Wikipedia talk:Notability (schools)/Archive 6

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Contents


Reasoning

The core of this proposal is requirement #1, which makes no value judgements about the quality of a school. All schools are notable, as long as there's non-trivial published works that could be used to write an article (as opposed to a stub or a substub). Clearly, if a school is important to its community, then out of that community will have arisen non-trivial works.

This article is based heavily on WP:CORP, as well as the other ratified notability standards, and I've intentionally veered away from including any subjective standards, as, generally, anything that meets a subjective standard will also meet the objective standard of "non-trivial published works on the subject." - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 14:41, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

That is basically a good core, although I think we need to thresh out exactly what counts as a non-trivial published work. I'm in favor of excluding anything written or published by the school itself, its students, faculty, staff, or administrators, unless the work itself is notable. If the author is notable, that's already covered under #6. Vectro 03:11, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

My Opinion

I'm going to make a couple tweaks. It's all well-worded and good in its current form, but I think a couple of adjustments might be mentioned in the "subject of nontrivial coverage" section. In principle with its root in WP:CORP, however, I think the basis for this proposed standard has a solid foundation. Perhaps one even allowing for consensus or compromise, but I suppose we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. --Kuzaar-T-C- 14:43, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Note: by my above comment it may be better in its current wording. I'll think about it some more. :) --Kuzaar-T-C- 14:45, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Would it be appropriate to explicitly exclude coverage by the local community, or would that be implied in the citation of WP:RS? --Kuzaar-T-C- 14:58, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
If it's a reliable source, it's a reliable source. This is aimed at dealing with unexpandable stubs, not articles referenced to reliable sources. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 15:02, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
That's what I had supposed. I like the proposal in its current format. I think that the consolidation of the numerous unexpandable school stub articles will be a welcome change, and hopefully more widely acceptable to the community. --Kuzaar-T-C- 15:09, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Events

Many (probably most) schools get considerable local press coverage for events such as fairs and fetes, retirements of long-serving teachers, groundbreaking for new buildings and so on, which do not amount to sources for material in the article. What do we do about that? Just zis Guy you know? 15:16, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

That was originally the concern that I had raised above. I have always held the position that because a subject is notable in a community or limited group does not imply that it is notable to the world at large, and to a degree this still concerns me. If an elementary school is, as you said, breaking ground and it gets a front-page spot in the village ledger, would it still be appropriate for its own article, as per AMIB above, or is its unquestionably shaky claim to notability sufficient in the context of this proposal? --Kuzaar-T-C- 15:24, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Is that village ledger a reliable source, though? Local papers (as opposed to major papers) often don't qualify for WP:RS. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 15:26, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Why would world-wide notability somehow be required? Many people around the world may not care about schools in the community where I live, but to people in a community who want to look up one of their schools, it is notable. --Stephane Charette 18:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
It may be the case that something is important locally, but in asserting that there should not be a good standard to hold notability to, you place the encyclopedia on a very slippery slope. How many people does something have to be noteworthy to in order to have a claim to an article? Five? A hundred? Questions like this are what make it necessary for Wikipedia to have standards, more or less, of notability within the scope of the article's field. For example, a chemist who isolates a compound that cures some minor sickness may not be notable in the "world at large" but is almost certainly notable within his field of study, and has almost certainly been the subject of multiple nontrivial published reliable sources. So, it may be that I misspoke; that instead of "worldwide notability" it should be "fieldwide notability" that I should have said. Hope this clears things up. --Kuzaar-T-C- 18:37, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
That is fine. In the scope of a region, or a school board, the "fieldwide notability" is the school board or the city where the school is located. That means a Canadian school doesn't have to be on the 6 o'clock news in the U.S. for it to be "notable", and thus can be included. --Stephane Charette 19:00, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. That would be akin to saying that because the town council awards me the pie-baking contest championship title, I am notable. In other words, it is no claim to notability at all. Recognition would have to come from a much more important source than local to have a claim to notability. If it were the National Culinary Institute or some other well-known and itself-notable body, my Pie Champion title would (possibly) bestow notability. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
A Canadian school doesn't have to be on the 6 o'clock news in the US to be notable, but any event that doesn't merit mention on the local CBC or provincial network station probably isn't going to be notable. (This is speaking from experience; CTV-Saskatoon covers some pretty inane stuff.) - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:32, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
If a village ledger isn't notable, how about a more major newspaper like Louisville's Courier-Journal? While it's not on the order of USA Today or the New York Times, it is still a fairly wide-read paper, especially in Louisville, KY, and the surrounding hundred miles or so. It will often do a piece on a new school when one is built (generally about the first day of school), even if it is an otherwise podunk elementary school somewhere in the county that wouldn't even get a back-page mention otherwise. --Carl (talk|contribs) 00:25, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

School articles to be deleted

In its current form, almost all school stub articles that we have (we in this case being Wikipedia:WikiProject Education in Canada) will get instantly deleted because of the strict inclusionary criteria, which I will quote here:

  1. The school, or events surrounding the school, have been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the school itself.
  2. The school is a post-secondary school.
  3. The school has stood for at least 100 years.
    • (You don't need too many fingers to count the number of schools in North America which have been open for 100 years!)
  4. The school is also a private business, and meets the requirements of WP:CORP.
  5. The article is about a school district.
    • (School districts are not schools, they're businesses or arms of governments, so including this criteria unecessarily makes the inclusion criteria look longer.)

If I look at the work we've been doing by following links such as Whatlinkshere:Infobox Education in Canada, somewhere between 500 to 700 of these articles all of sudden qualify for immediate deletion. Now the project has recently (in the past week) been accused of things like "flooding", and "schoolcruft", but regardless of individual views on the topic of the usefullness of stubs, WP:EiC has been doing some great work in taking stubs that people outside of WP:EiC create and turning them into full articles. See this quote from today on an ongoing AfD:

I am most impressed by the level of structure, organization and thought demonstrated by the WP:EiC initiative and its team members, which makes it clear to me that the promise of expanding these into yet more productive and useful articles is eminently justifiable. I would like to suggest that other areas (perhaps organized by state in the US) would greatly benefit from the methodolgy developed as part of WP:EiC, and I will certainly take advantage of these concepts in expanding the scope of WP:NJ, which has craeted articles for most New Jersey school districts and a significant percentage of the state's high schools. Bravo WP:EiC! Alansohn 15:09, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

The biggest problem I see is the new proposed policy/guideline/process Wikipedia:Schools is too restrictive and would result in a lot of hard work being deleted. To feel comfortable that we're not going to use this to quickly delete large groups of school articles, we need to come up with something more balanced that would also take into account the following:

  • the existance of schools are usually very easy to verify (for example via the school board web site);
    • thus, a stub article of a school can easily be shown to physically exist, and as thus, schools have typically affected the lives of the people who attend or have attended in the past;
      • thus, if a project exists for the area in which the school is located, and, the project can takes responsability for cleaning up and expanding the stub, then allow the article to exist and grow.

This is what we've tried to do with WP:EiC#Cleanup needed -- when an article needing work is found by a member of the project, it is listed within the project with summarized cleanup criteria, such as "general cleanup", "cite needed", "needs infobox", "needs neutral POV rewrite". This way we can continue with the project's work and enhance the articles as we get to them. (Having said this, listing 500 articles at once and then claiming that the project is not getting through the list fast enough would not be acceptable.) --Stephane Charette 18:58, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I generally agree with most of your points. However, I see no reason for "thus, if a project exists for the area in which the school is located, and, the project can takes responsability for cleaning up and expanding the stub, then allow the article to exist and grow" to be so restrictive. The work of projects such as EiC and other regionally-oriented projects are GREAT, but WP:SCH has been around for years with a large number of participants who have not limited the scope their project to a specific geographical region, for a number of reasons. With dozens and sometimes scores of school related articles being put up for VfD/AfD in the course of the last 2 years, "those who frequently nominate and/or vote to delete school-related articles" have effectively pushed AfD into a constant cleanup process (even if such wasn't their intent), where many editors who work on school articles divert their attention away from project oriented editing of schools towards those school related articles that are in danger of imminent deletion with a 5 day window to act before the article is potentially lost. If the existing projects were referred to for cleanup of stubs, substubs or poorly written school articles, many of them would be cleaned up without the necessity of going through the (mostly fruitless) AfD process. You have just experienced an example of precisely what I am talking about with the mass-nomination and multiple-deletion of school in the Richmond area, which is effectively disrupting the work of the EiC project.--Nicodemus75 19:16, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Note, to the first editor in this section, that the guidelines that you have quoted are not all required to be met. If read carefully, you would have noticed that any one of those being true, as it says, implies notability and a place for the article of the subject in question. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
One of the benefits of the guideline as proposed is that many of the legitimate, non-stub articles currently being {{prod}}'ed or nominated for deletion can be speedily kept. --Usgnus 19:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Nothing in the proposal as I read it said any articles had to be deleted. It would appear to encourage a merge of some stubish articles of questionable notability. Vegaswikian 21:03, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Although I can understand how the Canadian group is committed to their group of schools, I really see no need or interest by the public to mention every secondary or high school in Canada. This seems to add so much minutiae. I support having guidelines that do restrict the number of articles simply because not every school is notable. This is not to say that a school is not important to a community and attempting to contextualize this conversation in that manner is inappropriate. A tree can be valued, buildings can be valued, almost anything can be valued by a given community, but we certainly do not need an article on every thing of value to all communities. This is trivia and not appropriate for an encyclopedia. Have you thought of creating your own WIKI? Please do and move all of those stubs to it and allow each community to expand each school stub. Storm Rider (talk) 08:06, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

The fact that you even suggest that someone should go create a parallel wiki and allow communities to update articles on schools proves the point that there is nothing wrong with having school articles. I still don't understand why a subset of editors are against articles on schools! We have articles on many things (from a structural point of view) that regularly affect our lives, such as bridges, roads, and various other buildings, and no fight being organized to go delete bridge articles, go delete highway articles, etc... (I'm also a member of WP:BRIDGE, so I've seen a fair share of microstubs). If you don't want to read school articles, then stop reading them! But at the same time, don't deny contributing editors the opportunity to create and expand on articles that interest them. This page is an effort to set guidelines on school articles; many of us believe that we can and should support having articles on every thing of value to all communitites, and the part where we get to contribute is through school articles. --Stéphane Charette 08:55, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
In my opinion, adding "minutiae" serves only a small number of readers, but deleting it serves no one. Advantage: minutiae. Furthermore, schools are vastly more important than entire classes of minutiae preserved on Wikipedia, such as individual episodes of television sitcoms or moves favored by particular professional wrestlers. Advantage: Schools. This debate grows tiresome. Our time would be much better spent expanding content in the areas we each have the ability and interest. --Dystopos 17:20, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

The school has stood for at least 100 years.

