, not about a school, but a hoaxy looking unverifyable book of poetry with a paisley cover, no listed publisher and a glowing "takes readers to a magical place" review. You would not go looking to see if there is some special rule exempting poetry books, or paisley related articles, from all other WP standards, or searching for some special set of pseudo-deletion rules pertaining only to that category. As someone who is regularly invited to contribute to "real" encylopedias let me say this, that I find this movement to document all schools in the USA to be really silly. That there is a refusal to accept any standard of notability or quality for elementrary schools suggests to me that some editors care far more about their elementary schools than they do about Wikipedia. What you want is your own little ghetto for school articles, where your hobby topic is exempt from the standards that apply to all the other topics on Wikipedia. I really hope you don't post a notice on the AfD page requiring everyone treat your hobby interest with a special set of gloves and exceptional rules. All the NN bands, vanity bio posters, bloggers etc will want their own standards too, and I just can't imagine it leading to much satisfaction. Next time I come across a really sub-standard school article, I'm just going to ignore it. I'll save my efforts for the parts of Wikipedia where the resource of usable information is being presented to readers who are actually looking for it. Pete.Hurd 01:01, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Secondly, school article in need of clean-up can be listed at Schoolwatch. Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:21, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(repost after edit conflict with hipocrite) I just found out from Kappa that there is a clean up list on school watch. There are ZERO articles on that list! Hipocrite, I think you are one of the good guys and are trying to make an honest effort in compromising. Why don't you (schoolwatch participants) start screening through the new schools and move the dogs into the clean up list. At present, it really does look like you all just sit back and wait for the Afd's. This stinks of entrapment since you then complain about how many schools are listed for Afd. I will promise you that from now on if i come across a crap school i will list it on your clean up list. If you could persuade others to do the same it might give people a chance to sort out what the criteria would be for a merge/redirect vs keep the article decision. I would propose that articles that are not cleaned up in a certain time frame (say three months) are fair game for deletion. Just out of interest why has no one mentioned the clean up list before?? Why don't you (schoolwatch) use it? As I said above, reaching this compromise is taking far too long. i just don't have the time or interest to persue this any more. I wish you luck in getting this sorted out. David D. (Talk) 21:24, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The schoolwatch cleanup list is mentioned prominently on the WP:SCH page (Rules of Thumb, #2). I don't have the technical prowess that the people who somehow scope out all the new substubs for AFD do. That's why they should be putting things on the cleanup list. I hope your break from this foul dispute clears your head some. Have a good one. Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:35, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But someone does have the technical prowess since there is (or was) the new school list. I think you clean up list needs to be more prominently displayed. I had not noticed the link and clearly NO ONE is using it. May be it should be on the Afd nomination page. Many of the Afd's are by people who do not know about the school debate. As more new users come in you'll get more Afd's. Thats what happens when the bar for inclusion is set so low. For this reason the schoolwatch team needs to be proactive in advertising their goals. I assume the goal is no AFD send it all to the clean up list. Why have I not heard this before. certainly those less familiar with the deabte will have no clue. David D. (Talk) 21:44, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A good point. I'll endeavor to advertise that more prominently. Your thoughts on the rogue admin threatening to disregard votes that don't engage in meaningless debate about specific articles on AFD? Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:50, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rogue admins are always a bad thing. I have not seen specific examples of George since i don't usually watch the closing ceremony. Any specific examples? I'm sure if it is as you say i would not endorse it at all. David D. (Talk) 23:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

[2] Hipocrite - «Talk» 23:30, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A closing admins has not only the right but the duty to examine all arguments and put aside those which do not adress the article in question. For example, I do not believe that there exists a closure who would count "Keep, nominator shagged my sister" as a valid recomendation. Similarly, "Delete, a magician stole my pants once and I hate them all" would be discounted in an AfD on James Randi. Geogre is quite right here, despite the fact that I have similarly linked arguments before. I shall go forth and sin no more.
brenneman ^(t)^(c) 23:56, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rules of Thumb

Does anyone want to revisit the "Rules of Thumb"? I ask only because I believe a disordanant amount of people do seem to link to them, particularly point 4, on school articles and either fail to rationalize their vote for a particular school in favor of a canned reason that often doesn't apply to the article in question and many of the rules of thumb have become somewhat dated in light of the new proposals.Gateman1997 22:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have no interest in templating an no-subing "Schools are important public institutions and should be written about somewhere, even when they cannot sustain an article on their own. Presently people do create school articles containing neutral, verifiable information and it is impossible to delete them, even though many have an unexplainable desire to do so. Rather than striving for an impossible consensus to delete any given school article, I feel it is always preferable and takes much less energy to merge the text of the article into an article about a suitable habitation or administrative unit: a city, county or state, or a school district of local education authority of other school system, while taking care not to delete the information contained in the article. The article itself should be replaced by a redirect." into every single school AFD. If you insist that I do so, I will. Hipocrite - «Talk» 22:08, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to do that, go ashead, but be warned that many would interpret it as WP:POINT. I would question there being an "unexplainable desire" to delete school articles, when those on the other side could probably just as easily argue that there is an "unexplainable desire" to keep them. This is part of the problem - neither side of the argument really wants to concede that the other might actually have a valid point, nor accept their explanations. Unfortunately, it seems that there are members of both extremes (though rather more of the keepers) who are "at the table" with no intention of making any concessions at all. Linking in to a pre-written list of arguments is actually not advisable, and neither is applying exactly the same text to every vote. Why? Because it adds nothing to the debate that isn't already there. It's just reinforcing the divisions that already exist, which is exactly the opposite to what we should be hashing out here. Chris talk back 22:21, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am not, and have not, and will not, link(ed/ing) pre-written text here. I have been following WP:SCH rule of thumb 4 at AFD, because I do not intend to get into yet another round of fruitless debate there (per RoT 4, which it is imperitive you read). If RoT 4 is repealed, I will just paste that block of text into my votes, because it is the reason behind my vote each and every time, and it appears that admins are now allowed to disallow votes that they disagree with if those votes are not explained. I believe that those of use who routinely vote to keep verifiable school articles would say that it is the deletionists who have no intention of making any concessions at all - see their recent attempts to sneak a bunch more schools past people who routinely vote keep on verifable schools. I am shocked that people who are participating at this late stage in the debate have absolutly no concept of the history of School deletion - previously, someone was shocked - shocked that I didn't know about the torpedo launched at the last sub-stub merge (I was aware of). Where is the shock that these people don't even know about the last WP:SCH debate and the conclusions thereof? Hipocrite - «Talk» 22:39, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A few points of interest:

If RoT 4 is repealed ... Excuse me? These "rules of thumb" are not policy, and such legalism doesn't make any progress at all. My exact point is that point 4 under Rules of Thumb is a Bad Thing, because it just repeats the same old tired arguments on both sides, which while they might be relevant to all articles as a whole, they are not relevant to individual cases. I'm tempted to scrub the "rules of thumb" entirely, as they appear to be one side prescribing how the other should behave.

If the rule of thumb is determined unhelpful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hipocrite (talk • contribs)
... which it is. What's helpful about linking in the same old arguments? Chris talk back 00:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

... it is the reason behind my vote each and every time. AfD is (supposed to be) about deciding individual cases on their own merits, not blanket statements. If you have exactly the same reasoning for backing a whole class of articles, something seems out of place.

In each of these individual cases "it is ... preferable and takes much less energy to merge the text of the article into an article about a suitable habitation or administrative unit: a city, county or state, or a school district of local education authority of other school system, while taking care not to delete the information contained in the article." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hipocrite (talk • contribs)
Non sequitur. Chris talk back 00:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that those of use who routinely vote to keep verifiable school articles would say that it is the deletionists who have no intention of making any concessions at all. Two words for you. Vice versa. This is the sort of line that contributes to the problem, and doesn't solve it. Branding people as "deletionist" doesn't help your case either. After all, the most common use of "deletionist" is to mean "someone that doesn't agree with my point of view".

That's kind of my point. You accused me of not having any intention of making any concessions at all - yet, I was an initial proposer of this entire enterprise (with others). You are the one coming in all hot and bothered accusing me of... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hipocrite (talk • contribs)
So, being "an initial proposer of this entire enterprise" entitles you to blanket label a whole bunch of people as "deletionist" and their arguments as "unexplainable desires"? Again, non sequitur. Chris talk back 00:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am shocked that people who are participating at this late stage in the debate have absolutly no concept of the history of School deletion ... "Late stage"? Usually, the later stages of a debate occur when some form of consensus is emerging, and decisions appear to be in progress. Neither of these is anywhere on the horizon. We're not at a "late stage", because it appears that we have absolutely no progress from the starting position.

Unfortunately, I am finding it very difficult to believe that you are arguing in good faith, using that last comment as evidence. I may try starting another debate page so we can restart this from a clean slate. Chris talk back 23:07, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bad fath. I'm certain that's going to get you what you want. No, wait. It's not. No schools have been deleted for months. No verifiable schools will be deleted for months to come. If a verifiable school is by chance deleted for some reason, a score of school inclusionists will make a featured article about the school. You've lost. Isn't it gracious of me, if I'm acting in bad faith, to even be talking with a bunch of powerless losers? No, perhaps I'm not negotiating in bad faith - in fact, when I decided not to participate, I was very open about what I was going to do. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hipocrite (talk • contribs)

First, WP:NPA. No schools have been deleted for months because an organised group keeps disrupting the process by blanket voting, not because there is community consensus to keep them. If no schools are deleted for months to come, it will be because of the same disruptive pattern of behaviour leading to a series of "no consensus" closes, not because the community at large wants to keep them. You are first proposing that we come together to discuss this issue, and then refuse to give so much as an inch. Spew as many more non sequitur arguments as you like, seeking to take something from these discussions without giving anything up is bad faith in anyone's book. Chris talk back 00:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

PS, can you not respond in the middle of other people's comments? Breaks the flow of the original comment. Also, mind WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL, before someone decides to WP:RPA. Chris talk back 00:27, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)

I would venture to say that relatively few categories of articles are "inherently notable" to justify a canned keep vote in the event that any member of said category is nominated for deletion. I'm really trying to brainstorm, and I'm coming up with... um... oceans, sovereign nations, geographical areas, heads of state, world wars, etc... and other things that one really could write a complete book on, if one were so inclined. Schools don't seem to fit that bill. And I certainly do not believe any entire class of articles should ever be considered exempt from deletion. Blanket-voting is basically implies that the voter is assuming bad faith and does not consider those in disagreement with him/her to be worth speaking to. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 22:49, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would go further, saying that "inherent notability" itself is a fallacy. Remember, "inherent" characteristics as those a subject has in and of itself. In other words, saying something is "inherently notable" is to say that it's notable "because ... well, it just is." Heads of state are notable because either someone has put them in that position, or they had the stones to seize power over many millions of people. Worldwide wars are major events in history. Sovereign nations can more-or-less claim to cover the world between them, and there's only about 200 of them. Your point on blanket voting is close to the best statement on why it's a bad thing that I've ever seen. Good point well made. PS, subst'd your sig, as template sigs are considered harmful. Chris talk back 23:13, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I look forward to AFD's of all the non-notable locations in the world out there from the two of you. You can start with [Perth, Towner County, North Dakota], population 13, non-notable article about nothing but demographics. Chop-chop. (I'll vote keep) Hipocrite - «Talk» 23:23, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please stick to topic, and mind WP:CIVIL. Take the settlements issue elsewhere. Chris talk back 00:28, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

