Talk:Cademuir International School

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[edit] Hoax?

I think this might be a hoax, Google reveals nothing as far as the first few results go and nothing about it closing is on its official page. --WikiSlasher 10:14, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

The article has been restubbed with the removal of the unsourced material. Yamaguchi先生 21:31, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Genuine

This information is 100 percent genuine, as you can now see from the sources I have added. If you consider that it is insufficiently referenced, I would be glad to furnish you with more references, however please do not delete this as that amounts to vandalism and censorship. It is one of the main benefits of Wikipedia that people can openly and freely make things public as long as they are verifiably true, and it is greatly offensive to the victims of these crimes that you should choose to aide and abet them by helping to keep this information out of the public domain. a little respect is called for here. As I say, if you require further evidence, or a change in tone, please say as much but do not needlessly vandalise my contribution.

As you can clearly see, I have provided a great deal of evidence here. If you know a way to attach the articles as links instead, please tell me how to do that. However please do not remove the information here just like that, as that would amount to vandalism. this information is in the public interest so please can we compromise here, any change of tone or more references being added is not problem to me but please do not be so disrespetful to just delete it all. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TomPrescott (talk • contribs) 19:16, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Tom, there are serious problems with what you are trying to introduce here. You can't editorialise and your negative information needs to be balanced and properly referenced with reliable sources per verifiability and reliable sources. Removing this information is not vandalism. Sarah Ewart (Talk) 17:02, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Requests for comment

To Guinnog and TomPrescott: You might want to consider RfC, since with only two people this is not gonna go anywhere. I'd help but I have other things in life :) --WikiSlasher 11:55, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Lol I didn't see this note before, WikiSlasher ;-) anyway, I tried to make a submission to RfC in the past (some months ago), but it got archived by a bot without having a response. RfC is just ineffective... --Lazer erazer (talk) 16:57, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major edit

I'm going to do a major rewrite of the whole article so please do not interfere now, once I finished, I will replace the original. Feel free to contribute right here or take a look at the scrap page in my sandbox. Later, I'm going to add some votes here to ask you whether or not to apply facts (or hoaxes?) to this text to keep it from stubbing...Lazer erazer 14:17, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Look forward to it. --Guinnog 14:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
I just added the school template which I thought to be semi-final. More to come Lazer erazer 17:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
In the edit notes you made you said "For over 15 years Cademuir has been the secret best school for gifted children, especially ADS, ADHS, Dyslexia and Asperger's Syndrome." This makes it sound like those disorders are gifts. --WikiSlasher 08:16, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I've read somewhere (I'll get the source!) that most german students have an IQ far higher than 130 but have disabilities in psychical social behaviour. It said that school is designed to promote students in areas where they feel confident while supporting them in areas where they show less confidence. --Lazer erazer 09:22, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
But should it not read "...best school for gifted children, especially those with ADS, ADHS..." --WikiSlasher 10:25, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
difficult to explain, the intention of this one: Disabilities in this case mean that those children would have difficulties on some (public) schools (f.e. ADHS making them hyperactive so teachers become annoyed) - but by no means it means that they are not intelligent.
Didn't say they were, in fact from that they must be intelligent because they are gifted. I don't mean to give the impression that they're not intelligent but ADHS doesn't make them more gifted, although it doesn't make them less gifted either. Anyway I think we agree and the phrase has been removed, it was a minor grammatical problem I was havng an issue with. Cheers, --WikiSlasher 10:34, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh, thank you for telling me this, now I spotted the mistake as well, just never noticed it was there... I'm still heavilly copying and pasting sources, erasing and rewriting paragraphs and stacking them into the outline I have made on my scrap page. --Lazer erazer 11:18, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vote for phrases and approval of facts/disapproval of hoaxes

Usage about how to get these icons ;)

[edit]  

"Due to serious and prolonged fraudulent financial mismanagment, the school has now ... been forced to close recently."