This would be counted from the date of establishment or founding, correct? If a school was founded in 1854, but switched buildings in 1935, would it still qualify? --Usgnus 19:30, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I would think so. 70+ years standing is a fairly strong claim to notability by any means. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:36, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
What if that same school moved into a new building in 1997? --Usgnus 19:43, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
That's a harder question and involves a certain amount of distinction, but I think that the easy method to solve that issue is, if there has been a continuous line of administration and the school is under the same name (and has only changed buildings), then yes, the school itself is over 100 years old. And likely has been the primary subject of nontrivial coverage. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:55, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
For further distinction on this, it reminds me a little of a philosophical question I encountered my first day in my Philosophy 101 class in college, in which the professor described a boat whose matter was replaced plank by plank and nail by nail over the years until it contained none of the original matter, and called into question the distinction between the idea of a boat and the material of the boat. Also the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you haven't read it. :) --Kuzaar-T-C- 20:01, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
As long as the building and current name can show a continuination from the origional it should be OK. Schools do change name and buildings. As long as the history goes back 100 years why should we quible over the building or name having been changed? Vegaswikian 21:06, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

100 is a number I pulled out of the air, based on the idea that a 100-year-old school can't possibly lack non-trivial commentary. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:09, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The article is about a school district.

I don't think this should be one of the points in the numbered list. It can be part of the text explaining that this guideline does not apply to school districts. --Usgnus 19:32, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

As AMIB explained in the top section of this page, this proposal was created to try to work toward a solution for the mass-creation of articles that are basically less than stubs. I think that the exception for school districts is okay on there to prevent confusion about the intent of the proposed policy. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:36, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
It's pretty clear that a school district is not a school. It's just really weird to read "A school is notable if... the article is about a school district". --Usgnus 19:52, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
That line was basically just to specify that school districts may claim notability even if all schools within them cannot. Of course, since high schools are notable as secondary institutions of learning, it's almost a given, but being explicit in guidelines never hurts. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:57, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Then it is not needed since I believe that there is consensus for school district articles being included. Vegaswikian 21:08, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll rephrase. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Alumni

Do we care at all about alumni? What if a school has X number of alumni with non-stub WP articles? --Usgnus 19:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that having had a person attend the school makes for a claim to notability, no, unless that alumnus subsequently attracts media or other reliable source attention toward the school itself. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:37, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not a matter of pure alumni counting; if the school is important to the alumnus, then there's going to be a non-trivial work with the alumnus talking about the school. By adhering to #1, we keep out silliness like the elementary schools of famous people (who often won't even much remember elementary school), while still keeping schools with a substantive link to a famous person. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:13, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Too proscriptive

I don't anticipate this proposal being particularly successful. Having read hundreds of related discussions, I don't see much resemblance between what is proposed here and the actual notability standards employed on Wikipedia. Previous efforts to develop subject-specific standards for notability have, as I understand it, attempted to encapsulate and clearly express standards that were already being used. This guideline, on the other hand, seeks to employ a standard that is substantially different from the one actually being used. Because of this, even if passed this guideline is likely to be rather ineffectual.

On another note, I'm interested in discovering whether no-content-lost merges of school stubs are actually being opposed (that is, reverted). After all, no guideline is needed to carry out such merges. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:59, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

This is a proscriptive compromise. It requires that a school be demonstrably able to sustain an article, while protecting those that are. It's intended to not impede the efforts of WP:SCH to make school articles, but it's intended to prevent the creation of school directories, something specifically called out in WP:NOT.
It's also intended to make AFD much more clear; "notability" wouldn't be a nebulous definition of whether such and such user feels that such and such school is "important" enough (and that's basically what everyone is doing, whether they think all schools are important or have a higher standard), and instead focus on whether we have the raw material to make an article about that school. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:30, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Compromise between what, though? The wiki process and core policies, essentially unencumbered by guidelines, have created and improved thousands (tens of thousands) of school articles. Those articles hardly need "protection" from a guideline. I have no reason to believe that, if we allow organic growth to continue, we will not see additional improvement buidling on our current base. This guideline represents a pernicious deviation from our current situation because it establishes that deleting verifiable information about schools is not just okay but recommended. The only thing this would compromise is the quality of the encyclopedia. Christopher Parham (talk) 04:52, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
This is a more-exclusive proposal than arguing about every single school peacemeal and having every single AFD flooded with argumentless, inane votes, and each AFD going to no conensus. Instead, it sets up a framework for discussing schools where it seems that little verifiable information can be written, while explicitly defending those about which verifiable information other than directory info has been written.
Simply using directory info and first-person-from-the-school info is tantamount to covering businesses because they have a website and a listing in the phonebook. However, it has been argued that every school can support an article; if that's so, as soon as an article shows signs of doing so, it's explicitly protected from "this school isn't important enough."
This is based on other notability policies that prevent the retention of policy-violating articles, while explicitly protecting articles with some potential. WP:BIO prevents vanity, WP:CORP prevents advertising, and this prevents the creation of directories. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Let me put this another way. Currently, information about schools is rarely deleted. Under this proposal, if a school does not meet the specified criteria, options explicitly include moving the material out of the article space or deleting it. If your primary interest here is preserving verifiable information about schools, the proposal is clearly not helping matters. Obviously it would be nice to end the AFD bickering but not at the cost of content. AFD has at least achieved the main goal of not sanctioning the deletion of verifiable material; any proposal should do the same or better.
To be explicit, the change I am suggesting is that instead of offering AFD as a possibility, the proposal should explicitly discourage editors from sending articles about schools to AFD, e.g. "Sending verifiable school articles to AFD is strongly discouraged." Christopher Parham (talk) 05:30, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Are you willing to argue that Wikipedia should be a directory of schools when it is a directory of nothing else and directories are specifically called out in WP:NOT? Is there someone willing to argue that Wikipedia should be a directory?
This entire proposal argues that all schools that can sustain an article merits an article. It's extremely inclusionist. The only thing it excludes is stubs that cannot become an article, something mentioned in WP:STUB, WP:DP, and WP:MERGE. It uses a similar process as those pages for dealing with unexpandable stubs; first, make sure they're unexpandable, then look for a merge topic, then refer the content to someone who might be able to find a use for it later, then, failing all of those, delete it. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:58, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
What exactly do you mean by directory? I interpret that policy to mean exactly what it says, that WP should not replicate the yellow pages by hosting information on thousands of items of no interest. Schools, however, are notable. So in the end we would hope to have verifiable information on all schools, just as we have on other topics of note. Yellow-pages-esque content like promotions or advertising should not be included -- that's what WP:NOT is intended to prevent.
As for stubs, I would contend that a complete article on a school might be just a few sentences; that might be all the verifiable information available. Such an article might well be a candidate for merging. But not for deletion or any other sort of removal from the encyclopedia. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
What do we do with a stub that offers nothing but directory info (name, number of students, location, contact info) that has no clear merge target? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Keep it, or find something else to do with it that is non-destructive. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:32, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Forwarding it to the project is destructive? Projects can keep whatever they like that will contribute to articles. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:34, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Removing it from the encyclopedia proper is destructive in that readers will be highly unlikely to find it in project space. Obviously seeking help from the project to find a good merge target or expand the article would be another matter -- that's already covered in the what to do section as the first recourse. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:43, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Why would someone expect to find something in articlespace that is explicitly called out in WP:NOT? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
This isn't called out by WP:NOT; that calls out directory entries. This is just a short article on an encycloepdic topic, similar to many short articles on significant people that just begin name-occupation-nationality-birth date-death date. On another note, please be careful about 3RR. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
This guideline requires some evidence that the subject is encyclopedic. If someone posted a stub on a person that was nothing but name-occupation-nationality-birth date-death date, it would not last unless someone showed some evidence that there was some way to expand the article. This is the the intent of both WP:BIO and this proposal: stubs need to show some evidence that they can be expanded into articles. If they can't do so after being referred to WP:SCHOOLS, what evidence do we have that they can be expanded at all? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 07:30, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Because schools are notable, it's safe to say that such potential exists. (With people, no such assumption of notability exists.) That's why we keep the article and wait for organic growth to expand it over time. It's like planting a seed and you come back in 10 years and it's a tree. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
This is circular. "Schools are notable." "Why are they notable?" "Because their articles can be expanded." "Well, how do you know that every school article can be expanded?" "Because schools are notable." If every school has coverage sufficient to expand its article, then this guideline will go far to encourage that that coverage is found and added to the articles, explicitly encouraging and endorsing WP:SCH's excellent work in this regard. (I've found that, just like WP:PCP wasn't formed from the most voiciferous defenders of Pokémon stubs, WP:SCH focuses more on improving demographic stubs than making them or defending them.) The only way a school would possibly be deleted is if it was tagged, WP:SCH was uninterested or incapable of turning up any independent coverage, and there was no logical merge target and no possible likely merge target. If all we can say about a school is duplicated from another directory, we not only invite duplicating errors in those directories, but also invite vandalism and the creation of directories of "resources for conducting [the] business" of education. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 08:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
That's not really an accurate portrayal of the reasoning. Schools are notable because they play a crucial role in their communities. Like towns, they are in themselves important institutions. Because they are notable, it is extremely likely that they have coverage sufficient to expand to a full article. This is a basic position that a lot of people have taken for a long time, and that is why deletion of information about schools is unacceptable. I don't really see the relevance of your last point to the issue...obviously we always invite duplicting errors in our sources. That is why we should use reliable sources. If you feel a directory is not a reliable source, then make that point when it is used as a reference just as with any other disputed source. Christopher Parham (talk) 08:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Mmh, just because something is important in its community doesn't mean that it's generally notable. Should every police and fire department have an article? Every hospital? Every mayor? (WP:BIO already explicitly discounts the last one). All these are important in their communities, but unless there is something distinctive about a particular school, department, hospital, or mayor, there's not much to say in a Wikipedia article and the topic is therefore not notable. Vectro 03:21, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Additionally, pure directories are often not reliable sources, especially in the case of private schools, and we risk reproducing errors if there are no sources but directories. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:38, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
If a source isn't reliable, that's another matter. I've never opposed challenging information on the basis of one of the core content policies; sending an article even to AFD for those purposes is fine (and recommended by the deletion policy). Christopher Parham (talk) 06:43, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
This is largely why I'm looking for non-trivial information. Non-trivial information is easy to evaluate and consider in context; when the only sources are the school and a directory, we have to take their word for it. (A lesser concern is that this leaves Wikipedia vulnerable to hoaxes and advertising.) - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Answering question from way up there. I've had the merging of sub-stubs reverted every time I've attempted it. - brenneman {L} 07:34, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
That's not a promising revelation. Some sort of centralized noticeboard for such merges may be useful to help organize merges and discuss disputed ones. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:45, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
  • BTW, to clarify I have no objection to the proposal as it stands right now. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:48, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
    Would you object to language discouraging (without outlawing) the creation of stubs that don't have the germ of expansion in the form of some non-trivial coverage of the school? I don't want to see stubs deleted; I want to see their creation slowed to focus on organizing, cleaning up, and improving the largely unencyclopedic, moribund stubs that barely survive AFD, while discouraging the use of AFD to force one-liners to be turned into unexpandable but barely-sufficient stubs. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 08:14, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
    So long as such stubs were not subject to deletion, I would agree that they should not be created as a separate article. However you should be aware that a vast amount of those stubs are being created by new or drive-by users who are unlikely to be aware of the guideline in the first place. (BTW im going to bed, check on you in the A.M.) Christopher Parham (talk) 08:22, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
    The drive-by subs are unavoidable. However, I had to delete a dozen one-line restatements of the title all by the same established author, and that situation is untenable. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 08:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Thivierr's edits

