Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bel Air High School

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was keep. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 06:40, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bel Air High School

Doesn't establish notability. --W(t) 14:52, 2005 May 14 (UTC)

• Merge with Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland article. Currently it merely states that it is a school, the name of the principal, and what size it is. And no, padding it out with pictures and details of the after school clubs won't make it notable, just bloated and overlong. Average Earthman 15:03, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• delete, no redirect. Merge the one sentence w/ the place where it is. Dunc|☺ 15:19, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. ✏ OvenFresh2 15:39, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, verifiable and NPOV but perhaps a poor title. There must be other Bel Air High Schools in the world. DoubleBlue (Talk) 15:40, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete.EvilPhoenix
• keep and expand. Disambiguate if any other Bel Air High Schools show up. Kappa 17:15, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, echo Kappa. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 18:00, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep -- and expand. - Longhair | Talk 18:49, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Notability established by words "High School" in name. Oliver Chettle 18:51, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, same reasons as Oliver Chettle. --Unfocused 19:04, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep; article's already being expanded, and it's the oldest high school, amazingly, in the large suburban Washington-Baltimore division of Harford County, Maryland. Samaritan 20:01, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, could be expanded into useful article --Freyr 20:48, May 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Schoolcrufta delenda est. Edeans 21:13, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Instutional Vanity. Gmaxwell 21:26, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Get the original author to encourage their friends to help expand the piece, because I'm guessing he goes to this school Harro5 21:41, May 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Will grow organically. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:50, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep high schools. R Calvete 21:57, 2005 May 14 (UTC)
• Delete. Useless collection of generic facts about an insignificant school. This is not an encyclopedia article. Individual schools are not inherently encyclopedic and there is nothing to distinguish insignificant schools like this one from thousands of nearly identical schools around the world. Gamaliel 22:15, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Useful collection of specific facts about a significant school. This is an encyclopedia article. Individual schools are inherently encyclopedic and there is much to distinguish significant schools like this one from thousands of nearly identical schools around the world. —Teknic^Talk/Mail 23:28, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
  • I'd say "superficially similar" rather than "nearly identical" Kappa 14:33, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• keep high school articles. Brighterorange 23:04, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Doesn't not establish notability. --Centauri 23:58, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge with Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland article. --Carnildo 05:14, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep every school is included in a truly great encyclopaedia User:GRider/Schoolwatch Klonimus 05:47, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep - you have to let the article survive in order to expect it to increase in quality, for goodness sake. -- Natalinasmpf 12:27, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment. It was nominated within 12 hours of creation. --Unfocused 14:18, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. I cannot possibly word it better than Gamaliel did. "Useless collection of generic facts about an insignificant school. This is not an encyclopedia article. Individual schools are not inherently encyclopedic and there is nothing to distinguish insignificant schools like this one from thousands of nearly identical schools around the world." My sentiments exactly. I'm beginning to think we need to launch WikiSchools to stop this angry "all schools are auto-notable!" idealism once and for all. Master Thief Garrett 05:24, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Master Thief Garrett, I don't see any anger in this discussion except in your perception of the comments of others. This is encyclopedic, NPOV, and verifiable, as are all school stubs. They belong here. Wikipedia is not running out of space! In fact, at the end of April, the database was less than 4 terabytes gigabytes, only a few thousand hundreds of dollars worth of disk space. --Unfocused 05:43, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
    • By the way, the 4 terabytes gigabytes is for ALL languages, not just English. --Unfocused 05:47, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
      • Correction: 4 gigabytes, NOT 4 terabytes. (3980 MB = 3.98 GB) --Unfocused 05:59, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
    • Sorry, I was meaning "angry" in a purely symbolic sense. Many users have a viewpoint that boils down to "How *dare* people vote to delete?!? All schools are automatically noteworthy here, WP is not paper; I don't see how anyone can possibly think otherwise!" This view is not necessarily given in as many words, but that's the basic idea of it.

We're not at all concerned about running out of disk space--WP:WWIN openly encourages long, detailed articles, and if we were really Scrooges we wouldn't allow User pages to tie up said bandwidth--but the thing is the ultimate ungainliness of it.

OK, my mother came from Cabri, pop. ~500 and declining (the old people slowly die off, the children quickly move to Swift Current, and no new families move in). It is a town so obscure it doesn't even have an article of its own yet (if ever). Now would anyone from Cabri come here and search for the their one-and-only school (with a roll of ~50) and actually *expect* it to be here? Of course not, because they know full well they're insignificant to most of the world and are even missing on many maps. But, according to the Schoolwatch ideal, should that school be here? Oh yes, of course, it's instantly notable.

Now that is the problem. As I expressed it on my User page, "the Vfd ideal ... is, that people vote for an article to be kept because it is *actually* valid, NOT merely because it is a school." The schoolwatch program tells me nothing of a realistic minimum of (non)notability, and in the end we could end up with 500,000+ school pages that will never get hits!

Now THAT is my concern, that the Schoolwatch program has "legitimised" a precendent for the addition of countless useless pages.

Please understand this, I hold academic institutions of all forms in high regard (except for the Kohanga, which result in children having a great understanding of Maori but no working knowledge of the English language whatsoever, but I digress), but very, very, VERY few of them are noteworthy to the outside world. And, therefore, THIS one certainly isn't. Master Thief Garrett 07:19, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

• Personally I would love wikipedia to have a decent article on that school in Cabri, sorry about that. As to numbers, there isn't a huge flood of school articles coming in, and the nominations and votes on school "notability" leave no room for compromise on the validity of the article. Let's make a {{cleanup-schools}} tag to get the articles up to a certain minimum quality, and discourage people from dropping in substubs which others have to fix up. Kappa 07:38, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

• Merge with Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland and delete - Skysmith 08:33, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep--AYArktos 08:46, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep and continue to improve. High schools should not have to prove notability.
• Delete. Useless collection of trivia. If delete falis, merge with Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland. Jayjg ^(talk) 19:21, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Schools are inherantly notable -- delete them when we delete articles on individual tv episodes! --Zantastik 19:38, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
• Comment I've added a good deal of verifiable data to the article. The school dates back to 1811 and John Wilkes Booth once attended there, if some people are looking for notability. I'll let someone else calculate the BEEFSTEW if they want to. --BaronLarf 20:09, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Neutrality^talk 22:57, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Wikipedia would not be improved by the deletion of this article. ~leif ☺ _(talk) 01:37, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete unless wikipedia wants a boring, pointless article for every average school in every country. CDThieme
• Keep. Good start. DS1953 04:16, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, nn. Radiant_* 13:16, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, per BaronLarf's good work. -- BD2412 ^thimkact 15:21, 2005 May 17 (UTC)
• Keep. Move to include location in name - David Gerard 22:25, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Lets keep things in perspective. Is this article less noteworthy, or less encyclopedic, than, say for example, some random article in category:Streetcar Builders or Category:Rolling stock manufacturers? Why VfD a school, and not, for example, St. Louis Car Co.? linas 00:51, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
• LOL Keep. Will Smith may have attended this high school. —RaD Man (talk) 08:12, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep as per Samaritan. —Markaci 2005-05-21 T 17:33 Z
• Comment This has been on VfD for more than 2 weeks; is anything going to be done here? I see 27 keeps, 10 deletes and a couple merge votes. Doesn't seem like a consensus to delete to me. --BaronLarf 11:27, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment Somebody will close it sooner or later, but I'd prefer it were someone who didn't participate in the discussion. Meanwhile, assuming your count is reasonably correct, I'm removing the VfD notice from the article as the discussion period is long over and it's an obvious keep. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:10, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.