  • Keep - I've heard of parents that have never been warned about the financial problems Cademuir already had since 2002. Government reports prove those problems. --Lazer

[edit]  

"...the school has now to the relief of many concerned, been forced to close recently."

  • Keep - Parents had been asked lately to pay their fees in advance to help the continuance of the school whereas the School was already about to close --Lazer

[edit]  

"This is a time for much celebration, as although nothing can take away the damage inflicted on many of their victims, whose lives have been permanantly affected by their crimes, the Mulvey family are, hopefully, at last now prevented from harming any more young children, and that is something we can all be grateful for."

  • Oppose - non-neutral tone; also I never heard of any psychical damage to children. --Lazer
  • Info:Mr Mulvay phoned us asking to participate on a new school he is about to found. --Lazer
  • Suggestion: "More and more students and teachers left school and Cademuir slipped into a big financial problem. The low reputation towards most advertising organizations could not bring enough new students when the graduates left. With only 34 students left and less than 30 teachers, the economical situation was catastrophic until Mulvay closed down the school on 22 July."


[edit]  

"The school was created with the purpose of exploiting already vulnerable children in order to profit financially."

  • Oppose - The school has high-skilled and famous graduates from the past, we cannot say that it was a bad school. Actually it was really the best school in the first 5 years, but never created to provit financially. --Lazer

[edit]  

"Children were appaulingly mistreated, ..."


  • Oppose - references? --Lazer

Helen Mulvey bit my nose and Mrs. slapped my face

[edit]  

"every HMI report highlighted concerns about student welfare"

  • Comment - There are several reports critizising things like fire alert, electrical security or lack of CCTV against robbery from inside and outside, but many of these things have been fixed during the years. These reports do not critizise any treatments of students. Yet their job is still to look after the students. --Lazer

[edit]  

"The mistreatment taking place consisted of numerous instances of psychological and physical abuse, leaving a string of dissaffected former pupils, the school having one of the highest turnover rates of any schools in the country, as pupils realised the nature of their enviroment. some examples of abuse include, but are in no way limited to, physical assault by staff members, sexual student teacher relations, extreme psychological abuse over long periods of time, arbitrary summary punishments, and the covering up and even encouragment of numerous instances of psychological, physical and sexual abuse between pupils."

  • Strongly oppose - references? In general I would also never include such information into the Wikipedia article. --Lazer

Comment Regardless of the outcome of this "vote", any information added to this article will have to satisfy both WP:V and WP:BLP. The correct spelling of the Head's name is Robert Mulvey by the way. All he best, --Guinnog 21:23, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

  • I have fixed it this morning and forgot to put the change onto the main page. That has now been done with all the other changes (give me time to check your help pages now ;) Please also give me time over-editing the article to confirm the verifiability of all the information I added. A few sources I might find tomorrow but it is already late ... --Lazer erazer 22:00, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
    • If and when you find sources, would be the best time to add the info. Please refer also to our policy on original research --Guinnog 22:10, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
      • okay then sorry for the trouble I caused... I tried to write detailled information about the school. And it should not be kept as a secret that I have been student there. Maybe I can find some other students who can add information or even agree or disagree to these phrases (some students who attended it for a longer time) - please do me a favour and remove the inuse again because i have to go quickly; good night! --Lazer erazer 22:17, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
You didn't cause any trouble, and I appreciate your trouble in trying to make the article better. But we need to make sure that anything we publish has been previously published in a reputable journal or website. If you read the policies I mentioned it should make things clear I hope. All the best, --Guinnog 22:24, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
[caught in edit conflict with guinnog] This is a common problem on wikipedia. Many people know a lot about some places and wish to add their perspective. The problem is that if such information cannot be confirmed it is not appropriate for an article. This brings up the dilema that these articles do not present the truth, but the verifiable truth. Invariably this needs to come from independent sources such as published books, newspapers and government documents. If you can document your claims then they will be welcomed here. Obviously this can be frustrating if you know something to be true but cannot find verification that will stand up to the standards expected in an encyclopedia. If you think about it, however, it is clear that this level of scrutiny is necessary otherwise there would be too many half truths here. David D. (Talk) 22:28, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References