Rob, I edited your additions about local press, folding them into a section that now covers any reliable source and covers alumni as well. I didn't want to be stepping on the intent of your edits, however, save for the qualification that alumni lists are trivial coverage. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Everything keys off of #1. If a school is demonstrably unique in some way, then there's going to be non-trivial coverage. We can't take a school's word that they're unique, for the same reason we don't take a business's or person's word that they're unique: they have a vested interest in making themselves look good. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:59, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

First of all, everything has to be verifiable always anyhow. It's enough to say just that once (the link to WP:V does the trick). Expecting substantial discussion on a point such as a notable alumni is unreasonable. You're trying to remove items that have been *widely* used in many AFDs. Often, inclusion of verifiable alums has caused an AFD to suddenly move to a strong consensus. We don't insist on substantial non-trivial coverage of a Grammy award in WP:MUSIC. A small mention is adequate, as long as it's in a reliable source. --Rob 05:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

As for uniqueness, I'm trying to prevent gaming the system by adding inane unique things. Let's say a school is the only one in the district with five levels of German instead of four, and that this is verifiable through the district and through the National German Class Ceritification Board. Is this substance enough for an article? Hardly. Is it unique? I guess. I folded the uniqueness in with #1, because #1 mentions non-trivial verifiable coverage. If you want to split it out while retaining the non-trivial qualification, then it's just a matter of organization.

A Grammy award is non-trivial coverage in and of itself, and there's no dispute that anything that wins a Grammy has been covered non-trivially. (Contrast this with the school whose team won a local spelling bee which attracted no notice.) I want to disqualify "unique aspects" or "awards" that are so trivial so as to have not merited mention in a third-party reliable source. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:20, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

How does this version look? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
You're still trying to do, what we don't do for WP:BIO and WP:MUSIC. If I find a verifiable source somebody won a grammy, or has two albums on a major label, that's enough. I don't need multiple sources with non-trivial coverage of it. If you wish to revert me, please go ahead, and go all the way. Please don't "fold" one item into another, if you're effectively removing it entirely. I think, at this early stage of this proposal, we should just let people add items they think are appropriate. Then we can all discuss all the items. Then later, we'll see what has support, and know which to remove or "fold". --Rob 05:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
If we had some authority to come in and make a distinction between trivial and non-trivial school awards, I wouldn't quibble about this for one moment. Right now, lacking that authority for schools, I'm deferring to availablility of coverage to make the distinction between the Best Bilingual School Of The Millenium from the Official Nationally-Recognized Board Of Bilingual School Evaluation and the Best Springfield School Ever from the Springfield Board of School Promotion.
Basically, what's the Grammy of schools? Is there one? - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:45, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
And how does this relate to alumni? Why are you insisting on "Substantial mention in biographical works about alumni or staff". I didn't add any criterion for school awards. Anyways, I'll leave this alone for the moment, and see if the ownership of this page can be removed from the creator, before spending any more time on it. --Rob 06:02, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I dont own this page; I'm just trying to avoid criteria that won't allow for the expansion of an article or that will allow someone interested in promoting a school to game the system.
I'm insisting on substantial mention for alumni/staff because the fact that Corey Haim went to an elementary school isn't necessarily something that can turn into a proper article. I'm trying to draw a distinction between bare lists of alumni (another directory) and grist for articles. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 06:05, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Staff I'd support but alumni? No. Unless a school has multiple famous alumni (verifiable from reliable external sources) the fact that one famous person went there is not enough to justify an article, any more than the fact of being in a band which passes WP:MUSIC is enough to justify an article for their drummer. Just zis Guy you know? 09:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not about scoring enough points on the notability-o-meter, it's about having material for an article. One chapter in a biography is better than a list of a hundred notable people. If Jimbo Wales describes how his elementary school helped form his current philosphy in his biography, we can turn that into material for an article, better than 20 notable people going to their elementary school, learning how to write cursive letters, and moving along educated but otherwise unimpressed. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 10:07, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Years and directories

I've changed the years from 100 to 5. It can easily be argued that a school that has been in existence for at least 5 years has had an effect on many people, and it was already admited higher up in this talk page that 100 years was just picked out of the blue. Therefore, I would like to argue the point that 5 years, also picked out of the blue, is long enough for a school to be known and to have an article.

In addition, the school directories that we work from are typically government owned and can be trusted better than some list posted by a 10th grader to some free hosting company. For example, at WP:EiC, we normally work from list such as:

Since these are so often government lists, I've removed the restriction that information obtained from these cannot be used. --Stephane Charette 07:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Those are directories, and copying info from them just makes directories here on Wikipedia. Directories are called out on WP:NOT. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 07:17, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Nice try. We use those as sources. We don't copy them. By the way, look up WP:OWN as you are reverting anyone's edit to the proposal who has a different opinion than yourself. This isn't a discussion on a proposal -- it is turning out to be something you are trying to force through. --Stephane Charette 07:20, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I wasn't accusing anyone of copying verbatim, but there's nothing you can make from a directory but another directory (or statistical analysis, I guess, but nobody on WP is doing that and it'd be OR anyway).
The intent of this proposal is that it sets as a minimum bar the existence of non-trivial coverage, to exclude advertisement and bare directory entries and nothing else. Everything else is negotiable, but if you change that, you have a proposal that has the support of absolutely noone whatsoever and that is in no way a compromise. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 07:24, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
As for years, anything that has stood for five years will have an effect on many people, be it a civic building, a church, a law office, or a store. The standard I'm promoting is availability of non-trivial information, not "number of people affected." 100 was pulled out of the blue as a number where a school can't fail to be historic; things that are five years old are not historic. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 07:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
One hundred years -> five? Err, that seems a bit extreme. I support one hundred. - brenneman {L} 07:31, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
May I suggest that you consider the impact of your proposal. Using 100 years, we should get clear consensus that the school is notable. If we were to use 5 years, it would be impossible to achieve that consensus. So if the goal here is to get a guideline in place that can achieve consensus we should leave it at 100. I would rather not have a specific number of years listed, but I don't have any ideas at this time for wording that would allow the removal of a fixed number. If this becomes a guideline, it can be changed if needed. But right now we really need to get consensus. Vegaswikian 07:34, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I too, think that 100 years is an appropriate number. Remember that the way the guidelines work at the moment, a school has to meet only one of them to be included. A school that exists for 100 years, thus in this sense, is notable only for having existed that long, regardless of the other bullet points, as the other editors above seem to concur. --Kuzaar-T-C- 14:39, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

100 years is far too restrictive and will only serve to institute systemic bias. Schools in certain parts of the world are far more likely to have reached a certain age than in others. European and South American schools obviously have a greater tendency to be 100 years old or older than do schools in the west of the United States, or schools in Africa which may or may not have a more or less equal "notability" (all other aspects being hypothetically equal). A school which is 50 years old in say, Great Falls Montana is arguably MORE historic (as AMIB expresses it above) than a school which is 100 years old in Pimlico, England. I think this number needs to be cut down significantly (40 years?). I think it is instructive that all of the endorsements of the 100 year benchmark, which was admittedly "pulled out of the air" have rapidly come from editors who "frequently nominate and/or vote to delete school articles". My concern is obvious, that the "100 year old standard" will be used as a club in future discussion about school articles in attempts to disqualify it as "non-notable" due to "not being historic" as set out by the guidelines of some future WP:SCHOOL criteria.--Nicodemus75 20:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I think you're probably right on this point. I was just pulling a number out of the air to give older schools a free pass on needing to demonstrate non-trivial coverage, as discovering that coverage (which will surely exist) will take quite a bit more time due to the need to do traditional go-to-the-library research. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 00:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

My conflict of interest and comments on the proposal

I declare a conflict of interest here which I believe will result in nothing but pain. From some of the comments above, I would say it is clear that the agenda is to severely limit the articles that we contribute to Wikipedia on the topic of schools. This proposal that we are supposedly discussing was written by one person who is now reverting edits by anyone else who holds a differing opinion such as myself. However, as one of the authors and a contributing member of WP:EiC, I also have a very obvious bias towards saving school articles and being allowed to continue contributing in the way that we have been to improve the coverage and quality of the school articles that we have so far.

Unless an obvious change somehow takes place to allow other people to contribute to this proposed guideline, and to take into account that some people -- like those of us who are part of various school wikiprojects -- actually enjoy setting up nicely-written articles on school districts and individual schools, I'm afraid there isn't much that can be done with this proposal.

The bias of AMIB and Kuzaar is obviously well-known, as the first draft of this proposal shows. But since it is a proposal, and it is being discussed and re-worked, other people should and must be allowed to contribute. While this was in your userspace at User:A Man In Black/Schools, you did OWN it. Now that it is a proposal, you no longer WP:OWN it. Trying to force the direction of Wikipedia's stance on schools is either going to result in a dead-end no-consensus, or it will end up with lots of hurt and pissed off people. The way things are going, it is unlikely it will be enforceable. You started the ball rolling with this, let it continue! We have a chance here to finally clean up all of the non-consensus problems and get a guideline or policy in place.