XD vs. Afd

Why not just use XD instead of AfD? If the articles don't get cleaned up while in Category:XD, then they can go to AfD and be deleted without the normal battles. This allows those who want to improve the articles a chance before someone puts it on AfD. Right now XD is small, so it should be easy to watch. Less work then putting the article on Afd so there is a good reason for users to use XD. Vegaswikian 00:22, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Might not be a bad idea. Because this debate is starting to seem fruitless due to stonewalling on both sides.Gateman1997 00:51, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Both sides? - brenneman ^(t)^(c) 01:11, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Adminstrators on your side are threatening to ignore votes from people on my side if we don't engage in pointless debate on AFD pages, and you're supporting that view. Of course, "D NN" is just fine for an AFD nomination, for some McMahon preschool, right? Look at the reception I got just today and yesterday to see why people on my side (we've "won" on AFD) aren't all that interested in being harrangued here when we can just keep "winning" there. Hipocrite - «Talk» 14:30, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure this is likely to help much. Why would an article be deleted "without the normal battles" simply because it had been under XD for awhile? More importantly, though, most of the XD options aren't a good way to encourage articles to improve since most of them involve blanking the article. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:04, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
In all fairness, there seems to be very little on XD that makes it obvious how the system is supposed to work (as opposed to AfD, where it's painfully obvious how it doesn't work). Is it supposed to be like AfD but without the debate? Chris talk back 01:37, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- You can't actually use it to delete articles, at least in the way we understand it on AFD. The main purpose is to experiment with different systems that might be useful for future reforms to the deletion procedure. Debates could still take place, but in this case on article talk pages. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:50, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- XD allows you to blank the article so the text remains in the edit history. This allows anyone to restore the old article and improve it. My thinking is that if it gets improved without going to AfD, then it is an article that does not get sent to AfD for a school worth writing about. If the article does not get improved then it is probably a school not worth writing about and those who argue that it will be improved can see that is not the case, at least in the short term. We lose nothing by giving this a shot. Vegaswikian 01:56, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - If I were a staunch inclusionist, I would be very afraid of the XD option. If the point of having an article on Wikipedia is for it to be read, this effectively disables it. Very few users will be troubled to restore an article, or even know how to do it. My preference remains to try to hammer out a deal where school articles which are lacking can be merged or redirected, However, if the worst-case scenario is realized, I will suffer no feelings of guilt in XDing articles such as Birchview Elementary School (Plymouth, Minnesota). Denni ☯ 02:32, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - "Very few users will be troubled to restore an article, or even know how to do it." Am I missing something -- all you have to do to restore an article is revert, right? I think most editors know how to do this. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:45, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Like you, I don't believe that any editor in this debate would have a problem restoring the old text so that they can edit it. In fact, they can even XD it again if they need more time to clean it up. The fewer battles on AfD the better. Vegaswikian 03:59, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
XD is not for use when there is any contention. It is an experimental page focused on analyzing the deletion process, definitely not for use in highly contentious cases such as this. See further discussion of the above ideas at Wikipedia:Deletion reform and on Wikipedia_talk:Experimental Deletion. ∴ here…♠ 04:31, 1 December 2005 (UTC) .[reply]
- Actually I just fixed up the XD pages for more clarity. XD methods are not official guidelines, so you can't use XD for deleting stuff. Kim Bruning 07:37, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Separate Wiki?

In amongst the broad spectrum of views, there seems to be a gap in perception through the middle, where it seems some people on both sides are failing to see.

One of the major arguments on the keep side is that schools deserve to be written about somewhere, though they then make the extension (unsupported by logic) that Wikipedia is the place for this to happen. I can't speak for anyone else, but my general view is that "Yes, maybe we might want to write about them all, but Wikipedia isn't necessarily the place for it."

Would anyone consider the serious possibility (i.e. if someone actually sets out to say "I absolutely will do this") of a wiki to cover all educational institutions, schools, nurseries, colleges, libraries, musea, etc.? This would be a win-win situation. The keepers get somewhere to put the school articles, and the deleters get to claim that some sense of encyclopaedic standard is restored to the core Wikipedia. More importantly, it provides a grounds where the competing theories of maintainability can be put to the test. Chris talk back 01:37, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think this would resolve many of the fundamental problems, though you are welcome to try. I, at least, would continue to believe that removing schools from Wikipedia undermines its first fundamental principle, regardless of whether a separate schools-wiki existed. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:54, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- To the contrary, I believe that keeping every single school article undermines this principle, particularly the bits Wikipedia is not a collection of primary source documents, a soapbox, a newspaper, a free host, a webspace provider, a series of vanity articles, ... but more importantly, the bit where it says Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. I also believe that the vast majority of the school stubs and substubs fall foul of WP:NOT and WP:V. But that, as they say, is another story. Chris talk back 02:00, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I know, and that's the point -- what is a separate wiki going to do to resolve the difference between these viewpoints? Christopher Parham (talk) 02:03, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - For a start, both sides of the traditional debate get something they want, and so do a few people in the middle. If you're having trouble finding them, I will happily list them all. Chris talk back 02:22, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Okay, I'll bite. There is a substantial number of editors that wants nothing more on this issue than for schools to be included in Wikipedia. (This is why there is such opposition to proposals that involve the rejection of some or all schools.) What would this group get from your proposal? Christopher Parham (talk) 02:42, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        They get somewhere to put them all, albeit not on Wikipedia itself, though this should not be a problem if they are genuinely arguing a good faith position. Chris talk back 02:50, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        While I would be more than happy to see most school stubs transwikied to a different project, I don't think it's fair to say in good faith that it's impossible to disagree that this is a viable compromise. I'm not sure what objections could be made, but I'm sure reasonable, good-faith objections could be made. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:58, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        
        The argument, of course, would be that schools should be included on Wikipedia, not in some separate wiki-ghetto. It's encyclopedic content and it belongs in the encyclopedia, period. Telling people to go do their work elsewhere isn't a viable compromise in any sense of the term -- but if you think it is, you're welcome to create a new fork at wikipedia-minus-the-schools.com and have whatever content restrictions you want. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:09, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        Well, there you go. I think there may be a place for a separate complete directory of schools, but I don't think forking from Wikipedia's coverage, or even using a wiki, would be particularly useful. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 03:18, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"creating an All Schools Wiki" is not equal to "transformation of Wikipedia into 'Wikipedia-Minus-Schools'"

I think a separate wiki would be an excellent solution for school articles which aren't encyclopedic in terms of level of notability or content. Such a relegation need not be permanant; if a school-stub develops into a good article, it can always be transwikied back.

Despite perceptions of the contrary, I don't hate schools (but I do hate articles that exhibit a prepetual lack of content). I never said that a directory of all schools should never exist (but I did say that Wikipedia is not the place for it). I consider the idea analogous to the September 11 memorial wiki as it would address topics that (A) are not, from a worldwide viewpoint, considered encyclopedic (B) a significant number of people are still very interested in (though I do admit that I am not such a person). If a school is notable or interesting enough to write an encyclopedic article about it, please do so. A prototypical example of a well-written encyclopedic article about a very notable school can be found here.

If we want to mention that (before entering the NBA) Kobe Bryant played basketball for Lower Merion High School (which consequently passes my criteria if you hadn't noticed), it would make sense to do so.

Unfortunately, hitting the preview button now, I see that there is no entry for Lower Merion, yet there is an entry for an irrefutably less notable school in the same district. I'm a little upset about this and now very curious as to why the creation of Harriton High School and the cleanup of Birchview Elementary School (Plymouth, Minnesota) have taken a higher priority. If we are going to write about schools in an encyclopedia, should we not start with those which have greater claim to fame?

Looking even further into this, I see that an article on Lower Merion was created, then deleted for lack of content. Thus, I encourage Hipocrite to do one of two things:

A. Go to deletion review right now, according to the philosophy professed in this comment.

B. Create a new Lower Merion High School article from scratch.

For what it's worth, I think B would be an easier and less vindictive action.

— FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 15:21, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- The difference is that the 9/11 wiki contains content that is avowedly unencyclopedic in the sense that it does not attempt to follow our core principles of verifiability and NPOV. School articles are bound by those policies, and those articles (or, as with all of WP, the cleaned up ones) typically do provide sources for their information, which is usually of a sufficiently undisputed nature that it also passes NPOV. Schools that cannot be verified are regularly deleted. Looking at your other point, it's not as if there is a well-organized project to add schools to Wikipedia; as in all fields, growth is fairly random and haphazard as people write about what they know and are interested in. Christopher Parham (talk) 16:23, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I failed to specify (in my previous comment) that I would expect an all-schools wiki project to conform to verifiability and NPOV standards. I assumed that much would be understood. I am not a contributor to the sep11 wiki so I cannot attest to its standards, but I don't doubt the validity of your analysis and point. I intended it as a valid example of a niche-wiki to supliment the encyclopedia and allow interwiki links in both directions. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 17:13, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
As someone who is regularly invited to contribute to "real" encylopedias, and does not live in the US, let me say this pandering to documenting every little school in that country is silly. That there is a refusal to accept any standard of notability or quality for elementrary schools suggests to me that some editors care far more about their elementary schools than they do about Wikipedia. What you want is your own little ghetto for school articles, where your little hobby interest is exempt from the standards that apply to all the other topics on Wikipedia. All the NN bands, vanity bio posters, bloggers etc will want exemptions from WP notability standards too. These topics (NN bands, vanity bios, NN schools) are markedly different from the rest of Wikipedia, where the resource of usable information is being presented to readers who are actually looking for it. If every elementary school, fire department, post office and other minor government institution in the USA is to have it's own page, I think it should go onto a wiki specifically devoted to trivial US govt. institutions. It would be a good precedent, the NN bands, vanity posters etc. who think the world revolves around them could start their parallel wikis too. Pete.Hurd 15:54, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Pete, I do happen to live in a very "middle" section of the U.S., and I still agree with you. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 17:13, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- What school inclusionists are trying to do is precisely to provide users who looking for encylopedic information about schools with that information. We are not here trying to defend articles about our own schools, or US schools, and I don't know where you got that idea from. However, I do admit I would like to be able to look up my local schools in an encyclopedia, and I imagine a large proportion of the world's population feels the same about their local schools, so I am happy to defend their and my right to do so. Kappa 23:42, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for those reasoned comments. Vegaswikian 01:35, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Aye, thanks Kappa. What you say makes a lot of sense. I have a lot of sympathy for this view, I've tried using data from Human height in my own research, and see how Wikipedia can be very useful exactly in the way you suggest. What is useful about the data collected in the table on Human height (and there is lots that's wrong with it) is that it's *collected*. Someone might find it useful to have all this school data on Wikipedia for the as you suggest. However, all these petulant voices, insisting that each and every school in the USA is uniqely notable and be documented on seperate pages have a different motivation and different goals in mind from the ones you suggest we aim for. One collects useful data by collecting it so that it can be seen, virtually all the non-notable school articles would fit easily in a row on a table. That would be the highest signal to noise ratio. Documenting each school seperately is like collecting data by writing each value on a seperate scrap of paper and storing them all in a big plastic bag. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. Pete.Hurd 02:50, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I would like for people to stop equating schools with post offices, fire departments, and other "trivial US govt. institutions". First, schools are a world-wide, so I don't understand the US connection. Second, schools are very different from a post office: thousands of people spend a large amount of their childhood in even the smallest of schools. A school is a very important part of a community, and involves a complex interaction of students, parents, teachers, school boards, administrators, community leaders, and many others. Because of this, each school *is* unique. Even within a "district", the natural grouping of schools in the US, schools can be widely different. I'm completely willing to debate the importance of schools in and of themselves, but please stop the comparison to non-school things that are not equivalent. (This goes for NN bands comparison as well). Turnstep 18:22, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I intend launching a schools wiki and have purchased domain names (schoolswiki.com and .org). I'm planning to launch as part of a group of special interest wikis, meaning I have a lot of prelaunch work to do. Currently I am coding some backend stuff. Expect a launch in 2006 but not any time soon. Offers of help welcome, of course. --kingboyk 13:13, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