lazerserver.la.ohost.de/nmp.php?id=214d7dcc553cde6a7ece2c5866bcec10 is on the spam blacklist, are you really sure it can count as a reliable source? --WikiSlasher 10:48, 21 October 2006 (UTC) Well I can't find it on the list but nonetheless I got the spamblock page when I tried to fix the link --WikiSlasher 10:52, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

This certain link has been used here because I thought to add information and sources later and put myself some annotations. Writing them all down would damage the blind text I used in my 2nd release. If it is forbidden to post raw links to ohost/funpic/etc. here, I would not have problems to use some of my vservers or DynDNS servers, even domains or subdomains I maintain to have them 303 redirect to there. In case it is absolutely forbidden to link to that host, I can also put some of my environments onto different servers or even mirror them. The only thing is that that traffic might cost.
"lazerserver" is a server solution maintained by myself and I am responsible for the websites. The provided link is a 2-years-old fast storage system (a bit wikipedia-like) that saves and hashes content to put annotations for usage in descriptive pages in forums. With those scripts I learned handling the PHP programming language. This single link is definately reliable because a hash can probably not be overwritten and so it serves for a history logging.
Additionally, can I use a subpage in my userspace for preparing or collecting information (I never doubt Wikipedia is far better than MSWord or anything else!), then publish it somewhere and then cite myself from that sources? I would consider writing another report of which a Wikipedia article might be built of; carefully watching out for NPOV issues. Is there anything for or against it?
Oh, and I never intended to make it appear on the main article. ;-) The actual entry for the spam link might look like this: /http\:\/\/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)\.((?:[a-zA-Z0-9\-]{1,2}.){0,1})(ohost\.de|funpic\.de)/i --> http://\\1.\\2\\3
--Lazer erazer 15:30, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] fvcademuir

In own research I found a source for the fvcademuir (Förderverein der Cademuir International School), but on archive.org only... are sources that are no longer existing on net allowed sources? (will these archive links eventually be deleted in future?) --Lazer erazer 16:46, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Certainly, Wikipedia:Citing sources#What to do when a reference link "goes dead" --WikiSlasher 11:15, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Basic School data from educational statistics

I have found some basic school data collected from roughly 15 publications concerning School Census ;-) source - how can we include this into the main article? --Lazer erazer 03:49, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Local Authority     Dumfries & Galloway
Seed Code(?)        5680239
School Name         Cademuir International School
School Funding Type Independent
Address 1           Crawfordton House
Address 2           Moniaive
Post code 1         DG3
Post Code 2         4HG
Phone               01848 200212
Fax                 01848 200336
E-mail              cademuir1@aol.com
Web address         www.cademuir.com
School type         Pre school, Primary & Secondary 

Secondary Pupil rolls:

        Sep 2005  Sep 2004  Sep 2003  Sep 2002
 Total    34        43        55        50
  S1                 5
  S3                 9        10         9
  S4       6                  11        11
  S5      15         9        14        18
  S6       5        12        14         7

Secondary Teacher numbers (FTE)

  Sep 2005      13.0
  Sep 2004      14.3
  Sep 2003      14.8
  Sep 2002

Location            Remote Rural
Denomination        Non-denominational

[edit] Additional totally unexhausted online sources concerning Cademuir

I thought about crawling once more through Google™ to find some more sources for this article. Successfully! There's not really much to prove with the following sources, but morely additional information that can be included to the main article... Have fun --Lazer erazer 17:32, 4 March 2007 (UTC) (For convenience I included a summary for each link)

Interviewing a female student about the concept of Cademuir (that's what we're missing!)