As for myself, I will refrain from participating in this proposal for the time being for the following reason: my bias is clear, I've stated it before and again, and as a member of WP:EiC I would see our activities severely restricted on Wikipedia if this proposal is accepted. If nothing happens and this continues where it is heading, then I'll take this to mean that I've gotten too involved to see clearly, and thus my backing away is a good thing. However, if there is continued resitance from others who feel like I do, then maybe AMIB and possibly others should consider how they've been trying to drive this process. In my opinion, this proposed guideline is very one-sided, and it is this one-sideness which will cause it to fail to be accepted, or fail to be implemented. --Stephane Charette 07:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't call that a bias (or not a problem bias). If you worked for a school district, and worked on its schools, that would be a possibly problem bias. All Wikipedian edit articles and all are welcome to participate in inclusion/deletion discussions of articles. I can't imagine somebody recusing themselves from WP:BIO because they like to edit biographies. --Rob 08:05, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I've added the {{guideline in a nutshell}} to the guideline, since it's the part that the entire proposal hinges upon. I don't want own this proposal, but if the core of it is changed, then we're trying to discuss a moving target. (If you change something that subverts that core, you're not changing this proposal but instead overwriting this proposal with a new one, if that makes sense.)
Ideally, I'd like to see objections to the core separated into "I object to that core" (in which case we may scrap this and come up with a new proposal) and "This part of the proposal works at cross purposes to the goal or has unintended consequences" (in which case we figure out new wording). It's the difference between "This is a bad idea" and "This is a bad implementation."
As for your "bias," I don't think that this is just a keep all schols vs. delete every school less important than Columbine argument as it has been previously framed, and unless you have a vested interest in doing anything but making Wikipedia the best project it can be, you belong in this discussion. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 08:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't see the intention as limiting the articles contributed on schools. The intention is simply to follow the same policy for schools as we do for everythign else, that is, we include them where there is sufficient verifiable information from reliable secondary sources to alow us to ensure the neutrality of the article. Empty articles are speedily deleted whatever the subject. There is nothing new here, really, as you'll see by comparing it with the numerous other inclusion guidelines. Any school article which contains verifiable information beyond a restatement of the title will be in little danger. My personal view is that we should have a sister project for schools where much more information can be added, including using the school's own publications and testimony from its students as sources. Then we can leave the few genuinely famous schools in Wikipedia and transwiki the rest without the fights. Just zis Guy you know? 08:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I can't help see this guideline as an attempt to limit the inclusions of schools in Wikipedia and I really don't understand why. The fact that the guideline moves from a general statement to the standard of notably implies that there is a limited subset of schools that would qualify. On the all or nothing issue of inclusion I support all. I believe there are certain pieces of public infrastructure that merit inclusion by their existence; communities themselves, hospitals, schools, cemeteries, and airports as examples. I don't believe there is a standard for notable Airports? I cannot contribute any edits to this proposal because I disagree with the fundamental premise. The fact that we must restrict the type of article and put a burden of proof (beyond the factuality of the information) on the contributor from the first edit is unnecessary and detrimental to drawing editors. The community has gone down this road several times and I do not believe this will gain any consensus. Wakemp 15:16, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Airports are a very good analogy. Every airport with an IATA or ICAO code has its own article (or soon will). I don't see anyone going around tagging them for deletion. --Usgnus 16:21, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
In the UK there are thirty airports, around 150 universities, over 3,500 secondary schools, and around 18,000 primary schools. One British airport had twenty-six million passengers last year. In what way are they comparable? Just zis Guy you know? 20:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
They are comparable in that they all deserve articles. Incidentally, according to wikipedia there are +220 airports in the UK. See List of airports in the United Kingdom. --JJay 21:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Here's an example of an airport stub: Red Lake Airport. --Usgnus 21:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Rather than looking at the problem as one of keeping versus deleting schools, I would suggest that we should look at it more along the lines of: How can we make the quality of the encyclopedia as good as we possibly can? My personal feeling is that this can be best served by having articles on any schools for which there is enough verifiable information about, and keeping information on other schools in a school district article or some other central spot, so that if more information comes along we can spin it off. If anyone else has any differing ideas as to how to increase article quality, I'd love to hear them. JYolkowski // talk 21:44, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, precisely. To be honest I think that there is probably community consensus for this principle. AFD of course will not find such a consensus. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
That is proof by assertion. It's also a circular argument: schools deserve article because they are comparable to airports; they are comparable to airports because they both deserve articles. Nothing inherently deserves an article - it gets one if there is enough verifiable information from reliable secondary sources to establish its significance. Foo school is a school in Foo, Bar is not an article, not even a stub. I can think of no other content area which would see such an article kept. Just zis Guy you know? 10:23, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
I could not agree more with the 2 foregoing comments. Frankly, if the {{guideline in a nutshell}} added is the accurate stated intent of this proposal, I think it is pretty clear that this proposal will fail miserably and utterly. As has been stated hundreds of times in the past, many of the editors who contribute to school articles and school-related projects simply believe (as Wakemp puts it) that "there are certain pieces of public infrastructure that merit inclusion by their existence; communities themselves, hospitals, schools, cemeteries, and airports". Other editors do not believe the same thing. Those of us who believe this, do not see the details of each individual school as trivial anymore than the relatively similar details about many, many, many communities listed on wikipedia are trivial (median income, specific demographic makeups including tenths of percentiles, etc.) I too disagree with the fundamental premise of this proposal. I think it is highly informative to review the previous school discussion which has now been archived (albeit improperly such that the archived discussion pages are all mislocated). As far as I am concerned, irrespective of the first principles or premise upon which I think a discussion towards reaching consensus on schools must be based, it must have the result of at least achieving the result that exisiting tools have created, ergo: thousands of schools are now (and have been for years now) included in wikipedia and any reader or editor of the encyclopedia can reasonably expect to find information about a school here in the same way they can reasonably expect to find information about communities, airports, etc. I must harken back to April of 2005 where CalJW put it so well: "The only reason to come up with some new policy is to create a means of deleting some school articles. Those of us who think all the articles should be kept will never accept such a policy..." If anything, there is now an additional year (plus) where this has become even more clear. I can already see that with this proposal, we are setting up for a repeat of the last WP:SCHOOL "discussion" of which I was highly critical at the time. Already, editors are opting out of the discussion - why? because "those who frequently nominate and/or vote to delete school articles" are already instantly reverting, "folding" and removing any changes to the proposal that would accurately reflect the premise that those of us who believe school articles ought to be included in wikipedia hold to. The whole problem is, and always has been, that so called "school inclusionists" disagree with your premise, they don't necessarily disagree with all of your bullet points. This proposal is bankrupt because fails to take into account the strongly held belief that Wakemp in the first place and is thusly doomed to failure. Instantly reverting or "folding" changes to the proposal that reflect how other editors feel about the issue is simply an attempt to control the debate and excise the differing opinion on the fundamental issue to somewhere outside of this discussion in a vain hope that by pushing the foundational belief of most "inclusionists" out of the discussion that a false compromise could be reached.--Nicodemus75 20:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I take it, then, that this is a statement of your intent to continue your obdurate refusal to accept widespread consensus in respect of covering only those subjects which have achieved sufficient external coverage in reliable secondary sources to allow for a verifiable and non-trivial article. Just zis Guy you know? 20:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
No such consensus exists, despite your (and others') attempts to "prove by repeated assertion" the same. Wikipedia has **THOUSANDS** of communities, municipalities, towns, etc. that HAVE ZERO "sufficent external coverage" as you put it. There are articles about towns in the USA and Canada where there are less than 10 people residing, articles which exist because of a single source obtained from a government source. No one is arguing WP:V here. There is no question that an article about any school needs to be verifiable as stipulated in WP:V.--Nicodemus75 20:50, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
There are notability guidelines for numerous content areas. In every case there is a bar to inclusion which is set well above simply existing. But it is evident that you will never accept any compromise whatsoever. Just zis Guy you know? 20:57, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Existence is never enough for an article on anything; it needs to meet our three content policies, especially WP:V. There are also a lot of subject areas that don't have "notability" guidelines too. We don't delete articles on "non-notable" places, or animals, or plants, or all kinds of stuff like that. Subject areas that do have "notability" guidelines have generally been ones where there is so much junk that gets added to Wikipedia that it is highly disruptive to people who work on those kinds of articles, so it makes it easier on everyone to make up some guidelines (on the other hand, people that work on schools don't seem to have this problem). It has never been the case the guidelines have been forced upon people who work on these kinds of articles against their will. I'm not saying that this is what's going on, or that you suggested that we should do that, but we definitely need to make sure that we make sure that any proposal is acceptable to most of the people who work on the subject area, not just the people who don't. JYolkowski // talk 20:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Painting those that disagree with you as irreconcilable extremists is a frequently-used tactic in these discussions over the past 3 years. In the recent past, you've publically characterized those who feel that schools merit inclusion in wikipedia by virtue of their intrinsic importance to infrastructure in the same way as airports and communities themselves as acting in a "religious" and "non-rational" manner. It is simply false to suggest that "In every case there is a bar to inclusion which is set well above simply existing." This is obviously not the case when it comes to communities, municipalities, towns, airports, railroad cars, etc. Simply rejecting the argument that schools ought to be treated the same as communities and airports by characterizing those who hold that position as religious, non-rational uncompromising extremists is an example why these "discussions" continually fail to reach consensus. --Nicodemus75 22:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Hmmm... no. We've seen analysis of previous AfDs that clearly showed that a very small core of editors drove the long string of "no consensus" closes to AfDs. We've seen analysis that showed that many of those editors were monolithic in their contributions, and that the perceived "enemies" of schools tended to not only have wider patterns of opinions in AfDs, but also to contribute to a wider variety of articles. It's been demonstrated that a large number of editors never contributed to maintaining or improving school articles beyond AfD participation.
    brenneman {L} 23:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
    Show us the "analysis" please. Point us to the "demonstration". And since you want to personalize things, then show us the school articles that you have improved. --JJay 00:30, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    You seem to forget the people who share your views on AFD, and never create and/or substantionally improve any school article. There's editors here, who's only edits to any school article are adding the {{AFD}} tag. They dream up all sorts of standards for articles, as they have never, and would never, bother to live up to those standards (e.g. make a qualified article). Its easy to have a "wide pattern of opinion", as random deletion doesn't bother people who haven't contributed anything in this area. We do have editors who regularly support keeping all verifiable real schools, and improve many, and work on many other non-school articles. Guidelines, like WP:MUSIC have succeeded, as they were developed by those who actually make them, and not by those who's exclusive interest is in removing them. --Rob 00:13, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Err, of course the burden to grow a micro-stub is on the people who want to keep it? Not on the people who suggest it be deleted? I'll dig up the stats, but it may take a while, it was in a now-deleted user page. - brenneman {L} 01:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      I never suggested you should improve articles you wish deleted. However, editors who spent enormous amounts of time, proposing and imposing criteria on school inclusion/deletion, aught to have made school articles that meet *their* criteria (not mine, theirs). I'm not saying one should "fix" a micro-stub to meet the standard. I'm saying simply such people, should be able to make an article, that satisfies *their* own test. Such articles, can be on schools of their choosing (not a micro-stub that they wish deleted). You completely mischaracterized what I said, in an effort to mock me. I am specifically addressing those editors, who insist their not "deletionists" and hate such labels. They insist they do want good articles on "notable" schools. We have a fundmanetal failure of communication, caused by a group of people who's primary contribution to the project is arguement and not content. --Rob 02:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      Whoa tiger, I wasn't trying to mock anyone. - brenneman {L} 02:15, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      Right. You mocked AfD participants. You mocked Nicodemus by linking to his edits. You mocked the "fervor" of participants in this discussion [1]. And "tiger" is not a civil way of referring to co-editors. --JJay 02:44, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Are you bloody kidding me? I'm going to raise a thread at ANI for a second opinon, I think you're way over the line with regards to civility here. - brenneman {L} 02:57, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
        Like when you replaced my comments with a personal attack notice? Your tone has offended a number of editors here. Funny how you think WP:CIV doesn't apply to you. --JJay 03:12, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      • So far I can only find my first attempt and it's quite ugly but does put lie to the "there is consesnsus" argument. I've got a whole year of AfDs analysed somewhere... - brenneman {L} 01:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
        • If you wanted to throw that argument out, you could also note that almost every AFD ends as no consensus. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:40, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

