Talk:Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board

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Proposed deletion? Non-notable? No way! This has got to be kept, along with all other School Boards. PKT 20:35, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Good job

I like what you have done with this. I think that these school boards aren't very notable by themselves, but if you flesh them out and list the schools which they administer, that helps a lot. --Brianyoumans 13:24, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks to PKT for adding to the page, and shame on Brianyoumans for trying to delete a page for a community that they've obviously got no information on. This school board is a publicly funded entity that serves a community of over 200,000 people. It is regularly mentioned in newspapers and other media. Why the vendetta against Windsor? The smaller the community, the longer it's going to take to flesh out stubs. That's just the nature of things.

• I'm afraid I'm not going to apologize here; fundamentally, school boards are just not that notable - they are all pretty much the same. In an encylopedia with global coverage, what is unique about this school board that someone not from Windsor would consider interesting? Frankly, very little. Schools I consider a bit more notable - many people pass through a high school in the course of its history.
• As to a "vendetta against Windsor", I AM in fact conducting a campaign against Windsor articles, but only because I happened across some Windsor-related articles that I considered non-notable, discovered that there was a whole category for Windsor, and then found a bunch more that I thought should be trimmed. 75% of the articles are just fine, and I'm glad that folks in Windsor have written such good articles on their city; however, I think it sets a bad precedent to have, for instance, articles on non-notable local churches, articles on fairly generic hotels, and articles on the university's non-notable student newspaper. Some of these articles have been improved and the prod has been removed; some have been taken to AFD, and are passing quite easily - I don't think my judgement on these articles differs greatly from that of the general Wikipedia community. --Brianyoumans 23:15, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

• I didn't ask for an apology.
• I'm not saying that every hotel in Windsor is notable. I see that in your other deletions you repeatedly raise the Radisson and Hilton pages as examples. Fine, a hotel is a hotel and those pages aren't useful to Wikipedia. In fact I see you voting to delete schools, churches and anything like a list. Simply because an article is a stub doesn't mean that there's nothing of note to be added. I seriously doubt you have much authority on Windsor but for some reason you've decided that Windsor should have a team of wikipedians on hand to justify the existence of any pages related to the city. I know there are weeks that I'm on every day then weeks where I'm not here. If you put up a bunch of pages and nobody comes to check on them for a week then the pages get deleted - useful or not. Who does that serve? If you're looking for pages to delete then look for pages around something or somewhere that you know.
• Spending your time deleting pages from authors who've only written a couple articles is just going to scare occasional contributors off the site. That hurts Wikipedia as a whole. Why not do some research or editing to improve things instead of just deleting?

Rob Russell 15:59, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

• • I certainly hope I haven't discouraged anyone from contributing; that is not my goal. I do in fact improve articles myself fairly frequently. For instance, I spent a good long time rewriting an article on High Ozone Shock Treatment for mold remediation because the way it was written, it was an ad for a dubious technology. (The actual rewrite is under an IP address, but that is because my session expired while revising it.) I'm afraid I would turn the question around - why put up an article about something if you can't find anything notable to say about it? And why encourage people to add articles about non-notable subjects? Also, just because an article gets deleted doesn't mean someone can't recreate it - it just means they should write a better article the second time around, or it will meet the same fate.

• • Partly, this discussion is about what Wikipedia should be - an encyclopedia, or a random collection of information about everything. If you read WP:NOT and follow AFD discussions, you will find that at the moment, the general view is that it should be an encyclopedia. Brianyoumans 05:05, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

• • • I don't question the value of your contributions. I do think it's necessary to remove non-encyclopedic content to avoid Wikipedia being a dumping ground for the collection of all human knowledge. I take issue with your emphasis on deletion instead of taking the time to become involved in the material you find objectionable in Windsor. These pages that have some boring content can be built up or merged. It takes a long time for a new author to create even a trivial page. Coming back to find that effort discarded is more likely to tell that new user they are not welcome and neither is their subject matter. With the number of editors that contribute to Windsor, it takes time for these pages to grow to the quality level that you'd find on more popular topics. I'm sure this happened long ago for places like San Francisco or Detroit.

• • • Pages that look much more useful but are in fact vanity pages are far more harmful to Wikipedia, but your method will not find them because you don't know enough about the matter you're reading. If you saw a fleshed out vanity page about some Windsor person or band placed by a PR firm, you can't tell it's a vanity page and would put it in the "well-written" group. The page for some church or school that's been part of the community for 50 years could basically be stub content but wouldn't pass your test. Windsor has many of these vanity pages, go find them and I'll support you on AfD. Good luck though because you'll find more references to them in Google than you will for institutions that actually are part of the community and do have history. Rob Russell 14:57, 1 November 2006 (UTC)