User talk:Necrothesp/Secondary schools

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Hi Necrothesp, I'm rather new and I have been looking at AfD's (although commenting on very few) and have read with interest your and Noroton's pages on the inherent notability of high schools. I really have little passion about the topic although it would be nice to have a consensus reached as there is a lot of sound and fury being expended over the subject. As 'WP is not paper' I probably would come down on the inclusionist side, but I have a question. Noroton says on his rationale page, 'High schools are inherently notable IMHO, and no harm would be done if every high school in the nation had a Wikipedia article' (emphasis mine), and while you do not specify locales I wonder if you limit this blanket notability to US or Western culture schools. I have spent several years in Nepal, and lesser amounts of time in other developing countries and if anything the arguments re: the importance of these schools to the students and indeed the countries themselves is as great or greater than it is in Western/US schools. Truly, I have no axe to grind, I'm just interested in your thoughts. Thnx--killing sparrows 07:27, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

No, I do not consider US/western schools (I'm English myself, incidentally) to be inherently more notable than schools elsewhere. Wikipedia is divided by the language in which it is written, not by country: just because this is English Wikipedia is no reason to discriminate against schools in non-English-speaking countries. Obviously, schools in English-speaking countries are more likely to be written about, given that a majority of people who write here are native English speakers, but if someone wants to write about a school in another country I would support the retention of that article too (and in fact have done in the past, when articles on some African and Belgian schools were nominated for deletion). In a debate I was involved in some time ago, someone even suggested that we should not have articles on all universities in China, as they were not particularly interesting to most readers of English Wikipedia and (the old argument) were difficult to source. I emphatically oppose statements like that - if the existence of the institution can be verified then an article, if only a stub, can and should be written about it. -- Necrothesp 13:59, 27 March 2007 (UTC)