And, in record time, this has been personalized and rendered useless. I'm sorry I wasted everyone's time; I had hoped that people could discuss the subject instead of each other. Let me know when you're done accusing each other of bad faith and assassinating each other's characters. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 00:33, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok. Thank you for your contribution. --JJay 00:40, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Not exactly a surprise when people from your side of the debate have pre-characterized those of us that believe school articles are valuable as "religious" and "non-rational" in our approach to school articles. Opinions which, I might add, you didn't exactly hasten to disown when they were made.--Nicodemus75 04:06, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Schools that don't meet the criteria

This is somewhat obvious, but I'd like it if the criteria for adding a notability tag only referred to non-substub pages. One-liner school articles probably should just be merged/redirected into a school district article. They can always be split off again following sufficient organic growth. Thanks. — RJH (talk) 19:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

  • I've added this to the proposal (note that I've also changed the tags to use as well). JYolkowski // talk 21:46, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Post-secondary schools

I have removed the bullet point that is an attempt to exclude technical schools and community colleges, etc. from notability. Many techincal schools and community colleges are *not* corporations or companies and are state-run/owned institutions making the reference to WP:CORP irrelevant. Beyond that, "community college" has a different meaning in different parts of the world, in some areas a "community college" is larger or indeed more prestigious than a "university". I also fear the elitist systemic bias against educational institutions which do not educate as "universities". Technical/vocational post-secondary facilities are no less worthy of an article on intrinsic basis than "universities". I have no doubt my change to this "proposal" will be reverted or "folded" by its original authors.--Nicodemus75 20:43, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

There are many more tertiary colleges than there are universisties. Technical colleges are functionally indistinguishable from secondary schools, in this country at least. Just zis Guy you know? 21:00, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
In North America, community or technical colleges are, based on my experience anyway, more prestigious than high schools, but less so than universities. JYolkowski // talk 21:48, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Counting words and other comments

Quote from a comment above by Aaron Brenneman:

If we want a vivid demonstration of the fervor, simply count the number of words per contributor in this section.

If we're going to start counting words, why don't we see who here has contributed any words to any school article?

Further discussion on my talk page

For those of you still following, last night I said I'd step back. It has been intersting to see where the discussion has gone since. I strongly suggest -- to both camps -- that you also see the side discussion between AMIB and myself that has been ongoing all day on my own talk page. Note: the discussion is long.

In regards to trying to merge school articles into school districts

I would like people to stop saying that stubs can/should/could/etc be merged into the school district or school board articles. It doesn't work, and your suggestion simply proves you've never worked on a school article. Want to know why? It has been tried. The best example I can give right now is Peel District School Board. This is discussed (briefly) in the discussion between AMIB and myself on my talk page, but if you don't believe me, go check out the article in question. Not only is it borderline unmaintainable, but it an eyesore (though better than what was previously there). In my opinion, it looks more like one of those lists or directories much more than an article with a navigation bar and an infobox.

My experience is that it does work. Take a look at Independent Schools Association of the Southwest. This isn't a board per se, but it is a logical grouping of schools. About 15 months ago when we last had this debate, I turned this stub into a list/description of all of the schools in the organisation, and merged a few schools into it. Looking at it now, people actually have added school information to that article. Also, the schools in ISAS that do have separate articles tend to, with one exception that I'm going to take care of momentarily, have really good articles. There has been no proliferation of tiny unmaintainable school stubs for ISAS schools. P.S. I think that Peel District School Board looks really good. JYolkowski // talk 20:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I see. But would you say the ISAS article was written as an article to list schools versus an article on a school board? I've been replying to AfD merge requests that suggest we merge 1 or 2 specific schools articles into the school board. When you're dealing with a relatively fleshed out school board article like TDSB or Waterloo Catholic District School Board, this destroys the article. In those cases, especially when a series of articles on the school has been written and can be navigated to individually, it doesn't make sense to merge 1 stub. --Stephane Charette 21:58, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
A while back i messed around with creating School District pages as holding tanks for school stubs. One, Howard County Public Schools, has grown quite well since I was last involved in March from this to its current format. Another, the Lincoln_Public_Schools, holds all the information from several middle school stubbs that were created. I think this works relatively well. Even for large school districts it can work well especially if the school feeder hierarchy can be visualised, as in the Elgin Area School District U46 school district. While there are cons to these pages i think that at this stage of wikipedia it represents the best compromise. Despite them being like directories, in some instances they can actually hold a lot of useful information that you do not find in a yellow pages. i do note that none of these pages has really evolved from the perspective of the school board itself, but the contextual information for all the schools with information of the respective towns, as well as links from the towns back to these pages overide those problem, in my view. David D. (Talk) 06:41, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

An acceptable school stub edited by AMIB

Please take a look at that last example, Delhi Public School (Ontario). This is a school stub that AMIB edited to demonstrate for us what he believes is an acceptable stub. The version of the stub that I had created is here (note the use of references throughout to fully WP:CITE the information I gathered). The latest version of that stub was edited by AMIB (see the history).

The question (from my talk page) now becomes:

So if adding a single small fact to a stub -- even the fact that the school has recently purchased a jungle gym like you did to the example article above -- is all that matters, state exactly that in the proposal! The proposed guideline would be very much simplified, down to just a single paragraph, and I'm certain you'll get a lot more people agreeing to it than the situation you have now.

Polarized discussion and non-neutral proposal

AMIB also asked me Do you feel that this proposal is essentially misguided?, and further in our discussion I pointed out the following which I think several people should read:

The premise of the guidelines is to set the bar so high that all of the stubs would get deleted or moved out of article space. As long as this continues to be the goal of the proposal, and you and various other people revert or refuse to accept input from people who are actually working on school articles, then there isn't anything else we can do. Take a look at the conflict this causes, and how divided the views are between people who work on schools and people who haven't worked on school articles: these two comments are side-by-side on the proposal's talk page:
  • I don't see the intention as limiting the articles contributed on schools. JzG
  • I can't help see this guideline as an attempt to limit the inclusions of schools in Wikipedia Wakemp
Obviously -- to me anyway -- there is something very wrong with the proposal when people cannot even agree on the effects or the intention of the proposal! If the proposal was neutral in it's intent, then people wouldn't be so polarized.

--Stephane Charette 00:11, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

The goal of the proposal is to resolve the issue of the unexpandable stubs. Any demonstration of expandability protects a stub. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 00:19, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Then in that case, there is no more problem, because every stub can be expanded into acceptable articles. For example, the article that you brought up to standard, Delhi Public School (Ontario), a few days ago looked like this, which I'm certain everyone will agree looked like an unexpandable stub. You and I with just a few edits have taken it to an acceptable level.
I suggest we simplify the entire proposal to reflect what we're trying to accomplish. --Stephane Charette 00:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Question: did you actually compair the two versions of Delhi Public School (Ontario)? Besides directory information, the only fact added is about some recently obtained "Jupiter Climber". Hence, until now this article is a case in point of an unexpandable stub. -- Koffieyahoo 01:52, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Continuing, and suggested reading

I realize that AMIB has just posted a comment seeming to indicate he's no longer interested in this proposal (edit summary: "fuck it"), but I would like to see what we can do now that everyone has been forced into this position.

However, prior to doing more, I'd personally like to read up on the guidelines that other projects have adopted. There have been several linked in various comments above. My thoughts at this point would be to read through them and cherry-pick from the work that has already been done by various group on Wikipedia.

Reading material for tonight include:

  • WP:MUSIC -- This page gives some rough guidelines which we might use to decide if a musical topic is notable.
  • WP:CORP -- This page gives some rough guidelines which Wikipedia editors use to decide if a company, corporation or other economic entity should have an article on Wikipedia.
  • WP:BIO -- it is the opinion of many Wikipedians that these criteria are a fair test of whether a person has sufficient external notice to ensure that they can be covered from a neutral point of view based on verifiable information from reliable sources, without straying into original research (all of which are formal policies)

Anyone else have further helpful reading material? Thanks. --Stephane Charette 00:54, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Speaking of WP:CORP, you may find it interesting to read the page history from before this was moved into Wikipedia: space. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 00:57, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Where do I get that? --Stephane Charette 00:59, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Ok, got it. Wikipedia:Schools/Defunct and Wikipedia talk:Schools/Defunct. --Stephane Charette 01:06, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I mean the fact that this proposal began life as a cut and paste of WP:CORP, which I adapted to apply to schools before I moved it to this name. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:03, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Has anyone found a guideline or policy on communitity factilities; sports facilities, hospitals, schools, cemeteries, and airports - it would seem to me that similar rules would apply to all these. Wakemp 02:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
It seems to me a set of guidelines related to WP:CORP would be best. I support the guidelines at the top of this article. I've just been doing some New Page patrolling, there are an insane number of school stubs being created at the moment, and I think we really need a set of agreed-upon guidelines soon Lurker talk 14:44, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
WP:CORP doesn't really apply in the same way to public bodies and facilities, I found proposals for WP:ORG which could be expanded to schools, churches, etc but they don't really want to go there and WP:HOTELS which seem to be going down the same track. I guess my question is are their Guidelines for other public facilities (hospitals, airports, churchs, stadiums), if not - why not? By broadening the discussion away from 'just schools' it may be more likely to get a useful result. Wakemp 23:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
All of the guidelines/proposals mentioned accept the fact that not everything is going to be notable or encylopedic. With schools, that is the crux of the problem. Some editors do not consider any school to lack notability. Hence any proposal to identify objective criteria is not acceptacle to some editors. Vegaswikian 07:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Agree. Given its use on AFD notability is a likely to be an inflammatory term; we could better describe these criteria as requirements for a free-standing article rather than notability requirements. Specifically the proposal should emphasize that these criteria are related to the organization of information and that the inclusion of information is not being challenged. Christopher Parham (talk) 13:40, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Disagree, I never got the sense that the 'all schools are notable' is the default standard of most people, it certainly isn't mine. But you give me an all or nothing kind of choice and I am forced into that position because it is used as the primary argument in every AfD on the subject. There seems to be many areas of content that do not use the standard of notability and attempts to apply that subjective standard in a guideline fails far more often than it suceeds. Wakemp 15:18, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

need to reword top of the project page

I currently have the following problem with the project page:

  1. This page is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. -> This is no longer proposed. The person who proposed it has stepped away, has apologized for opening up this can of worms, and doesn't want to be involved anymore. We need to come up with something new.
  2. This guideline in a nutshell: Wikipedia articles about schools should show the existence of non-trivial coverage of that school to allow for the creation of a complete article. -> This statement is not agreed upon, and is one of the root causes as to why this proposal has failed. I would like this removed until we come up with something that is agreed upon.
  3. This is a work in progress. Editors are encouraged to improve it and discuss ideas on the talk page. -> I had edited this to say Prior to quoting or using this page as a reference on Wikipedia, please see the talk page as this proposal is currently stalled., but has since been reverted.

