Talk:San Jose Unified School District

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[edit] Question about wikilinks

Wikilinks in school names on this page (generally) lead to biographical articles associated with persons after which the school was named. Should these wikilinks be replaced by wikilinks to articles on the schools themselves (if they exist) or should a new column or icon be added that provides such a school-article linkage (for instance, forgoing a new column, after the name of a school add the character "→" that is marked up to lead to the school article, like →, presented as an example, not a real link to use). Courtland 17:08, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

If the school exists, then it should link to the school article only. The school article will then link to the appropriate bio article. For schools with no articles, there really shouldn't be any link, but leaving the link to the bio is harmless. I think the bio-links are mildly signficant to the school, but trivial at the district level. Also, I would avoid making any signficant changes to this article unless/until its cleaned up, as the the current wiki-markup is almost unmaintainable. --rob 17:26, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

About schools with no articles ... would you agree that a red-link should not be introduced even if the school is mentioned in a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/High_schools/US/Texas (this happened to be the one I had open at this moment ... an example only)? Both this and the prior question are general and not meant to specifically target the current article. The reasons why posted here are a) I passed through here and had the questions and b) posting such questions on a page monitored by an interested person can lead to perspectives not obtained in posting on more general pages where "the usual suspects" comment on most things passing through. Courtland 23:54, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

As a rule of thumb, I wouldn't make a red-link unless I'm certain of the future article name. I notice, for instance Lee High School is a link in the list you mention, but it refers to multiple schools. I think it's hard to predict in advance what the article name will be. Better no link, then the wrong one. When the article is finally created, its a simple matter for somebody to create the appropriate links. Usually, the only way I'm certain of the future article name, is if I know I'm personally going to make it in the near future. If we had some universal naming guidelines, then maybe red-links would work better then they do now. As an example, red-links to towns work great, as their article names are highly predictable/standard. --rob 02:42, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

This is largely a two-pronged issue, one prong being disambiguation and the other "notability".

• In the "missing articles" listing, typically a name (sometimes an ambiguous name, as you've pointed out) appears along with a city and state; the combination of school name an city/state provides access to disambiguation potential ... but what a pain it is to actually work through those is kind of tough to imagine unless you've "slimed" yourself to try it. I've been workin on Abraham Lincoln High School for a while now and after disambiguating the "missing articles" pages for about five states, there's still a plethora to work through (take a look at [1] for the current status).
• The presumption by some (many? I'm not sure) is that if an article exists in another resource it should exist here. I'm not 100% bought into that mindset, and from your answer I'm presuming that you are applying a higher standard of notability than the simple existence of mention of a school in a non-Wikipedia resource. That's quite alright, but I want to make sure I'm coming to the right conclusion before moving on. Am I close to the mark in my interpretation?

Thanks for your continued input. Courtland 03:08, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

• Wow, I hope there's not an even more common school name (maybe Washington High School?). Given the large number of schools, it might be time to consider a standard, where we always qualify North American schools with "(City, State/Province)".
• I'm generally pretty "inclusionist" when it comes to schools, as I generally support having any fully verifiable real active K-12 school (controversially for some). However, I think it makes obvious sense to focus first on the largest and/or most famous high schools first; which produces best results, and avoids a lot of debate. So, anything that can help people pick the schools that would make the best articles, would be nice. One thing, I'm really unclear on, is what is the criterion for inclusion on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/High_schools/US/Texas (is it just any high school in the state?) --rob 03:53, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
  • At the very bottom of each of the state pages appears the reference line "Press staff at facebook.com". According to the website referenced (but not linked — http://www.facebook.com/), "The Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools." Therefore I infer two things: first, the references in the list exist first in the facebook.com institution directory and not necessarily in, for instance, Britannica, and their sources are unknown; second, the choice of listings is driven by the facebook.com business model, which is not something I've looked into. A third inference with a lower likelihood of turning out to be valid might be "if it is in the facebook.com directory, there is are at least two living persons who have attended the institution" - I daren't make that inference any stronger, though ;). Thanks for your help as a sounding board and source of opinion. Courtland 04:06, 6 November 2005 (UTC)