- That's good to hear. This is where I believe all these school articles belong. With something like about a gazillion schools in the world, the best place for them is in their own dedicated wiki, freeing up Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia. Your wiki can house the contact information which is about all most of the current articles contain. Denni ☯ 01:46, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  - So Denni are you volunteering to help Kingboy build this separate wiki? Kappa 01:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    - Couldn't it be seemlessly integrated? David D. (Talk) 01:58, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What's the problem with Wikipedia being an encyclopedia with a gazillion articles about schools? Wouldn't that just make it a bigger, better encyclopedia? As long as the content is neutral and verifiable, I see it as a plus. --Dystopos 02:53, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Have we made any progress?

I'm starting to think this has all been in vain. Based on the latest school AFDs only those people discussing here have taken ANY of this to heart and even those that are here haven't been applying to proposal to their votes on any AFDs that are coming up. I applaud those that tried to bring both sides to the table but it's just not going to work unless we get broader support from both sides.Gateman1997 19:08, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I dont think a compromise is really possible. If there are 1000 schools in your state/region/whatever, any test of genuine notability or distinctiveness that has been proposed so far would result in no more than, say, 50 articles being allowed. Obviously thats unacceptable to the inclusionists. IMO, its not possible to design a series of meaningful criteria that would result in 500 being allowed and 500 not.

You either reduce the number of schools articles drastically or not at all. So the inclusionists have (rightly from their point of view) no incentive to accept any compromise. Jameswilson 03:00, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see much progress either. There is no outcome on the "notability" criteria. The AFD problem is still there. There is still an important amount of vanity as a motivation to write a school article. I have the feeling that when a school article is worth of interest it is actually not because of the school, but because of some people who worked there, or some project developped in them or something loosely linked to the school. My point being: at that stage the sementic of the article is not about a school anymore and we better have an article about the actual worthy subject. I tend to beleive the - drastic - but best way is to plainly say no to high schools. Force the sementic on not being about bunch of buildings existing somewhere. That way, a author would be forced into actually having some material to talk about. Otherwise, accept them all, and let WP be not only a directory, but a new Google with the guarenty of being out of date and of poor value. Unlike Google. Gtabary 17:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that both sides seem to be saying the same thing, different ways. Both sides agree "schools are important public institutions", and that "schools should be included in Wikipedia". The keep camp insist this means that all schools should be in, but this is an obvious fallacy of division. It is worth noting that they maintain this belief, despite the fact that most of the resultant articles will fail to meet a number of our central policy principles. Chris talk back 14:48, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

How does keeping all schools fail to meet WP:NPOV ("number" above)? In addition, I think that most of the inclusionist camp wants to keep all verified schools in Wikipedia. I've certainly voted delete on non-verifiable schools.Turnstep 15:12, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I repeat for the benefit of those that may have missed it: ... despite the fact that most of the resultant articles will fail to meet ... Unfortunately, many of the keepers tend to have an "interesting" definition of verifiability. Apparently if they've found some trace of a suggestion somewhere that the school might exist, it's verified. Forget for a moment that the verifiability policy applies to the information rather than the subject itself. Chris talk back 17:48, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Merge out class rooms? Could it happen?

I just saw my first article on a class room in a school, Davis_High_School_German_4_Class. Would this get deleted on Afd? I would hope so but I'm really not sure. Slippery slope? David D. (Talk) 00:08, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That would be deleted with no votes for keep. If you were trying to make a WP:POINT you went a LITTLE too far down into obscurity. A preschool would have been a better point maker.Gateman1997 00:25, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No I'm not trying to make a point at all. I was just amused by the fact that someone had written an article on a class room.David D. (Talk) 01:15, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A proposal to slow/stop the AFD nominations

But seriously. To get everyone to the table we need to stop the AFD nominations it is the only way to get started on a serious discussion regarding criteria for merge/redirect, keep or delete criteria.

One success of an Afd nomination is that a school article normally gets cleaned up quite quickly. I have been experimenting moving schools that would otherwise get an Afd nomination on the the schoolwatch cleanup page. I think this is a viable option to stop Afd nominations but at the same time ensuring these article do get improved.

I created a template template:schoolzone that i have tagged many new school micro/stubs that might have otherwise appeared in Afd over the last few days. See below

This article is actively undergoing construction as part of the schoolwatch cleanup project.
You can help Wikipedia by editing it into a better school article.

I then transfered those schools into the cleanup list at schoolwatch, they also get listed in Category:School articles actively undergoing construction. Myself, Kappa and Hipocrite have already got to work trying to improve those articles.

The advantage of using a tag like this is that once a school has been tagged it should not get re-tagged for Afd. i hope that for a while people can use this tag in lieu of an AFD or speedy tag as a show of good faith. THEN we can start talking about details instead of arguing in Afd. Sorry I went ahead and did this without discussion but I hope this bold move might get us moving along in the right direction again. I hope that this might be a transient solution to bring EVERYONE to the table. If others can think of an improvement in this idea or have better idea why not throw them out now. David D. (Talk) 01:10, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation of school names

One thing that I think is a big problem with school articles is the creation of school articles with titles that really should be disambiguation pages instead. There are the obvious school names that already are disambiguation pages (e.g. George Washington High School), but I keep running across school names that I would have guessed were probably unique, but weren't. What needs to be done is ALWAYS check school article names against a good internet resource for duplicate or similar names. I've been using Public School Review, because it seems to be fairly thorough, but there may be better resources that I haven't found yet. As an example of what I think should be done, I just turned the Jordan High School article (which was a redirect to David Starr Jordan High School) into a disambiguation page. ^Blank ^Verse 15:10, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Subject-specific notability criteria

I've removed this category. The very concept of notability is very controversial, and never so controversial when it comes to schools. Such category tags on this discussion page can only inflame matters. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 04:02, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Straw poll?

According to the centralized discussion list, there is supposedly a straw poll going on here. What happened to it? I can't find it. --Metropolitan90 16:54, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think that refers to Wikipedia_talk:Schools/Archive_5#Summary.2C_proposal, which is archived and didn't come to any clear outcome. The discussion is still mostly centered around that proposal or something similar, however. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:47, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- I would suggest the next straw poll if/when made, is done on its own sub-page, so its termination is independent of the archival of this volumous talk page. Also, if anybody still has an interest, it seems worthwhile to make a revised proposal (after a little more discussion), since the last one had a clear majority, and a number of people seemed to like the merge idea in principal, but were hung up on the sentences (both quantity/quality). --Rob 18:11, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Special collaboration

Culler Middle School Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Dawes Middle School Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Goodrich Middle School Keep candidate although could be expanded.
North Star Middle School Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Park Middle School (Lincoln, NE) Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Pound Middle School Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Scott Middle School Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Irving Middle School nominated for AFD. Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Lefler Middle School nominated for AFD. Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Lux Middle School nominated for AFD. Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Mickle Middle School nominated for AFD. Currently a microstub and merge candidate.
Lincoln High School (Lincoln, NE) Keep candidate although could be expanded.
Lincoln East High School Currently a stub and merge candidate.
Lincoln Northeast High School Currently a stub and merge candidate.
Lincoln North Star High School Currently a stub and merge candidate.
Lincoln Southeast High School Good school article definite keep.
Lincoln Southwest High School Good school article definite keep.

What does the above mean??

Regarding the current proposal being discussed on the talk pages at WP:SCH. A Keep or Merge vote is being touted as a compromise that might get us out of school AFD hell. Presently people create school articles containing neutral, verifiable information and it is impossible to delete them, even though many have a desire to do so. Rather than striving for an impossible consensus to delete any given school article, it is preferable, and takes much less energy, to merge the text of the article into an article about a suitable habitation or administrative unit: a city, county or state, or a school district, either a local education authority or other school system. This should be done while taking care not to delete the information contained in the article.

How would this compromise work? One solution is to tag new school articles that are considered candidates for merging with a template such as the following, template:schoolzone, to warn those unfamiliar with the process from tagging it for AFD. This will also serve as a holding category and bring to attention schools that need to be merged or expanded.

Merging is appropriate if the school article is both below three sentences and lacks any sort of illustration, boxed info-template or picture. If the article is merged, the current location should be replaced by a redirect, and the edit history maintained for future use.

We now have an good chance to test this proposal since User:Bp28 has just created the school district page Lincoln Public Schools including new pages for all the middle schools and high schools in the district. Already four of the middle schools have been tagged for deletion by User:Luigi30. Do we really have the energy for 11 middle school AFD's? I have tagged the remaining schools with the schoolzone template in the hope it will prevent the others reaching AFD.

Above is a list of the schools and a description their current state.

Let's see how these grow over the next week and then discuss which ones if any are merge candidates after that period of time. This will be a useful exercise for several reasons:

It will help convince those who wish to delete such articles that given a chance they will grow if less time is spent arguing in AFD.
It will help determine what form a merge candidate will take.
It will also help us reach a consensus of the type of school article that is worthy of being kept without merging.