While we regroup and figure out where this proposal is going, I really would like something on the page to indicate that this is not (yet) a proposal, not (yet) a guideline, shouldn't be quoted, and certainly shouldn't be used for decisions like speedy delete and/or AfD. If no-one comes up with a better suggestion, I propose putting back the sentence I had up there earlier today about not quoting or using the page as reference. --Stephane Charette 04:56, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

No, the nature of a "proposed" guideline is that it's a work in progress. If we can have some slightly calmer discussions then there is no need for an extra disclaimer. - brenneman {L} 05:23, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
In that case, let us put back the previous proposal which people typically expect to be there and which AMIB moved to "/Defunct". My point in this is that I don't want to have AMIB's proposal in place of WP:SCHOOL since he quit after just 24 hours, and which contains text that is likely to cause issues, especially with people who are pro-school, seeing that many of our edits were actively reverted over the past 24 hours. On the other hand, if people trust my writing skills (I was the one who re-wrote most of WP:EiC in a span of about 72 hours) I could also come up with my own proposal and put it in place so it can be discussed. --Stephane Charette 06:06, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
This proposal is very mild, is completely in line with Wikipedia policy, and sets an incredibly low bar for inclusion. The only problem is that there is a perception of factionalisation, and that there is odd resistance to merging. It's quite mysterious to me. - brenneman {L} 07:27, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Then I suggest you read the comment I posted above about Peel District School Board. That should explain to you and everyone else who hasn't worked on school articles why merging into the school board doesn't work. --Stephane Charette 18:14, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
I've worked on school articles and i think merging can work very well. The microstub can still exist as a redirect so the page is ready for improvement when the right person comes a long. the redirect can be housed in a category for those that wish to improve and write up the articles such as Category:Redirects_from_school_articles. The reality of school microstubs is that they can stay that way for a long time until they go to AfD. As such they are out of context often with nothing linking to them. the redirect category has two advantages. Users who continually send microstubs to AfD can encouraged to merge them and categorise them in the redirect group rather than trying to get them deleted. All the time saved from the endless squabbling on AfD can then be used to improve the schools in the redirect list. How can this not be a win win situation. School district pages get renovation, school articles get improved and the arguments stop. I really don't see any grounds for objecting to such a proposal?
The alternative is to continue using Afd as the school improvement drive. And argue bitterly while the improvements are in progress. Anyone that thinks this is preferable is not looking at this from a lost productivity perspective. David D. (Talk) 15:23, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Agree strongly. This is similar to many existing and established inclusion guidelines - better than some in that it also includes details of how to fix the articles if they don't meet the criteria. Consensus does not mean unanimity, if there is a minority view we are entitled, after taking due note of it and doing our best to understand where it is coming from, to disagree with the minority and move on. Just zis Guy you know? 10:13, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Aaron has hit the nail on the head with regards to how I feel. I think that the overriding prerogative in this case is to establish a largely acceptable Wikipedia standard for articles of this given variety, so that the community is not forced to express consensus opinion again and again in a waste of time. I am also similarly confused by claims of factionalism, cheerleading, and opposition to merging Aaron has observed above. I can only express my concern that editors will recognize this effort for what it is- an attempt to create a mutual understanding regarding a contentious, controversial topic. --Kuzaar-T-C- 13:23, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

"Wikipedia articles about schools should show the existence of non-trivial coverage of that school to allow for the creation of a complete article. -> This statement is not agreed upon, and is one of the root causes as to why this proposal has failed. I would like this removed until we come up with something that is agreed upon." — In fact, that Wikipedia should not have individual articles where there is no source material to permit the article to ever progress beyond a stub has always been policy here. It is in our Wikipedia:Deletion policy. Uncle G 11:36, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

  • Where? Kappa 11:41, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Extracurricular activities

To me a key element that makes schools below the collegiate level notable is their extracurricular activities. I'd like to see this captured in some manner in the criteria. For example:

  • The school participates in the highest level of the state, province or regional competitions in at least three extracurricular activities. These can include, for example, sports teams, band competitions, cheerleading competitions, engineering contests, and so forth. In addition, the school has won at least two regional championships or one national championship in any of these activities.

By highest level I mean, for example, "Class A" high school football leagues. Would this make sense? Or is it already covered by item (3) in part (1)? Thanks. — RJH (talk) 14:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I think awards for extracurricular activities are sufficiently different from awards for teaching to merit a separate entry in the guidelines. I think adding something like the above suggestion is a good idea Lurker talk 14:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
It may be a little premature, but I've added it to the criteria. Please comment on it Lurker talk 14:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I think the combination of news stories and extracurricular achievements can make this sufficiently inclusive that most properly-developed, big-city high schools will make the cut. So that will bring it closer to the typical AfD consensus, and hopefully make the discussions therein less contentious. — RJH (talk) 17:01, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

On series of related articles

I've added a further criteria for school articles that are part of a series grouping together school from a school district or school board. The 1-sentence stubs we're trying to eliminate are not part of a series of related articles, they are stand-alone stubs. By adding this criteria, it will allow school projects like WP:EiC to work on or focus on articles that compromise an area, without fear of having those articles deleted as we're working on them. --Stephane Charette 18:18, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I believe that this would seriously satisfy anyone who is working on school articles. I don't mind when badly-written lone school articles are deleted, and have abstained from voting several times in the last few months since I've joined Wikipedia when such articles came up for deletion. What I'd like to save, is when an editor like myself picks a region, a province, a state, or a specific school board to improve, and as the various articles get improved and reworked, they come up for deletion. This has happened twice now to BC schools since I joined WP:EiC. Can we work on this part of the proposal to somehow make it work for both school editors and those who really want a way to delete sub stubs without turning it into a battle every time? --Stephane Charette 18:22, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
My problem with the most recent addition to the proposal is that it allows for unexpandable stubs. Perhaps more correctly would be to say that my complaint is in regards to schools whose stubs will be expandable when something notable happens to them. I can appreciate wanting information to be kept. However, I think that even in consideration of your above reasons for opposing merges, that the way it would turn out (without merges) is with a tiny smattering of unexpandable information on a handful of schools spread over an abnormally large number of articles, instead of in one article that has an acceptable level of content. A Wiki project's utility lies in being able to divide units of information into easily digestible pieces, but taking it to such an extreme level in which you have little more than an entry gleaned from a survey is unconscionable toward interested users of that information. --Kuzaar-T-C- 19:41, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
How does anyone know if a stub about a school is unexpandable? Not all newspapers and journals are online. --Usgnus 19:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
The argument about unexpandable stub can stop now. No need to keep up the myth. Take a look at what happened yesterday between the "unexpandable stub" (previous version), and how AMIB and myself in a short time turned it into a very workable school stub article, seen here: Delhi Public School (Ontario). Stop thinking in terms of "no-way-is-every-school-somehow-expandable" and instead start thinking about we get a proposal together that will allow us to work on school articles yet at the same time allow sub stubs and discarded orphaned school articles to be deleted easily. In my opinion, if a school article has editors working on it as part of a series of articles, then the same transformation that happend yesterday with Delhi Public School can be allowed to happen for schools that are part of a chain of related articles. This is the work I'm trying to protect. --Stephane Charette 20:34, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Are you arguing that all school district should have a template to give the individual school stubs context? Similar to the one used in the example you cite for the Delhi Public School (Ontario) that is in the Grand_Erie_District_School_Board? David D. (Talk) 07:45, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
That's a fine example of an expandable stub. It's also an anecdote, and by no means is the norm for other school articles. If it were, there would be no need for this proposal. --Kuzaar-T-C- 17:44, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

What is the goal of the proposal

In this section, I don't want to discuss the content of the future propsed guideline, I want to discuss instead the goal.

  1. We need a way to delete school articles if they don't pass a certain criteria. (AfD is painful, slow, and inefective for schools since they can easily end in "non-consensus".)
  2. Editors want to prevent all school stubs from being deleted, and want to ensure we're not prevented from creating articles.
  3. Do we want the proposal to say what goes into a school article? I think this would be wrong, as it isn't the place of the guideline to describe what goes into the article, but instead simply list agreed-upon things that can be used to determine...? To determine what?

PROBLEM: My assumption here is that all schools have enough information that exist about them in the real world to somehow make a great Wikipedia article. So worded differently which I think points out the issue even more for Wikipedia, I believe that all schools are notable. This is my assumption, and one which this proposal must somehow address:

  • If we assume that all schools are notable, but the information in the Wikipedia article fails to describe how/why it is notable, what happens next?
    • For example, when I tag articles for speedy-delete and use templates like {{db-bio}}, it is perfectly acceptable for users to re-create the article with lots more information which then leaves no doubt that Tom Cruise is notable.
    • The important distinction here is the argument does not become "schools are NN", the argument is "the article as it is written fails to describe how or why the school is N". When we try to use the argument "schools are NN", then the implied meaning is no matter what we write, it is NN and doesn't deserve an article. I believe this needs to stop for the various camps to eventually come to an agreement.
  • If we assume that not all schools are notable, then I predict we wont ever come to an agreement as part of the mindset for people working on schools is definitely that schools are N.

A slight shift in the thinking behind the proposal is that we're not working on a proposal to decide which schools are notable, but whether or not the current state of an article on a school is notable.