There are far more HMIE-reports during the past years. The reverted editor probably did only see one at that time. It would be intersting to mention the "improvements in all sectors over the past", yet we cited only one so far. They're worth being included

This reference is containing current and informative community reports from involved parents and students in Cademuir (and other schools). The NPOV may be disputed in some cases, but some people even signed with their real names.

Note: Do not collect any mentioned emails/names/addresses/phones/mobiles for any spam/commercial-related purposes!

Signed as Opfer (Victim) a former friend of mine reported some interesting facts about the school. Also other students and parents joined the "debate".

[edit] Why is this not verifiable?

I was busy previously but I feel that I should have responded to this point last year, and now have time to do so.

The critiscisms here of my tone are quite valid, my original submissions were highly emotive and I appologise for that. However you repeatedly claim that the references are unverifiable. However I feel that articles in two national newspapers constitute "Verifiability". You say:

"My issue with the reference (once I had tracked it down; you could have made it easier by giving me a url) is that it is present on a paid-for site."

Wikipedia says:

""Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed.""

It does not say that only online sources are valid. There are other sources for these articles, you know. In fact, "...Published by a reliable source...." Tends to imply print-press rather than electronic, according to the common definition of the verb, To Publish. Are you seriously suggesting that mainstream national newspapers are not a valid source in any circumstances unless a FREE on-line source is also available? THis is NOT mentioned in The definition of Verifiability provided by Wikipedia (which you yourself claim is the basis for your decision) so I find this decision strange, to say the least. The internet has been around for 15-20 years or so in it's popular form, newspapers for around 200 years. I am sure that there are many references in other articles which do not also existing on-line. I think that the general public consider a citation of a national newspaper to be 'Verifiable', this being all that existed until the present generation.

In fact, in the Wikipedia policy about living people you have mentioned above, it states: "The views of critics should be represented if their views are relevant to the subject's notability and are based on reliable secondary sources, and so long as the material is written in a manner that does not overwhelm the article or appear to side with the critics' material."

Once again, I apologise for the tone of my previous article. But it is a fact that the school was being investigated by the police for allegations of abuse, this is actually more than a critiscism so surely warrants inclusion? If "The Sunday Mail" and "The Mail on Sunday" feel that it deserves two full articles then surely I have a right to ask that this information be included.

So please, someone tell me how I can get these allegations included, as I feel not to do so is falling way short of Wikipedia's goal of fair and balanced information.

Am I allowed to quote these articles?

There must be a way to include this. These are not obscure references.

Tom Prescott 21:12, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edit war at Cademuir International School

Dear John (talk), first of all I want to participate with you and TomPrescott to find a solution on how to fix this article. You've shown confidence in certain sections of the article that you thought were inverifiable, and by copy editing and undoing things done by TomPrescott some parts have been accidentally removed that were written far earlier by former contributors. I did not yet find out whether it was done accidentally or on purpose, as there have been many changes in each of these edits. To prevent further damage being done to the article, I would like to know what has made these changes to happen.

  • Why has the image been removed? Wikipedia states that a fair use includes showing the object in question or a company logo.
  • Why has some trivial information been removed on a stub article? Wikipedia states that information that helps advancing articles or that can be included more beautifully later is better than not including it at all. This relates to some "facts" (or whatever definition is more suitable to your mind^^)
    • The Lakes and Country estate agent managing the property sale
    • Liquidation of the school (something quoted like "His misfortune might be your luck" Why is some trivia related to the Lakes and Country estate agent managing the property sale been removed?
  • TomPrescott may have included doubtful facts. Still, those facts have been cited well from magazines, newspapers, (witness) reports, investigations, statistics, etc. Why was such content subject to deletion?

OT: Why are articles such as Copenhagen International School not marked as a stub?

Thank you very much for taking the time answering my questions. Best regards --Lazer erazer 08:30, 24 September 2007 (UTC)