Talk:J. Reuben Clark Law School

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J. Reuben Clark Law School is part of WikiProject Brigham Young University, an attempt to write quality articles about Brigham Young University. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
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Contents

[edit] Start

I've been slowly building this page up over the past six months or so, but it definitely needs a lot of work. Essentially every section has much more information that can be added to it. Any help would be much appreciated. Oscarsonthepond 01:30, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I've added a list of distinguished alumni (that I know of, anyway), state and federal judges, distinguished professors, a few pictures, and additional biographical information about the deans. I'm trying to expand the list of state judges and other distinguished alumni. There may be errors, most of what I found came from the internet...

[edit] Site overhaul

Thanks to previous editors, the site has a lot of information to use, but it needs to be seriously altered to meet WikiStandards. I've added the appropriate tag to the page and will be working on it myself, but any help is appreciated. --Eustress (talk) 02:02, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

The site needs a History section. --Eustress (talk) 13:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
The following site may help in constructing a history section: http://www.martindale.com/xp/legal/Professional_Resources/Law_Schools/schl0101.xml --Eustress (talk) 16:13, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all of the changes - it definitely is more presentable now. At the same time, though, please be careful when making changes. For example, BYU is not ranked #10 for salaries - it's ranked #10 alphabetically. Also those LSAT/GPA "medians" aren't true medians...they are averages of the 25th/75th percentiles - the only number that law schools actually report are the 25th/75th percentiles. Minor things...I'll go through and change 'em. My question, though is - why take out so much useful information? There were a number of other rankings that many people would consider helpful/relevant that have been removed. Also, there was lots of good info in the main history paragraph that has now been removed - any particular reason why? Perhaps it needs to be moved to a "history" section, but other than that I see no reason to delete info - if anything this page needs more info. Oscarsonthepond (talk)

I reverted all your edits because I couldn't tell the minor corrections from just a rehash of what was there previously. There was a lot of copy-and-paste stuff in the article (plagiarism) and quite a few lists, which are discouraged on Wikipedia. I agree we need more info (I have some pictures I'll post later too), but we don't want text for the sake of text—clear, concise, and compelling. (See GA Appalachian School of Law for a good goal to shoot for.) If you find some problematic facts, try tagging them for review first. --Eustress (talk) 04:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
I have to agree with oscar. All those rankings are quite useful to someone who is interested in information about the law school. People talk about that kind of stuff all the time and want to know about it. I can understand not wanting it in list form, but why would you completely delete valuable information? You can be a formatting stickler if you want to, but it's ridiculous to just delete a bunch of info that people (who are actually interested in law school) care a lot about and then to just revert all the changes back because oscar didn't say whether they were minor or not. In looking at the history it seems like you aren't Mr. perfect when it comes to keeping track of your changes, and even if you were it's just really rude to undo all of the changes that guy made when he was putting back the valuable information that you took down. I'm not trying to pick a fight; I'm just saying that you should be a little more respectful. Also, I put the other picture back up as that one (of the sun setting on squaw peak) is a lot more attractive than all the dead trees out front. Also, I just looked back and it looks like a lot of the reversions you did messed up the facts again. Those are not "median" values for LSAT and GPA - they are averages of the 25th and 75th percentiles - that is not the same as a median. Likewise, the Princeton Review did not rank the school #8 - the tax prof blog did, using data from the Princeton Review. I don't have time to go through and change these, but someone definitely should. Like oscar said, it's great that you've done so much to help this page out - but you need to be a lot more careful w/ your facts and especially w/ just deleting and changing stuff without double-checking things. 199.107.43.222 (talk)
Removing all the changes and going back to the old version wholesale is not the answer here (whoever it is that did that). Please just add the specific things you feel are missing. We need to create a separate article for those lists of alumni and add the info on rankings that seems to be missing. Along with that, it seems the alumni and faculty sections need to be expanded base on the old version of the article (but not as a list!) Wrad (talk) 03:11, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
It wasn't me that removed those, but I can definitely see 218.185.86.226's point (the user that tried to revert everything back). To me it seems somewhat annoying to click on a link to a separate page w/ BYU Law school people, but I can see where it makes things a lot more organized, etc. However, I just looked at the page that it now links to and not only has it stripped a very large portion of the relevant information, but you also now have to wade through all of the undergrad alumni to try and pick out the law school alumni. To me this doesn't make any sense at all. Of course it doesn't have to be in a list format, but all the info that used to be on this page was really *really* good info and was researched by many different people to make up a great list of the various accomplmishments of people who have attended and/or taught at BYU Law. Now many of those people are gone, and even the ones that are still on the BYU people list have had most of their relevant info stripped. At some point, someone should go back and restore all of that data and put it into whatever the proper format is. Oscarsonthepond (talk) 06:41, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, the BYU project just started overhauling that page and we were planning to create Law School-only alumni page. We can easily dig into the history and put that info on another page with a nice summary on this page. Wrad (talk) 18:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Main picture

My main picture modification was reverted, so I would like some input from others. I changed it to the West exterior pic (now in the gallery) because it is a nice, straight-on pic of the school. The current pic in use has been modified in Photoshop so that the mountains really stand out, really detracting from the essence of the article. I would like to use the West exterior pic. What say ye? --Eustress (talk) 04:04, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I really like the version of the photo that I had up there. The reason the mountains were brighter than the school is because the sun was setting and had already gone down on the law school, which is also why the mountains were so red. However, I can see where some would feel that the old version was too bright, so I put up a new version that is more natural-looking, you could say. Does anybody else have any input? Oscarsonthepond (talk) 06:36, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
They all look very good, but I like what Oscar put up best. Wrad (talk) 18:21, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Old Ranking info

Here's all the old ranking info. Things already in the article are struck out: Wrad (talk) 18:38, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I added most of this back in. Some of it was outdated since 2008 rankings have come in, so I put those instead. The Library thing is a dead link. Wrad (talk) 21:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks good. For future reference, when you're inserting WP:Cite web refs, try to fill in as much info as possible; some just say BYU Law School when they're each different web sites. Thanks. --Eustress (talk) 15:18, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Alumni and faculty

I also feel that the school has enough notable alumni and faculty to merit a separate Law School People article along with the BYU alumni listing. Wrad (talk) 18:35, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

List of Brigham Young University alumni only shows 12 JRCLS alumni; List of Brigham Young University faculty only shows 5 current/former notable professors. I don't think separate pages are merited, and each list adequately indicates those who graduated from or work(ed) at the Clark Law School. --Eustress (talk) 15:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
What about what is listed in the history of this article? That's what I'm talking about. Wrad (talk) 20:25, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Not sure what History you're referring to. If you're referring to the edit history of this article, I made sure to add any notable faculty and alumni to the main lists (as noted above) before removing them from this article. If you're referring to the History section of this article, then please elaborate. Thanks. --Eustress (talk) 00:54, 30 May 2008 (UTC)