Question: is the entire purpose of the guideline to determine if a school article (not a school!) is notable? And if NN, then the article gets speedily-deleted? --Stephane Charette 21:36, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

  • I was under the impression that Deletion is a process used when the topic itself is unfit for Wikipedia and that improvement was the correct course of action when the content of the article is deficient. Do I misunderstand the issue, or am I correct and this is a proposal to change the scope of the Deletion process? --Dystopos 21:59, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
IMHO, I feel that the goal is to prevent
  • Acrimonious AfD debates that serve no purpose
  • A proliferation of really tiny school stubs that aren't going to be expanded anytime soon.
Non-notability is generally not a criterion for deletion except in specific cases. Deficient content is never a reason to delete an article (although in both cases other remedies, such as merging, are available). I don't think the proposal has ever been worded to indicate that school articles, except for really bad ones, should be deleted; most people seem okay with merging (although see my new section I'm going to add shortly below).
I'm not sure either that we can ever come to an agreement on notability. In order to get around that problem, I reworded the guideline yesterday to remove any reference to notability. I notice now that that section's back, so probably someone disagrees. My personal opinion is that these goals can be better met by suggesting how and when to create school articles and what to put in them, rather than attempting to define what schools are notable or not notable. It sounds to me that you disagree with both approaches. If you have a better approach or even if you don't, feel free to voice your opinion here or to edit the proposal to make it suit your needs better. JYolkowski // talk 22:06, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't want to give up on N just yet, as I'm getting up to speed on what WP:MUSIC and WP:BIO attempted to do with notability. I would really hope that we can leave the content of school articles to the individual projects that govern school articles. I wouldn't want a guideline on Wikipedia that specifically tells me a school article must have a section on teachers, a section on students, a section on after-school-activities, etc... Then the guideline can simply state what is needed to pass the notability test, we can get rid of things like beefstew, and finally have an easy-to-use guideline that allows us to work on school articles yet allow us get rid of sub stubs if an owner (meaning either editor or project) of an article cannot be located. --Stephane Charette 22:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Thank you for your reply. I'm not sure about my opinion yet, or if I even think I need to have one. I am interested in the issues at play, and I especially appreciate that you have opened a discussion on the goals of the proposed guidelines. Let me follow up with your response by noting that Merging and redirecting do not require an AfD and I don't see that it requires new guidelines. Has there been an objection to dealing with substubs by merging whatever tidbit is contributed and redirecting them to appropriate parent articles (either the school system or the location)? --Dystopos 23:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    • You're absolutely right, merging and redirecting doesn't require new guidelines or AfD discussions. However, I see this proposal more as suggesting ways of doing things that people might not think of offhand rather than creating brand-new ways of doing things. JYolkowski // talk 22:10, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Straw poll on merging

I've always felt that merging tiny school stubs into a parent (district, board, etc.) article is a good way of dealing with them, and I've felt that this was a reasonable, widely-held compromise position. I've seen some discussion above that would seem to indicate that this position is not as widely-held as I might believe. So, I'd like to have a little straw poll here to get a feel for what the people discussing this proposal think. Like all straw polls, this is completely non-binding and is just to get a feel for how much support or opposition there is to the statements, and as a means of starting discussion. P.S. Feel free to reword the statements if you can get them to sound better. TIA, JYolkowski // talk 22:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Statement #1: Considering only the overall quality of the encyclopedia, having a number of small articles is inferior to having one larger article on a parent topic that would incorporate all of the information in the child articles.

Support
  1. JYolkowski // talk 22:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  2. Usgnus 22:20, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  3. Agreed if the "parent" school board article is also a stub or not much more than a list of schools. --Stephane Charette 22:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  4. In fact the often means creating the school board article and creates more work. However, it is worth it since there is more context than can be gained from a micro stub. David D. (Talk) 05:23, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
  5. See Wikipedia:Summary style. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
  6. Provided that school name redirects to the parent article are not discouraged. RJH (talk) 16:13, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  7. This is the way the school distict article should have been created in the first place. Not just as a list of schools, but a place to gather information about the schools so that someday they could be complete enought to build an article from the material collected in the district article. Vegaswikian 16:23, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  8. Kafziel 16:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Oppose
  1. Opposed if the "parent" article to merge into are fully-developed articles like TDSB Waterloo Catholic District School Board --Stephane Charette 22:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
In that case, couldn't we simply create an article titled something like "List of schools in the Waterloo Catholic District," with a summary section and link in the WCDSB article? That's what I would expect people to do. -- Visviva 04:53, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Statement #2: Where the parent topic is a school district, school board, other association of schools, or a community, and the child topic is a school, there are other considerations that are more important than article quality when deciding whether to have one larger article or many smaller ones. If you vote support, an explanation of why would be appreciated.

Support
  1. Agreed, since a fully-written article on the school board is about the school board itself, the financials, the decisions, the people, the area, etc. The individial school is just one very small part of the school board -- we shouldn't see the school boards as merely containers filled with the details of their schools. For example, an article on "New York" shouldn't just be filled with details of all the cities in the state of New York -- those cities are just one tiny part of what makes New York. --Stephane Charette 22:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  2. I think I agree, although the wording is very confusing. In view of the comments above & below, I would rephrase this to something like "Even when it is appropriate to merge, school information should not be indiscriminately merged into unrelated articles. If no appropriate superordinate article exists for community/district X, a "List of schools in X" article should be created." -- Visviva 04:53, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Oppose
  1. JYolkowski // talk 22:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  2. In response to Stephane Charette (above), I agree. I think articles should be on school districts, not school boards; articles on school boards should also be merged into a separate heading under the main district article, but kept distinct because they are not synonymous with the district as a whole. Kafziel 16:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Not applicable because I opposed statement #1

Comments on Merging Proposal

From an organizational unit point of view School Boards may be the parent articles of schools but from a practical point of view I think the real parent is the City, Town, or Community. This leads to a problem we had with classifying School districts. In urban areas where a school district is diectly associated with a single municipality or county it may not be a big deal. In rural areas where a SD spans 6-10 communities it is more likely to have people looking for information about the community, than the school district. If I was given the either/or choice there I would suggest the school information be merged with the community not the (SD)organization because that is more likely to be how people would look for it in an encylopedia. Wakemp 22:48, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Good point. I've updated question #2 to reflect that. Looking beyond the straw poll, this may be a useful insight, and that possibly people aren't disagreeing with merging per se, but with the suggested targets. JYolkowski // talk 22:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I tend to agree with the line of thinking here, but do not completely support either stated opinion. I think that the general practice of merging and redirecting substubs to parent articles is correct if you are not prepared to expand and improve the article yourself. I also think that giving thought to where to point the redirect is worthwhile. The threat of having random tidbits about particular schools added to polished articles about districts rings a bit hollow, as that is properly a matter for the editors of those articles to hash out. I would rather that information which is contributed to Wikipedia in good faith be preserved, even if it's in a clumsy place for a while. (Perhaps, for example, the editor who takes pride in the well-made district article would be willing to create a separate article for Schools in the ____ District as a place to collect minor data for later expansion into individual articles.) --Dystopos 23:16, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    • So it sounds like merge targets of [[Schools in school district]] or possibly [[Schools in community]] are better than a merge target of the school district itself. Other thoughts? JYolkowski // talk 23:28, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    • I think the issue is problematic, which is why I believe the best choice is a well developed article for a school. The recent AfD activity has lead me to believe that regardless of the amount of factual content you have a school is either notable or not - and if not should be deleted. I would like to offer up my own contributions as an example, please view School District 5 Southeast Kootenay as well as Cranbrook, British Columbia and Sparwood, British Columbia and tell me what you think a notability and/or merge guideline would do in a case like this Wakemp 23:45, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I don't think that [[Schools in school district]] or possibly [[Schools in community]] is necessarily a better target, but I can see where, in some few cases, an editor may want to distinguish the schools from the district or community that supports them. Regarding the issue of AfD and notability, is there an example of a non-notable school which, when its name is typed into the search box, should return the result "No page with that title exists. You can create this article or request it." INSTEAD of redirecting to another article on a notable topic which can provide context or even contain some information about that school? --Dystopos 23:58, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Assuming that the school name doesn't need disambiguation, I would personally say no, redirects are cheap. (Can't decide what to do if disambiguation is required). I've also changed the proposal so that the merge targets are [[Education in community]] instead of the school boards/districts. Not sure whether how much better that is, but at least it addresses the objections above. JYolkowski // talk 23:16, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
  • From the Afd discussions, it appears that quite a few editors distinguish between secondary/high schools and primary/elementary schools. Would it make sense to have separate articles for each high school, regardless of "notability" but merge the elementary schools without enough content for a separate article? --Usgnus
    • I agree, but I personally feel that that'll fall naturally out of the merging suggestion, so that it doesn't need to be stated explicitly. Because high schools have so much more that can be said about them, the information about them will become sufficiently large for their own article that much sooner. JYolkowski // talk 23:16, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Yes, I agree. Brief (< 1-2 paragraph) articles on High Schools that don't meet the criteria should still be considered for a merge. If they then become large enough to consider forking but still don't meet the criteria, somebody should take a pair of shears to all the fluff. Merged school articles take up less of everybody's time in AfD. :-) — RJH (talk) 18:38, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Took a quick look

I took a quick look at the latest version of the proposal. #6 ("The school article is part of a series of similarly-maintained articles related to a specific school board or school district") seems to overtly encourage the creation of multiple demographic stubs.

Less seriously. #7, #8, and #10 could really use some examples, similar to the examples on WP:CORP. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 05:53, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Schools are "frequently" important to their communities

Do we have any evidence for this biased opening statement? In areas with higher levels of urbanisation (eg, Europe, Australia, etc) the presence of a school in a "community" passes without a blip to most people. Because there is another school within two kilometers, and another three within five. - brenneman {L} 11:38, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

  • Do you know anything about property values? Kappa 19:29, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Yes, schools can have an effect on property values, but is that encylopedic? Being near a garbage transfer station can also affect properity values, so does that become encylopedic also? In some areas, it is not the school that matters, but the school district. The bigger question is how supportable is that statement. While it is very clear that schools are important to some, it is not clear that schools are important to communities. If this were true, then they would receive all of the funding that they would like from the community. Since they do not, their level of their importance is questionable and very subjective. Vegaswikian 19:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Hospitals are very important to communities and do not receive all of the funding that they would like. --Usgnus 20:02, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
      • In my community a swimming pool has a far greater impact on those who live nearby than a school does, simply because there are less of them. And really, the use of the word "community" is a biased one as well. Groups of people whom happen to live close together do not automatically form communities. - brenneman {L} 23:12, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
      • (Vegaswikian comment)- I don't think we want to measure inclusion by operating revenue, although schools and hospitals likely have the highest operating budgets of any facility in all but the biggest urban centres, (Aaron) - the definition of community is a significant issue for me, in BC we define "a community is anywhere in British Columbia with a place name and either a public school, a library, or a healthcare facility."Connecting Communities:Report of the Premier's Technology Council So from my point of view Schools define communities Wakemp 00:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Using that definition, my community should merit an article because we have a health care facility and a school. I would guess that my commmunity is about 750 homes and maybe 3,000 residents. Communities are a very loosely defined term so maybe not using that in a guideline would be best. Vegaswikian 02:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
          • If your point is that you should write an article on your community, then I agree. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:42, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Places of local interest

I've thought about the addition I made to this proposal and I felt that it might make more sense if it were generalised to other places of local interest, like masts, railway stations, and the like. So, I've created Wikipedia:Places of local interest. If you're interested, please edit it or comment on it. Thanks, JYolkowski // talk 14:55, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

The sum of all human knowledge

If Wikipedia is to become the sum of all human knowledge, articles on school districts should always be kept seperate from articles about school districts, school board, or cities. I think Dystopos said it best: A look at the types of articles that have repeatedly survived VfD should make this conversation completely moot. You can not possibly argue that an actual educational institution with a history, a building, a faculty, and a body of students is less important than a fictional planet with a few mentions in a Star Wars expanded universe novel or the 16th episode of season two of NBC sitcom Will & Grace, a intentional spoonerism used in a Nintendo 64 game for comic effect, or pop singer Mandaryna's cover of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name". Please. We're wasting our breath.