I urge everyone here to participate in this project as an exercise in good faith. David D. (Talk) 00:46, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I continue to refrain from voting on school articles, but I must admit that my patience is wearing thin. However, I will take part in this project despite my sense that these articles will go nowhere beyond their generally pathetic state. Denni ☯ 03:16, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't think we can necessarily bring them all to a state where they stand as articles in their own right. For some of the middle schools I expect it will not be possible with out local knowledge. I may be wrong. Actually I hope we will get a gradation of verfiable information for this collection of schools such that it will help us see where the consensus cut off is for a merge/keep decision. This seems to be the sticking point at present. It is not as easy as a definition and maybe we'll all get some insight from these schools here. David D. (Talk) 03:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - The remarkable link Public School Review provided by User:BlankVerse above lists a great deal of potentially relevant data for 25638 high schools, 23513 Middle schools, and 61085 elementary schools. Unlike the articles slowly accumulating here on Wikipedia, the data on these 110236 schools appears to be collected systematically, and be of potential relevance. That's a lot of schools, and there are many more outside the purvue of that website. Why start picking schools willy-nilly and writing articles on them absent any notion of notability? Even hundreds of "good" school articles is simply collecting trivia on a vanishingly small cross-section. Pete.Hurd 04:25, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - That is why any article should have more information than is presented by such a resource. Any article that can only cite the information in such an article is very worthy of merging, in my opinion. To be regarded as usful wikipedia needs to add extra information. So basically bot article are a merge. Articles written from local knowledge or extensive research are a keep. It least that is what i have in my mind at the moment. David D. (Talk) 05:01, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

School District Categories

When did this start happening? Fairmeadow School is now listed as a member of it's district as a category?Gateman1997 21:26, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It can be listed in both the article and as a category. This way, if a user is on the article of another school in the district and they want to know which other schools are in it, they just have to look at the category. Nifty feature :-) JHMM13 (T | C)

16:31, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You should rephrase that to "if a user is on the article of another school in the district and they want to know which other schools in it have a wikipedia article, they just have to look at the category.". This is one of the advantages of lists since a school can be on a list even if there is no article. David D. (Talk) 16:35, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely, good point. Categories can only be populated if an article exists on the subject. If that person wishes to look through the list of schools in that district, he can consult the list, make his own list, or simply make his own article without any prior list-assistance. JHMM13 (T | C)

23:24, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Greensboro Day School

This has been around since November 18th. I removed all the vandalism and now all that's left is one sentence. Now I understand why schools get put at AfD so often. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 03:56, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

While I obviously don't agree with the deletion of schools, one problem we face is that aside from being a forum for deletion AFD right now also serves as perhaps the best way to quickly get school articles improved. Schoolwatch has done some good work in this area, but (and I'm certainly partly guilty for this) the record suggests that all these schools AFDs, while shredding our sense of fraternity, have in fact improved a great many school stubs. Ideally, we could eliminate this sort of incentive to nominate schools for deletion, but this faces major problems in that schoolwatch, even if I and everyone else put more time into it, isn't really capable of dealing with the full volume of new school articles. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:48, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I was a bit annoyed when I found the article last night but not enough to AfD it. I once, without knowing the amount of feeling (on both sides) it would engender, put a similar school article up for AfD. I realised that to put another one up would just be a "bad faith" listing and "proving a point". If the amount of time wasted in the arguing at AfD over schools was put into fixing them there would be less problems with the articles. I think that one of the features we need is an RC list that filters out based on keywords, like "school".

Since the time I put the school (can't think of the name but it was a middle school) I have changed my mind about them being nn and think they should be included. We have plenty of other articles on things that are just as obscure and appeal to an even smaller group of people. As an example look at the airports section Category:Airports in Canada. I would argue that many of the airports in Canada are important because they are the only access the community has to the rest of the world. But I wonder about some of them like Killarney Airport which is at Killarney, Ontario. No one ever thinks of putting these up for deletion yet schools in a community are just as notable as airport are and, I would imagine, in some cases more important than the airport. Here's another example, Prairie Creek Airport, of an nn airport. The big differences between airports and schools is that airports get hit with less vandalism and it would seem in peoples minds that they are more important. Just so you know I am the one resposible for creating most of the smaller airports in Canada.

I missed the Wikipedia:Watch/schoolwatch last night but I will list them there if I find anymore. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 16:02, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Removed bad reccomendations

As deletionist admins are now ignoring keep votes that are merely a link to the keep arguments page, I have removed the majoirty of the comity guidelines from the main page. These guidelines, while fine for delete votes, will cause keep votes to be disregarded. Bad faith? I can't assume it! Hipocrite - «Talk» 14:16, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad you are avoiding the assumption of bad faith. As a deletionist, I continue to avoid voting on school articles, and hope that all others in this discussion will also refrain until such time as we have a working policy. (I would also point out that you are referring only to those admins who are closing AfDs. I typically do not do this, and actively avoid closing school votes because of my hard-line stance.) D e nni ☯ 01:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is that a good idea? After all, there are users who are claiming that if no school article is being deleted then therefore none should be deleted. Or, putting it in other words, there are uses who claim that if no action is being taken then it is precedent and no action should be taken, independent of the article's notability or encyclopedic value. That isn't good. --Mecanismo | Talk 09:59, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's a good idea to defuse the problem. But you are right that this argument is being put. It would, of course, be equally easy to put together a cabal to prevent deletion of spam, with the rallying cry all businesses are inherently notable! and keep all valid businesses. Unfortunately dogma is incompatible with consensus. - Just zis Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] AfD? 21:32, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Defining objective guidelines for the definition of keeping/deleting of school articles

The debate on school articles is getting a bit long and, frankly, getting nowhere. The problem is, as I see it, that there are people who want to include articles on every single school which ever existed and there are people who only want to keep the schools which are undoubtedly and unquestioably notable. I believe that the only solution to this problem is that the community agrees with a few basic guidelines which may serve as foundations to support other more refined and specific guidelines, i.e., set up a sane starting point from where to start with.

To start with, I propose two objective principles that define a notable highschool. They are:

The school had at least one unquestionably notable person as alumnus/alumna (example.
The school attained unquestionable and verifiable historic notability throughout it's existence (Columbine High School).

I believe that everyone agrees with these two guidelines. They have the advantage of not requiring absurd metrics as the number of lines proposal and it is easy to verify the notability of the schools being analyzed. After setting these guidelines as basis, then the community can discuss other more specific details on what schools should/should not be listed and the cleaning process can retain the sane approach which it is currently lacking. --Mecanismo | Talk 14:12, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Keep all schools - this debate is over. No valid school has been deleted for ages. Hipocrite - «Talk» 14:56, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If the debate is over, how come there is still a lot of discussion and not a single objective guideline which gathers the consensus of everyone? I believe it is safe to say that the subject is far from over and for a very good reason. --Mecanismo | Talk 16:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If your point is that schools that are unquestionably notable should be kept, then you'll be happy to know we already do that. We don't need new principles to tell us to keep these schools, anymore than we need new principles to tell us that hoax schools should be deleted. I don't see how your proposal addresses the question here, which is how to deal with all the schools in the middle whose notability is disputed. Christopher Parham (talk) 16:35, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As I stated in my proposal, it isn't aimed to be a end-all proposal. It serves as a foundation to the discussion and a common ground for everyone to start with. About highschool notability, it is easy to see that there are highschools whose notability is limited to the region they are located and outside of that, they are as not-notable as they can get. Those schools are completely void of encyclopedic value. An encyclopedia should be a means to convey relevant information and not a yellow-pages about schools around the world. --Mecanismo | Talk 16:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really see how it can act as a foundation for the discussion when it really has no bearing on the questions of interest. We all agree that notable schools should be kept, but its not clear how we take this and arrive at more general proposals that can gain consensus. To be useful, a proposal has to suggest a way to resolve the dispute; you've just restated things we clearly agree on without proposing a way for us to resolve the dispute at issue. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:12, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Schools/Arguments#keep Hipocrite - «Talk» 17:22, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that we should define a basis to discuss the highschool article epidemic which is afflicting wikipedia. One of my proposals is to define basic guidelines that any user can use as a starting point to define the notability of one school. I gave two suggestions (school history and notable ex-alumni) but more suggestions are more than welcome. What guidelines do you suggest? --Mecanismo | Talk 00:25, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is no epidemic. Hipocrite - «Talk» 03:14, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I contend the statement that both of these points are things we agree on. For a start, notable alumni, no matter how notable they may be, do not make the school notable. Ultimately, the it seems the root cause of this whole problem is a confusion between the collective and individual senses of "schools", i.e. the difference between "all schools" and "each and every school". Yes, schools should be written about and represented, but in line with the usual Wikipedia practice of comparing subjects with others in their category, not each and every school is notable enough for inclusion (and let's keep this point on schools only). In exactly the same way that we do not include every person, every company, every band, every charity or every anything else, we should not include every school. Chris talk back 17:12, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- Unfortunately, at this point in time in Wikipedia's history, it seems we *do* accept every school, no matter how singularly unnotable it may be. The inclusionists are quite correct in noting that school articles simply are not deleted. I believe this reflects badly on Wikipedia's credibility as a source of information, primarily because the greatest percentage of these articles hold so little information that their presence is laughable, and I also believe that these articles are going to mean major cleanup work for someone down the road. But trying to get the inclusionists to appreciate that more is not always better appears to be a losing battle. Over the past couple of months, a number of deletionists have debated in good faith to strike a set of standards, but the discussion appears to be going nowhere. Until the inclusionists, who are currently in the majority, are willing to accept that even school articles have to be held to some standard, this argument is, sadly, going nowhere. Denni ☯ 01:50, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - One of the reasons the school articles are not deleted is that there is a group of very active users who participate in every school AFD vote against the deletion, independent of the merit of the school. There are uses who even state as a motive something in the line "fighting the highschool articles deletion". Some of those users are simply highschool article authors who started fighting against the AFD nominations because their own pet project was listed there. So, therefore, the "highschool articles aren't deleted anyway" argument can't be taken seriously at face value because there are "conspirators" moving behind those votes and that vote regardless of the school's merit. --Mecanismo | Talk 00:19, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- - - I'm certain that Assuming Bad Faith is the BEST way to get people to the table to try to move the status quo more to your position! I suggest you accuse those of us who oppose the deletion of school articles of worshiping SATAN to really make us afraid to disagree with you! Hipocrite - «Talk» 03:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, that "satanic" comment was a bit out of line. For the sake of argument it would be best if we kept away from that line of debate because, as it is easy to understand, it is a quick path to flamebaiting and trolling. About the subject, it is natural tendency to assume bad faith when a user sees the user's little pet project or the article on the user's highschool with a AFD tag. After all, if the user invested time in that article and/or if the user went to that school, the user may really believe that the school is indeed notable. The thing is, sometimes it simply isn't and sometimes the school is just plain not interesting, not notable and completely void of any encyclopedic value. So, although the author sees the AFD tag as an action done in bad faith, that doesn't mean that it was really an action done in bad faith and even that the article doesn't deserve to be deleted. Yet, the authors who mindlessly "gang up" against any AFD vote of any school article and mindlessly vote against the deletion because they have to "fight the highschool articles deletion" still do so, completely independent of merit and of any fundamented reasoning made by them. So, as I said before, the "school articles aren't deleted anyway" argument is plain nonsense when one knows what is going on on the AFD votes. --Mecanismo | Talk 09:56, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WP:AGF is still a guideline here. I suggest you follow it. Hipocrite - «Talk» 14:16, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Application of Wikipedia:Verifiability is an objective guideline: any school which has been written about in a credible source is ok, any that has not should be deleted. redstucco 09:36, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do we allow non-notable libraries too? TrafficBenBoy 21:21, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just as we generally reject non-notable schools, we would probably reject non-notable libraries as well. Sorry! Christopher Parham (talk) 07:22, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- No offense intended, Christopher, but I have yet to see you vote to delete a non-notable school. Please correct me if I am wrong. Denni ☯ 00:52, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I don't recall any non-notable schools appearing on AFD, but if one does let me know. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:13, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - Sorry, I thought for a moment there you were starting to make sense. Oh well. Denni ☯ 04:56, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - What can I say, sorry to disappoint. Cheers, Christopher Parham (talk) 22:27, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
How about doing Afd normally - judging each article on its own quality. If a school article is a respectable stub, keep it, if it's garbage (in other words has nothing more than the school's name and lat/long coords). This maintains the quality of Wikipedia without resorting to arbitrary 'notability standards' which are inherently POV - this debate would be shorter and more effective if people would read WP:NPOV before they start flaming Cynical 17:11, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's what people were trying to do, but since if there is no consensus the default is to keep, and since there is a group of editors who will vote keep on all schools regardless, it doesn't work that way. - Just zis Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] AfD? 18:48, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We don't need a foundation proposal, we just need the deletionists to accept that they have lost. CalJW 05:07, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of obsessing about the fight between deletionists and inclusionist why don't you make constructive comments about how to improve the quality of wikipedia? I sometimes wonder if you just wish to have a perpetual war so you can continue the good old fight instead of make a serious effort to improve things? For example, how do you propose we should educate new users about not nominating school articles for AFD? How do you propose we should educate new users on how to write a good school article? David D. (Talk) 08:23, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My comment was intended as a reason why we should not allow non-notable schools. If we did, we'd have to allow non-notable libraries and such as well. Both are not meant for wikipedia. TrafficBenBoy 11:11, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why shouldn't wikipedia users be able to read about libraries? Kappa 11:56, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why are we overcomplicating things?

