Wikipedia:Schools3

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You may be looking for Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools (WP:SCH), Wikipedia:School and university projects or Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one day (WP:NFT). The previous policy proposals are at Wikipedia:Schools/Defunct and Wikipedia:Schools

The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy". A proposal's acceptance or rejection is not determined simply by counting votes.

Shortcut: WP:SCHOOLS3

Notability and inclusion guidelines

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This is a work in progress. Editors are encouraged to improve it and discuss ideas on the talk page.

Schools are frequently important to their communities, and are often the subject of the sort of non-trivial published works that are needed to complete an article. Wikipedia articles about schools should show that there is sufficient coverage of that school to allow for the creation of a complete article.

A school may be best handled in a separate article if it is the principal subject of multiple reliable independent ¹ non-trivial ^{2 3} published works. If it is not, then it is likely sufficient information to expand the article does not yet exist, and any verifiable information might best be merged and redirected to an article about the locality or school district in which the school resides.

A school may meet the criterion of being the principal subject of multiple reliable independent non-trivial published works in several ways: ⁴

1. The school has been the focus of multiple non-trivial ³ published works whose source is independent of the school itself. This includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books ⁵, magazine articles, television documentaries, and non-routine reports by school inspection agencies and reports by consumer watchdog organizations. ²
2. The school has verifiably gained national recognition in an area such as curriculum (academics in U.S.), architecture, athletics, or extracurricular activities, or for its history or its program of instruction. For example, the school has won a science competition at the national level, or its athletic teams hold a nationwide record.
3. The school has verifiably gained regional (eg. statewide or provincial) recognition in at least two of the areas mentioned in criterion #2.

Articles about schools that do not meet the above criteria may be unexpandable save for demographic data. Such articles may be merged into an article about their parent community. However, this is not an excuse to turn community articles into directory listings. See Wikipedia:Places of local interest for more suggestions for dealing with such articles. In general, even when a merger is non-optimal, it is preferable to make redirects out of small stubs and not delete the history, rather than to delete the articles.

In addition, Wikipedia is neither a directory nor a phonebook. School articles (or the articles they are merged to) should not list upcoming events, phone numbers, schedules, etc.

[edit] Notes

• Note 1: Self-promotion is not the route to having an encyclopaedia article. The published works must be someone else writing about the school. (See Wikipedia:Autobiography for the verifiability and neutrality problems that affect material where the subject of the article itself is the source of the material.) The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the subject itself have actually considered the school notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works that focus upon it.
  • Any work (such as a school newspaper or an alumni journal) published by the school itself or by its staff, students, or faculty is not an independent source. While these works may be used, with appropriate care for verifiability and neutrality, to expand the article, they may not be considered an indicator of notability.
• Note 2: Non-triviality is partially a measure of the depth of content of a published work, and how far removed that content is from a simple directory entry or a mention in passing that does not discuss the subject in detail. However, in order to be non-trivial it must have some non-routine element. So anything that occurs for all schools such as a standard government report is by definition trivial.
• Note 3: "Trivial" can have several meanings in this context:
  • A source that merely mentions the name of the school in passing is trivial. (Eg. "Bob Smith, a student at Example Middle School, won the local poetry contest." — This might indicate notability for Bob Smith, but the school is only mentioned in passing, giving no basis for expanding the school's article.) In other words, if the school is not the primary focus of the work, that work is probably not a non-trivial source.
  • Directories of schools that offer nothing more than demographic data, or lists of staff and alumni that offer no content beyond names and graduation dates, are trivial. While the information they contain might prove useful to the article, and they can be used as a source for such information, they do not offer sufficient information to expand the article beyond a stub.
  • A routine source, such as a typical local news story about an athletic match between two schools or a human-interest filler piece about a teacher or student at the school. (Note that local news is not always a trivial source; coverage which is not routine in nature, eg. an in-depth story about the school's history or a story about a team taking the national championship, is not trivial.)
  • Standard government reports made on all or most schools, such as Ofsted reports.² These fall into the category of "routine sources" since they occur for the vast majority of schools.
  • Other works which would not meet Wikipedia's reliable source criterion.
• Note 4: Tertiary educational institutions which are distinctly for-profit should also be examined with Wikipedia:Notability (companies and corporations).
• Note 5: Some examples: Rift Valley Academy and The King's School, Worcester have been the subjects of books. Maywood Avenue School has been the subject of several full-length newspaper articles.