First of all, Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of the sum total of human knowledge. Nowhere in that principle did I see 'the sum total of human knowledge, except schools'. Defining arbitrary, POV 'notability standards' will only serve to complicate matters. Why not just judge school articles individually - if a school has NPOV, verifiable information about it (ie more than just its name and co-ordinates) which can be written into a decent article (ie at least a stub) then the article should be kept regardless of any arbitrary 'notability standards'. Cynical 14:57, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is an address knowledge or information? What exactly did Wales mean when he said "sum total of human knowledge"? When reading the WP:NOT it seems clear that knowledge was not meant to equate with information. That is the root of the problem here with regard to schools being sent to AFD.

The real discussion is how to encourage context and growth of school articles. That discussion IS complicated since everyone has a different opinion. David D. (Talk) 16:35, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That may be part of it. Then there are those who keep creating articles or red links to encourage new articles that will cause tempers to flair. This is pushing or breaking WP:POINT in the views of many. Vegaswikian 16:46, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is true, although I'm not sure how much of that is really occuring? The real disputes seem to happen when a newbie editor writes a truely awful school article that, of course, is immediately sent to AfD. There are two ways to deal with this. First, send it to Afd. Second, do what User:Thivierr has started to do [3].

And sending to AfD can be avoided if we don't red link every school. That encourages these newbies to step right into this trap. Build the district articles so that information can be added there where there are no issues and then when there is enough for an article create the article. Vegaswikian 18:44, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a good point. David D. (Talk) 08:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

People shouldn't make *any* type of article if they haven't gathered sufficient information on the topic. Inadequate/incomplete/misleading school district articles [4] [5] have been made when they shouldn't have, just as some school articles have been, just as other articles types have been. In a number of cases, the role/jurisdiction of a school district isn't as obvious as it first appears, and the initial version of the district article actually misleads people. I have added a bit to WP:PJSCH to ask people gather up sufficient info first, before they make a school article. I've also asked some new makers of articles, to look over the recommendations on that page. I think a basic problem Wikipedia has, is we fail to explain to new users the distinction between writing articles, and writing requests for articles. People wishing to make a request for an article should go to Wikipedia:Requested articles. A request for an article, shouldn't be made by doing a one-line substub (in the form "X is a Y in place Z."), but it also shouldn't be made by adding incompletely to a district article. (note: my preceeding negative comments have nothing to do with well thought out district articles, or mergers to district articles of existing substubs, which has broad support). --Rob 10:42, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By welcoming the new user there are two good things. No arguments on AfD, because hopefully the new user will respond positively. Two, the new user, having learned how to write a school article and learn wiki protocol, will go on to become a productive contributor. Get them while the're young! I tend to the deletionist side of schools but i can see there are valid reasons, besides content, to actually keep them. David D. (Talk) 16:54, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia would be a lot easier if we had an endless reservoir of people willing to collect information and write articles about less than massively important things. I had to write the article on my own high school, and even that was painful due to lack of verifiability. Some of it is OR, but where do we draw the line between OR and my own common knowledge (like that everyone who knows Buzz Aldrin knows that he went to MHS)? Also, upwards of 90% of edits to school articles are vandalism, since so many anons are students signing on from school to play a joke on someone (which is something that people just do for a gag, so I don't really let if it bother me). So when an article is created by a user who has no real reputation, how much can we truly trust their word? As Wikipedia starts getting into less-verifiable territory, things get a lot more complicated. JHMM13 (T | C)

16:28, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Notability and the case of Edina High School

A high school is not notable in itself. We should only have articles on notable ones, categories which are pretty easy to separate. It's like the difference between TWA Flight 800 and TWA Flight 802. I mean, I don't even care about my own former high school and would instantly nominate it for deletion if its article was created. Its simply not important information, for anyone, even or perhaps especially its students, since they already know the information in the article. I don't even see why this is a debate; the arguments for keeping high school articles collapse with 5 seconds of rational thought. --Tothebarricades 01:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You make the grievous error of assuming there is anything like rational thought involved in most "keep" arguments. According to many inclusionists, all high schools are notable, and all information is worth keeping, even the utterly mundane and totally irrelevant. And I have given up trying to disabuse them of their folly. Might as well swat flies under the delusion you'll be rid of them. (Please note that I do not say "all inclusionists". There are many here who appreciate that articles worth keeping require some minimum level of importance and some minimum amount of content. They can be reasoned with. Unfortunately, they seem to be in the minority.) D e nni ☯ 02:12, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can you please explain why you have a minimum level of importance in the first place? I do not see any reason in it as you have stated it; it appears to simply be your belief or opinion. I believe anything worthy of being on Wikipedia will be accompanied by outside sources worthy of verifiability. If there are outside articles written on schools and there are whole encyclopedias out there on them, I believe articles on Wikipedia can be justified. However, when we start getting down to really small things, like individual, non-notable people, we run the risk of having an overabundance of articles and not nearly enough vandal-fighters, far too much unverified information, and less space on the servers. I don't think saying "because it's non-notable" is ever a good-enough reason to disallow something to be on. You need to back it up a bit with, as you say, some rational thought. JHMM13 (T | C)

23:33, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One thing Wikipedia is not is a collection of nondescript information. It is an encyclopedia, therefore, what goes in it must, by definition, be encyclopedic. You make my point for me when you talk about "outside articles written on schools." The fact is, for most of the schools here, there are no such outside articles. And there are certainly not whole encyclopedias written on schools. Such an encyclopedia, even if it were to exist, would make pretty boring reading, since most schools are pretty much alike. To make matters worse, editors do not bother to provide, for most of the articles in Wikipedia, even a fundamental level of information about a school beyond its name, location, and population. To make matters worse yet, these articles typically receive no further attention and languish as articles essentually devoid of information. I disagree that "non-notable" is not sufficient reason. It is, by policy, a sufficient reason to delete articles on individuals, bands, websites, and businesses. I do not believe schools should receive any special exemption. D e nni ☯ 00:28, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has the potential to significantly broaden the range of what is "encyclopedic". There is quite a lot of material here that doesn't interest me and probably never will. That doesn't mean that it is wholly nondescript. Someone cared enough to add it, and that must count for something in the market of ideas. Perhaps you meant to allude to the official policy that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. The description of that policy explains that "there is a continuing debate about the encyclopedic merits of several classes of entries," and does not go on to state a consensus about school articles. That, in fact, is what brings us here. No consensus has emerged on the "encyclopedicness" of schools. Therefore, I don't think we can accept a de facto reasoning based on your assessment of typical high schools as "unencyclopedic". It's circular reasoning.

The fact does remain that Wikipedia does have standards. We would be wise to adhere to them more rigorously, especially when there is a question of whether an article is appropriate. The policies that govern article standards are neutral point of view, verifiablility, cite sources, and what Wikipedia is not.. If an article embodies those qualities, the question of whether its subject is notable becomes more or less moot. --Dystopos 01:05, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Edina High School is a public High School in Edina, Minnesota." End of article. Please!! Try to convince me that this is encyclopedic, never mind notable. This article is a piece of shit, plain and simple, and I am embarrassed to have my name (as a Wikipedia editor) attached to it. If an editor cannot be troubled to find out more than this about a subject, I cannot be troubled to find reason to keep it. This article is speedy deletable, possibly by CSD:A1, definitely by CSD:G1, but I would never hear the end of it if I even considered speedying it. So much for Wikipedia's standards. D e nni ☯ 00:30, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to be going to a lot of trouble nevertheless. Forgive me if I fail to understand why you are embarassed that Wikipedia reports the fact that Edina High School is a public high school in Edina, Minnesota. Is that false? Is it causing some harm by being there? Lacking specific information about Edina High School, doesn't it link you to information about Edina, Minnesota, and about High Schools? Isn't that how any encyclopedia would treat a minor entry? Why must every article in a boundless encyclopedia like ours be fully fleshed-out in order to remain? Wouldn't having a bit of patience with substubs be less trouble than hunting them down for deletion? To what standards are you referring when you bemoan the persistence of articles like this? Are these agreed-upon standards or personal standards? --Dystopos 00:41, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The only information this article adds to what can already be garnered from the article's title is that this school is in Minnesota. I doubt anyone searching for info about this school is unaware of the state it is in. In fact, most people coming to this article, IMHO, are attempting to learn something of the history of the school, the special programs the school offers, the notable staff or alumni of the school, or any of a number of things this article cannot provide. So basically, this article is totally devoid of useful information, and hence is a waste of server space. It embarrases me because my encyclopedia is supposed to be a source for useful information, and someone coming to this article and expecting to find relevant information is likely to be left with a bad taste in their mouth. Iexpect articles to hie to the standards any paper encyclopedia would - have something of relevance to say or don't say anything. This article wouldn't have a hope in hell of being vetted for a regular encyclopedia - why should Wikipedia's standards be less? (and don't give me the saw that Wikipedia is not paper, because it is server space, and it is search engine time). D e nni ☯ 01:08, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What annoys me about the schools is the sloppy editing. Editors who rush to improve school articles, to stop them being deleted, often fail to put the article into context. How hard would it have been for those that improved Edina high school to back link the article from the Edina page. Apparently many editors start a job but don't finish it. When Denni say he is embarrassed, I interpret this to mean that this sloppy work reflects on everyone who is editing this encyclopedia. Those that create pages should be responsible for doing it correctly not just leaving it dangling without context. That goes for those that defend the inclusion of low quality pages. David D. (Talk) 00:59, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Annoyances about sloppy editing and short-sighted concerns for server space are not criteria for deletion of factual, verifiable articles. The correction for sloppy editing is to edit the page. The correction for server overloading is to donate liberally to the foundation. If you don't wish to do either of those, you can at least have the patience and the good faith to let other people pick up the slack. Deleting factual information serves no valid purpose. Also, if you check the article again, I think you will find it much improved. Wikipedia is working. --Dystopos 01:57, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You endorse sending articles to AfD to get them improved? David D. (Talk) 02:11, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I do not. As I said, the need for improvement is NOT a criterion for deletion and the proper recourse is to edit the article. --Dystopos 02:42, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While everyone tries to clean up bad articles there is only so much one is willing to do with regard to articles that are not within your sphere of interest. Improving random local schools is near the bottom of most editors to do lists. And unfortunately even the best school articles are targets for vanity and hate. This has to do with the maturity of the types of editors than do take an interest in these articles. Even if serious editors can restore the quality and patrol such articles these articles will deteriorate and lead to the embarrassing articles that Denni is referring too. The number of man hours to maintain all schools as quality articles will be huge. You have to fight an army of kids. I understand why inclusionists want to keep everything but the quality of wikipedia will suffer for this policy. However, if this is the way wikipedia really wants to go then they should just get rid of AfD all together, seriously. It is a huge time sink if you include all the fighting outside of the AfD (this page is a good example). Wikipedia needs to have a policy of accepting that there will be many crap articles but they will probably not be viewed or linked to good articles and will exist relatively anonymously. Until that day I see no reason not to use AfD. And no I do not think an editor is obliged to research and rewrite truly bad articles to save them from AfD. At least if AfD is abandoned we can just forget about the bad articles and let them rot without the charade of assuming that all these pages are worth something. With that in mind it is quite embarrassing that wikipedia is always touting how many pages it has online. Quantity is irrelevant. The only parameter by which wikipedia will ever be judged is quality. David D. (Talk) 05:19, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can wikipedia maintain every school article?

Last fall I joined the schools discussion briefly to comment on the staggering scope of the inclusionist position. My original calculations are part of Wikipedia's archives now. A "keep all schools" policy would expand to half a million articles or more, requiring diligent attention from thousands of editors and posing tremendous disambiguation problems. I am not a deletionist; I just don't think Wikipedia's format and human editors are adequate to the task on a subject so prone to vandalism. The inclusionists disagreed so I have left them to their own devices. Since their definition of encyclopedic includes every institution that teaches the alphabet to children who are not yet fully toilet trained, they may have the honor of maintaining these articles. I will not. Durova 09:15, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why wouldn't Wikipedia have thousands of diligent editors? Are disambiguation problems not encountered in every subject? If the category did expand to half a million or more, it would be because someone somewhere put forth the effort to add each school. No one is arguing that a robot should be assigned this task or that every editor be required to create a school stub before making any other edits. Furthermore, I have not seen a lot of vandalism in the school articles I watch. Where have you seen all this vandalism? Perhaps a project to monitor edits to school articles originating from IPs assigned to the school in question would make the task of patrolling vandalism more manageable. These are temporary practical matters which don't get at the basic issue. What I'm missing from the arguments against my position is any connection to Wikipedia's actual policies for articles. What I'm seeing instead is a large amount of effort being put forth to say that allowing school articles to survive as stubs would be too much effort. --Dystopos 14:56, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- - My estimate depended on 5000 editors editing 10 schools a day, every day including weekends and holidays. At this rate they could update every school on earth once every two years. While Wikipedia does have several thousand total editors, relatively few of them contribute to the main space at that rate. Only a very small portion of those are single subject editors. Honestly, is there anyone at all who actually verifies and updates school information at a sustained rate of ten schools a day? My figures assumed no vandalism. Obviously vandalism does occur. Dealing with it requires additional resources beyond the scope of my estimate. Durova 18:43, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    - Am I misreading you or are you contemplating a situation in which we would have articles on 36 million schools? Christopher Parham (talk) 19:15, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      - I should have checked the original numbers. I've reposted my original statement below.
- Well i have be monitoring two school in NYC for various reasons. they got onto my watch list due by a circuitous route, nevertheless I have been watching the progress on both pages. In summary, one in ten edits is a reversion (for hate mongering, POV, vanity or vandalism). Probably 30% of edits are due to vandalism or reverting vandalism for both Horace Mann School and The Dalton School. I have listed the reversions that were made in the last 100 edits so you gauge the problem.

Reversion in last 100 edits for Horace Mann. 09:20, 31 January 2006 Daycd (rv irrelevent info that is subjective.) 02:39, 31 January 2006 140.247.156.10 (172.152.11.30, This is your last warning. Vassar is not a good school, not even remotely good.) 17:40, 30 January 2006 Hall Monitor m (Reverted edits by 172.152.11.30 (talk) to last version by 140.247.156.10) 02:14, 30 January 2006 140.247.156.10 (RV from POV....Please do not engage in false edits anymore or you will be banned from wikipedia.) 14:15, 26 January 2006 Daycd (rv nonsense) 10:48, 26 January 2006 207.76.182.20 (RV edit) 12:21, 16 January 2006 Daycd (rv scandal that is not pertintent to this artcile. Could someone please set up a personal web site for this stuff as it is not encyclopedic.) 19:55, 14 January 2006 Daycd (This page is not suitable for football results) 19:52, 14 January 2006 Daycd (sorry but this is not current ervents page. What specifically was revised in the constitution? Why is it woth mentioning?) 14:52, 9 January 2006 Daycd (Who is Will Ruben???) 14:47, 9 January 2006 Daycd (remove vague statement)

Reversion in last 100 edits for Dalton. 23:45, 29 January 2006 Daycd (nice job on the second place finish but i don't think this is a good precedent for this page.) 13:45, 19 January 2006 Daycd (who is Dawn Mark? why are they notable?) 10:57, 13 January 2006 Daycd (remove petty gossip that is not relevent to the big picture of Dalton School. EVERY school has kids that gets into trouble, so what?) 18:38, 12 January 2006 Daycd (rv edits from Horace Mann. This is not encylopedic it is gossip. Parade magazine or such would be a good place. Or start your own web site at HM. This event has no significance to the overall history) 12:03, 12 January 2006 D C McJonathan (rv edits by Excelerate to last version by 67.83.47.44) 20:56, 10 January 2006 Sophitus (rv to last version by Sophitus) 14:21, 4 January 2006 Canderson7 m (rvv to last version by Daycd) 15:49, 1 January 2006 Daycd (wikipedia is not a gossip colomn) 28 December 2005 Amejr999 (removed original research) 25 December 2005 D C McJonathan (rv ongoing vandalism)

In the case of Horace Mann one of the computers is used for positive and negative editing. There has even been dialog with the students involved on the user talk page of 207.76.182.20 (talk • contribs). Maybe this is a worst case scenario, but imagine this type of editing for every school in the US let alone the world. David D. (Talk) 17:30, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

1. 99% of the schools is not notable enough to be in Wikipedia. 2. There is no way to stop poeple from writing about their schools. So the only way out is to let them write. Actualy who cares whether all the information about school in some willage in the middle of nowhere is correct. No one except former students is going to read it anyway. The possible solution is to create wikischools, somethink similar to wikibooks or wictionary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jan.Smolik (talk • contribs)

There is no consensus on notability for school articles. I don't know where your 99% figure comes from but I would be interested to see the same analysis performed to establish the notability quotient of professional wrestlers, episodes of Sex and the City, Star Wars weaponry, or incremental releases of Mac OS X. I support school articles not because I'm a big fan of high schools, but because I'm a big fan of Wikipedia's potential. The saga of a possible "worst case scenario" of vandalism shown above seems pretty tame compared to what a lot of articles see. I probably have to revert vandalism on Harper Lee twice a week or more. And when we discuss the burden of maintaining school articles it's disingenuous to use the present number of editors and the maximum potential number of articles. Let me just go ahead and suggest that if there's a real problem we address it with a policy recommendation and if there's not, let's stop talking about this. --Dystopos 19:12, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By definition, the only way a school will GET an article in the first place is if a Wikipedian is interested in writing it, so the maintenance problem is moot. Cynical 19:43, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Below is a reprint of my original calculation. Maintenance is indeed an issue per WP:Verifiability. Schools open and close. Some change location and get renamed. Schools merge with other schools. Buildings burn down. My calculations assume that fact checking occurs only once in two years, which is a very lenient standard. Counter vandalism and disambiguation are additional concerns not covered by my manpower estimate. To illustrate how severe the disambiguation problem would become, start counting the identically named schools here [6] and here [7]. Durova 21:01, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  - "There are approximately 6 billion human beings on earth. Conservatively, estimate that 1 billion of those are of primary or secondary school age. Again conservatively, estimate that only half of those actually attend school. If every school has 1000 students, then that presents 500,000 separate article candidates for the schools category alone. This number is equal to 60% of the total current English language articles and nearly seven times the entire Spanish language Wikipedia. In order to keep such a group updated it would take 685 editors each verifying and editing one article every day without holiday for two years. Durova 08:29, 16 November 2005 (UTC)"[reply]
    - Your logic is as flawed as last time, by doing irrelevant calculations. Nobody is requiring anybody to make all those articles. The question is do we keep the ones that somebody has already taken the time to make. Deleting thousands of school articles already made (which is what you're seeking) won't free up editors time for other things. It would just drive off editors, who wouldn't then edit other areas of Wikipedia. We don't currently have enough editors to maintain population figures in ever town on Earth (outside RAMBOT territory), yet every town may have an article when somebody wishes to make it. There is a problem when a few editors make masses of substubs, that are unlikely to be maintained. But, outside that specific issue (not limited to schools), growing the number of school articles *with* the number of school editors poses no maitenance problem. Also, proper school articles don't actually require much maintenance. We go years without updated census data for towns, so we can surely go yeras without attendance for a school being updated. Such figures are there only to give a general idea of size, and not for the purpose of giving up-to-date stats. The only reason for providing exact attendance numbers, is an exact figure for an specific time is its easier to verify. The fact information, such as attendance is made public more frequently than it is for town population figures, doesn't mean we have to update the information as quickly. We know Perth, Towner County, North Dakota had a population of 13 in the year 2000. We're perfectly content to let that number be six years old. Now, even if Perth provided an annual figure on a web site (which it doesn't), that does not mean we would have to update the page yearly. Your entire logic is binary. You think either we immediately have up-to-date info on all schools, or delete almost all. That's a false choice. --Rob 21:57, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's better to advocate one's own perspective than to characterize an opposing view. People rarely do justice to opinions they disagree with. Your post is no exception. Point by point:

The comparison to geography articles is a false analogy. As other editors explained months ago, bots can maintain geography articles. School articles require human attention.
Since this is proposed as policy and not guideline, the actual issue is how to handle all the articles that would result. My calculations estmate the eventual scope of this proposal.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this dialogue has been its unwillingness to conduct long range planning. When associations contemplate policy changes they normally welcome estimates of the five or ten year impact. These estimates help to compare aspirations against resources.
This dialogue has taken a different direction. In my experience, when an organization bases its decisions on unmodified idealism and when the group disparages the individuals who attempt to discuss the organization's capacity and limitations, trouble is ahead.
What I would prefer at this point is a separate Wiki project for schools. The scope of the current proposed policy makes that option worthy of serious discussion. When I check a fact about George Washington I don't want to sift through a disambiguation page filled with hundreds of elementary schools.
My decision is a personal boycott on schools editing. When an organization implements policy changes without adequate planning, the people responsible for the flawed policy usually abandon the project as the negative consequences manifest. Reluctant participants who try to make the project work become overburdened. It is better to voice one's objections at the decision making stage and then stay as far from the problem area as possible. The conduct of the dominant group on this topic reinforces my decision. I don't take kindly to gross mischaracterizations of my statements and motives.

Having said that, I do hope the editors here prove me wrong about my concerns. It seems unlikely that the project will sway from its current direction. Regards, Durova 07:54, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

RAMBOT is an American thing, and has nothing to do with most places on Earth (e.g. where 95% of people live). For instance India and China have a rather large number of places (obviously), and they're not input by bot. Such human-made articles are welcome. However, if somebody, in one day, made 100 one-line substubs on Indian villages, such articles would probably languish, unimproved just like any substub. We don't use a bot for Canadian places and I'm happy with that, just as I'm happy we don't use a bot for schools. Bots don't make truly encyclopedic articles, only humans do.
You keep implying somebody proposed immediately going out and making articles for every school on Earth, and updating it regularly; all as a matter of "policy". Nobody said that. There's merely been a proposal, that *if* people individually chose to make them, that they be kept. Again, you confuse a volunteer project with a commercial project. We don't have to maintain articles for every school on Earth, but those who wish may maintain the ones that are made by the same group of people. You keep on putting forward calculations and projections for a non-existant proposal.
Your "personal boycott" is amusing to me. There are 900,000+ articles in Wikipedia. I will never read, let alone edit 99% of them, but I don't call that a "personal boycott". There are many WikiProjects, that I haven't helped out at. I don't visit each one, to tell them I won't do anything in that project. I figure, nobody would care.
As for your suggestion for an alternate wiki. Do feel free to set up your own wiki, with whatever policies you wish. You can then ensure all the articles in it, are ones you support. Call it the "no school wiki". I won't be joining it, but I wish you the best of luck with your proposed fork-wiki. --Rob 09:11, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good point about avoiding mischaracterization of opposing viewpoints. Good advice for us all.

As has been pointed out, the only way that every possible school article will appear in Wikipedia is if someone makes the effort to add them. So the number of school articles is more directly limited by the interest of our editors than by the number of physical schools. It is therefore logical that every school article will have someone with some degree of interest around to maintain it. There will be a large number of exceptions as people lose interest, but this is certainly no more problematic than in any other area of Wikipedia.

Secondly, I don't think the proposal is about how to handle the maintenance burden. Maintaining articles falls under the broader scope of "the encyclopedia anyone can edit". It is Wikipedia policy that particular articles are not the "responsibility" of particular editors, but are the responsibility of the project as a whole. The policy we are discussing here is how to help editors of school articles fulfill the mission of Wikipedia with guidelines that are tailored to the particulars of this subject. The principal issue currently at hand is whether routinely discouraging and/or deleting school articles is more helpful or harmful to that mission than the alternative of allowing stubs to be created and to evolve into articles.

A separate Wiki for schools implies that schools are a separate concern from the category of information we document here. For example, I support the Star Wars wiki because it documents a discrete "universe" which only intersects reality through the mental "portal" of Star Wars. The films themselves, the persons and technology that made them possible, etc. are fully within OUR world and should be documented here. The capabilities of a particular fictional vehicle or the fictional racial make-up of a fictional character are only encyclopedic within that context. Schools don't submit so easily to that distinction.

George Washington is not a disambiguation page, and there is no reason for it to be.

I respect your decision to stay away from these articles and I look forward to the challenge of demonstrating that your fears are unfounded. --Dystopos 15:31, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's a stupid question. Wikipedia will not include every school article unless someone creates those articles - and if someone makes them, that implies they have some interest in the school and in keeping the page up-to-date. Basically, for it to happen, a member, past member, or interested party of every school on earth would be a wikipedia editor - that's millions of editors! So yes, Wikipedia can maintain every school article, easily. ··gracefool |☺ 01:45, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Strange that I return to this after a month, but I thought a guiding principle in education is that the only stupid question is one that doesn't get asked. WP:Civility has something to say about that. It's a false assumption to suppose that every article gets maintained, as discussions surrounding the millionth article have demonstrated. It's also a suspect assumption to suppose that schools are as apt as any other article to receive maintenance. A village of 1000 people retains mostly the same population over 5 years. A school of 1000 people experiences a majority turnover. It is also essential in any policy planning to consider long term consequences. To disavow responsibility for the results of one's actions is irresponsible. This discussion has been overrun by extreme inclusionism and, as I noticed from deletion vote comments over several months, this was not the result of consensus but the result of cooler heads abandoning the subject. Wikipedia's supermajority standard ensures that a dedicated band of inclusionists will prevail. This is one weakness of a project I generally support. Insults and specious arguments only serve to confirm my opinion. Durova 05:21, 3 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What about Sunday Schools

So we are now getting Sunday Schools appearing. For example see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/West Seattle Christian School. And consensus seems to be to keep. Going a little far I thinks. Nfitz 06:19, 31 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, perhaps that example isn't just a Sunday school .... Nfitz 06:32, 31 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This needs to be revised now.

See for example this deletion section:[8]. This is getting bloody ridiculous. JoshuaZ 01:32, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Without concensus, this will continue. The easiest fix would be to improve the school notability criteria. However in this group, that suggestion is dead on arrival. Vegaswikian 01:39, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone discussed a minimal size maybe? The obvious notability is something like at least X number of students or newsworthy for some reason. Quick and easy to apply. I went to a school that had about 10 kids or so per a class and it seems like it would get an entry under these conditions. This is at the same time while we are throwing out the bios of real academics if they dont have enough published papers. groan. JoshuaZ 01:42, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Size has limited meaning. The National Sport School is one of the more notable schools in Canada (going by notable students/alum), and it has only 122 students (a tenth the norm in the area). Also, a lot of the more unique, innovative schools, that are historical "firsts of" (old history, new history making ones) are small. You have to be small to be innovative. Big schools are less able to go off on wild tagents, or radical new learning approaches. --Rob 02:23, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And those will show up on news sources and be newsworthy. But random elementary schools are simply not encyclopedic. JoshuaZ 02:26, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, its in small elementaries, that some of the greatest innovation, and trend-settings occurs, especially in charter schools, or other special-purpose schools. Also, most schools get news coverage (though local). Also, Dixon, which you cited, isn't a random typical school. It's a fairly interesting one, for having a French immersion program (obviously there are a lot of immersion program in Canada, but its still in the minority, and interesting for this fact). --Rob 02:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but many of the keep votes occured even before that came up. And trend-setting early in a trend is really not relevant for other wikipedia purposes. For example, with websites, we only consider a website notable after it becomes popular/well known, not before. And our policies for people are similar. Why should schools be different? JoshuaZ 03:12, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the minimun criteria could be expanded to require entries for Notable alumni, References and noteworthy milestones in History. Articles could be created without these, and truly notable schools would still standout and be accepted as a valid article. Maybe more attention should be paid to the suggeted structure for new articles. How many AfD articles meet the references criteria? Vegaswikian 03:22, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It may also be worth trying some no-content-loss merges, it's my impression that these have at least some degree of success in consolidating pages, if that is what you desire. I think that so long as no material is lost, most people would be okay with it, but there may be stronger opposition to this than I am aware of. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:30, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merges was a good approach at compromise, but few have tooken the time to do any decent merges. The opposition comes when somebody randomly puts a redirect to another page, without doing any research or thought. I've seen people merge to a talk page, merge to a state list, and even suggest merging to a country (bizarre, but true). --Rob 02:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One of my points has been that having links to schools in district or local articles is a cause for may of the delete/merge issues. If district articles were built as a table that included a place to gather facts, many of the AfD issues would simply vanish. Vegaswikian 03:13, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like this solution. JoshuaZ 03:15, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tables are not an especially attractive solution as they are quite complex for new users to edit -- the markup is a bit confusing. Plus they encourage only adding the sort of telephone-book information that I think is what most people don't like about these articles. The unique bits of information that make schools notable are not easy to place in a tabular format. Just having a section header for each school on the district page is the best solution, and this makes it easy to break things out when the sections are substantial enough. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:25, 15 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed new critera.

Ok, I have attempted to make a new version of the notability guidelines for schools after looking at the above discussions. I have stolen liberally from the above. Here it goes:

If a school article is verifiable and meets one or more of the following criteria, it should be kept:

The school has had At least 1500 students for at least 10 years.
The school has at least 3 notable alumni/ae.
The school is old. Note that this a relative measure, a school that is 80 in an area that has only had people for 100 years fits this criterion better than an 80 year old school in London. In general this criterion should be interpreted in an inclusive fashion.
It has one or more interwiki links (that is another version already exists in another language)
The school has one or more famous persons attended immediately prior to embarking on a notable career, as in the case of prep-to-pro athletes.
The school has a paid faculty currently includes, or formerly included, one or more famous persons.
The school in some way, remarkably differs from other schools in its geographical area (defies the summary description given in Education in SOMEPLACE)
The school was/is at any time during its history, the focus of major media attention, due to a notable event, such as a school shooting or other tragedy, criminal indictment of a faculty member, controversial school policies spawning a notable court decision (such that we have an article for the legal case A v. B).
The school has/had team or delegation took first prize in a notable athletic or academic championship, of some kind, during some year, at a national level.
If the above fail, the burden becomes notability with a presumption for merging and deletion.

If it meets none of these criteria, but is still verifiable, it should be merged into the appropriate district (or other higher-level article such as city or education in that city or region, if private), preserving all relevant content, and be redirected.

Comments

Note that this removes the "three lines" criterion and the "PD/GFDL/free pictures" criterion. 1. I could see the numbers changing in 1, and they should in any case be considered guidlines (so a school that had 1200 students for 15 years would also count for example). I could definitely see 1500 being substantially reduced. 2. Note that for alumn the condition is only notable, not famous. Ok, feel free to tear this proposal apart now. JoshuaZ 20:51, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This idea won't work. We're not going to go over the thousands of existing articles, and start deleting them (point #10). Also, much of your wording is far to subjective. Nobody is going to agree on when something "remarkably differs" from other schools. Verifiable real schools, by precedent are kept, much like municipalities, and there's no reason to revisit this. Ideas for improving quality are needed, but this does nothing to accomplish that. You're saying some schools should be deleted regardless of the level of quality of the article content. Also, note that point #10 about deletion, contradicts the last sentence, which calls for merging (not deletion) when criteria isn't satisified. Note the words "preserving all relevant content". How do mesh "preserving all relevant content" with "presumption for deletion". --Rob 21:16, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict with below) Dystopos clarified the poor wording on my part about merger and deletion. And yes, articles should sometimes be deleted regardless of quality (classic example being vanity articles). I agree that some of the wording is subjective. However, most of it is not, and in any event WP:CORP and WP:BIO have strong subjective elements as well. Sometimes the best guidlines has some subjectivity. As for the complaint about 1000s of articles, we don't need to do a systematic review, just let articles come to the deletion review at they may. And if a large number of articles risking deletion is an argument for not changing a criterion then one should never change any criteria for anything, which seems a bit odd. JoshuaZ 21:23, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Rob, this will delete more than half of the school articles out there in wikipedia, I like the idea in general but I think the criteia is a bit too harsh --Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 21:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have any specific conditions that you think should be added or criteria above that should be less strict? JoshuaZ 21:24, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, as far as I can tell this won't delete any article, merely merge and redirect them. And as far as I know, there is no substantial opposition to merges that do not lose content (that is, most of them will not be reverted). There's no real need for this proposal -- if what you want to do is merge the articles, do so. Thoughtful merges are unlikely to be reversed. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:30, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, among other issues, I'd like it that when very minor schoolsd o get put up for deletion, we have a general response of "merge" rather than keep. JoshuaZ 23:46, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really see how that would be useful -- the content can already be effectively merged no matter what people respond at AFD. Just wait till the discussion closes and then carry out the merge. If there's strong oppposition to performing such merges, then we can deal with that, but to my knowledge no such opposition exists. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:57, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yes, but I'm not going to be around for every single school AfD, so I'd rather get a consensus about merging them, and I also strongly dislike merging after an AfD has a consensus of keep. That seems to not be in the spirit of consensus. JoshuaZ 02:57, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that nobody is objecting to the merges, therefore a presumed consensus already exists. Re: your second point, AFD is not oriented around the question of how content should be organized, so I don't think you should be afraid to edit articles that have been kept at AFD. If someone disagrees, they can always undo it. As someone who has always voted "Keep" on schools, I think that people who want to merge article should simply go ahead and do so; haggling over a complex set of standards, on which consensus is very unlikely to occur, is not a useful way to spend time. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:36, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you're worried about opposotion to a merge, and don't wish to act unilaterally, just put a {{mergeto}} tag, and see if anybody objects. If nobody objects, go ahead and merge. If there's major opposition, then pick another one of the many thousands of school articles to do instead (and you can come back to the controversial ones, when you've done the non-controversial ones). --Rob 03:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Groan, I guess part of the issue is that I would prefer this not to be a one man campaign. JoshuaZ 03:48, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the {{mergeto}} tag would get other editors who actually edit, to be involved. In the later part of 2005, a majority of participants said they supported a merge proposal. Almost none of those people who supported the proposal actually helped in any decent merges (they would blindly vote "merge" in AFD, then do nothing). Also, surely, it makes more sense to carry through with the least-contested and simple merge candidates first, and leave controversial ones till later. Even if your proposal got unanimous support here, it wouldn't result in a single extra merger, if nobody takes the time to do any proper ones. --Rob 05:18, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, consider this matter dropped until further notice. I'll start putting on tags and merging the lesss controversial ones and see what happens. JoshuaZ 05:36, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This page should be scrapped

Even primary schools are routinely kept now. This page is totally pointless, so please stop wasting time on it. Osomec 00:55, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. This is shit. Schools are crucially important foci of the communities they serve. Grace Note 05:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. This page contains plenty of useful information of what how to write school articles and serves as a useful archive. It's purpose was to reach some sort of agreement on whether to keep or delete them, and that has in fact succeeded. We see hardly any fighting and tears over school articles any more. It should remain as a record of a long, acrimonious, but ultimately successful discussion. Sjakkalle (Check!) 10:39, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sucess is an overstatement. Vegaswikian 20:29, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is a pile of shit, written from the "delete schools" viewpoint. It should be scrapped, and if it isn't going to be, it needs to be edited to tone down the antischool POV it represents.Grace Note 07:00, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why don't you calm down and actually point out where this (to paraphrase) "anti school POV shit" is in the article? Currently i don't see anything which is saying delete schools. Where is it? David D. (Talk) 08:09, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I did this revert to Grace Note's changes. There should be no substantative changes to the project page without consensus, and as said, this discussion is pretty much dead anyway. No point in stirring it up. --Rob 01:08, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And I reverted you back. I haven't made "substantive changes". I've toned down the rhetoric a bit. People cite this page in AfDs trying to delete schools. So it's not quite dead, is it? Pages such as this and the many other essays on the subject of deletion that litter the project space are backdoor means to create policy and destroy content.Grace Note 07:00, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I can't tell if you have read this talk page or not. Where is the deletion/destroying content part? Adding this sentence: "Alternatively, let's just keep all schools and not waste our time trying to destroy content" seems like a strawman arguement. I challenge you to tell us where in the following sentence it says to delete a school:

"If it meets none of these criteria, but is still verifiable, it should be merged into the appropriate district (or other higher-level article such as city or education in that city or region, if private), preserving all relevant content, and be redirected."

I have no idea how you can describe above as "I don't agree. Any "criteria" for keeping or deleting schools are unacceptable in my view ". Source. You are misrepresenting the discussion on this page as well as the text in the article. Also the content you added to the article was antagonistic to say the least, for example: "Get over it and write some content instead". And you are surprised people reverted that? David D. (Talk) 07:58, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Protected

Alright, I have protected this page at the m:wrong version so that Grace and Rob can work out their differences on this talkpage, instead of playing ping-pong. Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked him on his talkpage to discuss it. I'd appreciate the article's remaining protected until we have come to an agreement on something that suits both of us. Grace Note 07:44, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I shouldn't have re-reverted again (I should have left it to others). If/when its unprotected, I will not re-re-revert. I think any discussion of what the wording should be now, should be done with other editors (e.g. not me). --Rob 08:00, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, no more edit-warring? Is it safe to unprotect. (Closes eyes tightly, clenches teeth together, braces for impact and pushes the unprotect button.) Grace, be aware that ou have already reverted three times, so if someone reverts you again you would be well advised to ... well you know. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:31, 5 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion of notability section

The notability section of this proposal needs to be expanded. To be a useful policy, this should spell out some guidelines for criteria a school should meet in order to be kept. There would be many such criteria, such as one that one a top award for having the top academic performance in its state or province, one that had (for example) 3 or more notable alumni, one that was involved in a school shooting, etc. As a result, we should make our wording clear that our list is not exhaustive. Suggestions for what things we should list? Johntex\^talk 04:00, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely not. If anything the current version is too inclusive. We don't need to expand it. JoshuaZ 04:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The overall proposal may be lengthy, but it doesn't include any criteria for notability. The notability section here is just "some believe this...others believe that..." I think it needs to provide some concrete guidelines in order to be of any use. Johntex\^talk 04:46, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You should go over the past archives, to see how past attempts at this have failed. Basically, the problem is people who propose these types of guidelines, rarely actually make and/or substantially expand any school articles (even those they feel are "notable", unless of course its their school). So, you never have any serious interest. Other criteria guidelines (like most of WP:MUSIC, WP:WEB, etc...) were actually made by people who make articles in the topic area. I realize I'm overgeneralizing, but I think it explains why this page has largely failed. Notice how WP:PJSCH has actual useable (albeit imperfect) information (unlike this page), because its written by people who actually edit school articles (and hence know what makes a good school article). --Rob 05:03, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Time to retire this

I'm marking this as rejected policy. Schools aren't deleted for a variety of reasons differing from person to person (so you don't have the unified standards you tend to see in a guideline or policy), and merges are generally handled in an ad-hoc way. Plus, people are still fighting over this wholly pointless page, and linking to the Arguments page, which should have been deleted ages ago.

I'm going to point WP:SCH to Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools, which, right at the top, includes more useful advice on making a school article not a useless substub than this page ever has or ever will.

If someone would like to make some notability standards for schools (heaven help the poor bastard), feel free to make a new, separate page without the baggage of this one. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think changing the redirect may be a bad idea, as it retroactively changes the meaning/context of somebody's archived comments, such as "Do something per WP:SCH". So, I think WP:SCH should be left pointing here (I would sooner deleted the shortcut, then change its meaning). --Rob 06:29, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I was going to put a dab notice at the top of the school project page, for exactly that reason. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:32, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, ok. As long its clear to the reader, I'm fine with it. --Rob 06:34, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm done fiddling. If you want to change anything or revert, feel free. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:39, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm cool with this being marked as a rejected policy. My concern was that people are linking to it as though it was accepted and the document as it stood was far more content-negative than the community is. Grace Note 03:40, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed wording on notability

Currently, the project page says the following concerning positions in the community concerning notability of schools:

It is tempting for some people to set a bar of notability for schools, such as by age, size or press coverage. However, any such criteria have proven to be controversial. Thus, some people believe the only fitting criterion is how much verifiable, NPOV information can be found on the school. Others believe that schools are inherently "notable" and that Wikipedia should cover each and every one of them since it's not made of paper.

This is a very biased paragraph that focuses too much on the "keep all schools" side of the debate. There should be a balanced view that better shows the range of opinions on this point. I suggest it be changed to the following:

There is currently no agreed-upon threshold of notability for schools. Some people believe that schools are inherently "notable" and that Wikipedia should cover each and every one of them since Wikipedia is not not made of paper. Others point out that Wikipedia is not a phone directory and they argue that, just as Wikipedia does not cover non-notable persons, it should not cover non-notable schools.

This states the situation (no consensus) in one sentence, and then gives one sentence each to two representative viewpoints on opposite sides of the issue. Johntex\^talk 22:51, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the current wording is a bit biased as well, and think that Johntex has offered a good alternative. I think we should also link to Wikipedia:Notability. "Notability" in itself is not a criteria for deletion, as noted by many in the history of this debate, and I think it would help to note that the motive behind this argument in the first place. (It is primarily, I believe, that "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.")

Regardless, I reverted the previous edit not because I'm a "school inclusionist," though I hate labeling myself or others with these kinds of terms, but because the list that read, "each municipality, TV/radio station, Simpsons episode, Pokemon character, restaurant, church, or each Wal-mart," was meaningless. Some of those are considered "notable," while others aren't. A comparison seems to just to further expound on the idea that the "bar for notability" is clouded, which is redundant. The rest of it is just poorly written after being hacked at by so many editors, and noting the "many ways" of "interpreting notability" seems, again, a little pointlessly redundant to me. — Rebelguys2 ^talk 23:04, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't matter if the wording is biased. This is rejected policy, and as such does not (and doesn't have to) reflect the current standards on Wikipedia, either as they are or as they should be. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:59, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just because it's rejected doesn't mean it can't be revived. If it were not open to editing, then it should be protected. Johntex\^talk 03:40, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This project should be revived. Schools are important and should be written about on this site if possible. 03:26, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

This wasn't a project. This was a bunch of people yelling about policy. You want the schools Wikiproject, which is still active. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 19:00, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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