Schools directly impact the lives of thousands of people, even if they're only around for 10 years or so. Schools have a much greater impact than the examples above, or a town in Alaska with 21 residents. Any place that hundreds or thousands of people lived in for years would have an article here and no one would object. All schools are notable enough to be included. All this policy would do is give an excuse for a large number of articles to be deleted. --Daniel Olsen 05:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Surely you realise that an emotive plea like that adds exactly zero to this ongoing discusion? Clearly there exist a number of reasonable people here who disagree with you. Either you're willing to work with them in finding a solution that all are equally unhappy with, or not. And if you're going to parrot exactly what someone else says, please just use a diff next time, there's a letter shortage. - brenneman {L} 05:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your reply helps the discussion either. Forgive me for trying to add my two cents, I'll leave you all to find your unhappy solution. --Daniel Olsen 18:53, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Where does the deleted part come into it? David D. (Talk) 05:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

50 year rule

Certainly here in the UK 50 years is no great age for a school. Indeed, as time passes all schools will eventually become notable by this criterion. I would go along with 100 years, possibly 80, but 50 is way too short. TerriersFan 02:39, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, not all of us live in the UK. Here in North America, 50 years is a long time for a school to exist. I'd like to see us reduce this to even less than 50 as that pretty much cancels all schools in many regions. For example, I know that the city I live in (Kelowna, in the BC interior in western Canada) has all relatively new schools where almost all of them are less than 50 years old. Making the number so high pretty much disqualifies this as a valid usable criteria for my corner of the world. It all depends on geography. --Stéphane Charette 03:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
Meanwhile, you'll also get other comments from people who try to humbly claim that 1000-year-old schools are (and I quote!) "borderline notable":
See my old school for a school which I consider borderline notable. Just zis Guy you know? 07:32, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
--Stéphane Charette 03:53, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
In truth, I don't think that this is a valid criterion - Schools should stand or fall by their notability and age alone shouldn't come in to it. My old primary school is easily over 50 years old and I can't think of a less notable school (apart from the fact that I went there :-) ). TerriersFan 04:27, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
Using a higher number does not disqualify any school. It simply means that the school needs to meet another criteria. If the school is notable and has been around 50-100 years then it should be able to meet another criteria. One of these days I'll get around to writing articles on a few of the old notable school buildings here. They are notable since they are listed as registered historic places. Personally 100 years is fine. Vegaswikian 06:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

The idea behind this proposal is to ensure that articles about schools have enough verifiable information about them. The idea behind 50 or 100 or whatever number of years is not to claim that a school is somehow "special" once it reaches that age, but to claim that, once a school has reached that age, enough sources will exist to verify the article. Since the United Kingdom and North America are both highly literate societies, it's likely that the same number is appropriate for both societies.

As an aside, I would suggest that 50 years is too low, at least for secondary schools; there's a high school in my community that hasn't even opened yet (until Tuesday) but already meets criteria #1 of the proposal. JYolkowski // talk 23:53, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with your points. The point of issue is the "great likelihood of—but greater difficulty of uncovering—non-trivial historical coverage of that school". Not just the age. But the statement seems more likely to be true if we set it to an age of 100 years ago, or 1906. Uncovering information from the last 50 years shouldn't be as difficult. Many communities have had libraries for that length of time. — RJH (talk) 18:25, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

This criterion is a bad one. Its aim is directly counter to what encyclopaedists should be doing. Editors should be looking for sources. A criterion whose whole purpose is to permit, and even encourage, editors to not look for sources, is a bad criterion. One of the problems with the schools debate is editors employing personal, subjective, and arbitrary, criteria, instead of employing the proper study of encyclopaedists: sources. A criterion with an arbitrary cut-off date for age is yet another such subjective, arbitrary, criterion, and a bad one to have. As JYolkowski points out, the primary criterion actually encompasses a vast number of schools. It's the best criterion to employ. All that one needs to do to satisfy it is to cite some non-trivial published works, no subjective arguments about importance or cut-offs with arbitrary values required. Uncle G 11:09, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I think that when in doubt age should be used as a reason to move towards keeping (under the presumption that it indicates that there may be notable data) but should never be used by itself. In any event, 50 years is not enough even in many parts of the US. For example, in a lot of New England many or most schools are easily 50 years old. JoshuaZ 01:49, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Something needs to be done

I am 100% for a proposal like this. Just as an example, Miami dade schools seems to think that every school, including elementary ones, are notable for an article. That's just absurd. Most of the school articles I see seem to have a NPOV slant and are used as blogs/ads for the schools themselves. It's like a school having their own website, and it gives them publicity, even if the school is usually not notable in a nationwide sense. I don't want to hear the arguments that "WP is the sum of all human knowledge", that's just a tagline, not an excuse to create mindless crap articles about everything that has ever existed. Who cares is someone put a lot of work into an article? If it isn't notable, it should be removed, post-haste. The amount of work someone puts into an article should not be related to weather it should be there in the first place. And just because thousands of articles may be put up for deletion is no reason to not have guidelines for this sort of thing. We should do whatever it takes, even if it's a bit massive, to make this place more relevant and reliable. I hope that this proposal takes place in the very near future. Renosecond 22:55, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

  • You're free to execute the proposal now by merging such content into an article on a broader topic. If this proposal passes it's unlikely to result in many articles being actually deleted, however. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:01, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Doing merging on school districts and such is doable and I would be for that. I don't think it's a huge problem yet, as not every school has a page (probably a very small %), I just don't like that many of the pages aren't conformed to the NPOV and some use it as a way to promote their schools and get free publicity and such. Look at the previous edits for Ridgewood High School (Florida), that what I am afraid of. Renosecond 23:08, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Regarding merging, I would like to second Christopher Parham's opinion. You will usually get very few if any objections about a merge, while an AfD often gets messy and rarely succeeds. Also note that the proposal doesn't say anything about deletion, so if you want schools to be deleted, this proposal won't help you. As for the NPOV stuff, a lot of other valid topics start out as total dreck too; this isn't unique to schools. As with any other topic, the solution is to edit the article appropriately, or minimally tag it for cleanup etc. JYolkowski // talk 23:57, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
      • In the UK we don't have school districts, and for all I know that may apply to every country in the world except the USA. It is really rather offensive when attempts are made to impose proposals designed for the U.S. on a global encyclopedia. Piccadilly 01:53, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
        • Probably a better merge target would be the community in question, not a school district article. This could apply to both schools in the UK and the USA. There was some discussion above about merge targets above. JYolkowski // talk 20:40, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
        • Whilst there is a lot of systemic bias to the arguments that some editors make, there are two things that you need to consider. First: The U.K. has local education authorities. Second: Many schools in the U.K. are most of the way to satisfying the primary notability criterion here, because they have an Ofsted report written about them. An Ofsted report is a non-trivial published work that is from a source independent of the subject. Uncle G 11:23, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Nothing needs to be done

There have been hundreds of failed attempts to delete articles about schools and there is no need to waste any more time on this matter. It is far too late to go through another round of denunciations of the de facto consensus. Piccadilly 01:51, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

  • This entire discussion and the new project page was started on the same day that AMIB speedily deleted "a ton" of school articles, as described in his words here. --Stéphane Charette 10:15, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
    • Well we aren't discussing reform to the ""Very short articles providing little or no context" criterion for speedy deletion, so that isn't really relevant. Kappa 10:19, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
  • There is no consensus, de facto or otherwise. Portraying the state of affairs up until now as a consensus is a gross misportrayal of the situation. Part of what is good about these criteria is that, just as the WP:CORP criteria did for the discussion of companies and corporations, they will push the schools debate away from editors making subjective judgements of importance based upon personal and arbitrary criteria and on to looking for, reading, citing, and evaluating sources. Because that's what criterion #1 requires. Uncle G 11:28, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Please note that this proposal is not supposed to be about deletion. The point is not to delete any school information; the point is to decide when a school's current content can support a full article. Schools that don't meet the criteria but still have content can be merged into a relevant article. Unlike many corporate or band stubs, school stubs have a natural merge target since most schools are part of a governing district or town. Becuase merging has never really be seriously tested, there really is no consensus either way as to such merging; if there is, it is very likely in favor of carrying out the merges. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:16, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Los Angeles USD

For the reasons that I stated at Template talk:Los Angeles USD, Template:Los Angeles USD has been nominated for deletion. The template is already huge and ugly. Imagine it populated with all 1,035 LAUSD schools. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. BlankVerse 20:35, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Specific objections to the current proposal

I like most of this proposal. However, I object to some elements. I strongly object to condition 1 "subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the school itself" if one searches hard enough any school will satisfy this since local newspapers write puff-piece articles about schools all the time (as far as I am concerned, this is essentially a killer for this being a reasonable proposal. I also object to the 50 year criterion- 50 years is much too short if we are going to have a general age criterion. 3 has multiple problems- in some ways it is too broad and in other ways it is too narrow. 3 teams at a state level encompasses almost any well to do school, they should have to place at the state level. This is also too narrow because if a school had two teams at the national level or had a team in one thing that was repeatedly at the national level or had individual competitors who did not meet notability but competed at the national level (say for a spelling Bee) they should also be included but they won't be in this. I strongly object to comprehensive coverage condition 2 which would allow any school to be included as long as one approached the matter in a systematic form. It would also make a sort of almost sustemic bias for public schools over private schools since private schools are not generally part of a board or district. Other than these serious issues I think the current proposal is starting to look good. JoshuaZ 02:03, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

  • Excluding "subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the school itself" for schools is special pleading that schools must pass a higher bar than say corporations, people etc. Kappa 02:26, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
    • Not really it is based on the observation that schools more than other institutions have puff pieces written about them or about things they are doing. The standard makes sense for people and corporations because such puff pieces are comparatively rare in those cases. If puff pieces were common for those they wouldn't make sense there either. JoshuaZ 02:44, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
      • Well I'll just say that you're at completely the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of what to include than most people I've seen who support school articles. If you narrow down the criteria any more I fail to see how you're going to achieve a consensus. As it is the criteria may be a little too narrow for a positive majority. I'm just going by historical consensus here, per the large number of AfD polls on individual school articles. — RJH (talk) 19:19, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
        • That is the basis of the problem. If you want every school included you view restrictive guidelines as a problem. If you don't support every school being included then restrictive guidelines make sense. Without restrictions of some kind, any proposed guideline is not likely to gain consensus. The proposal needs to gain the support of both sides in the discussion. Vegaswikian 22:15, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm not arguing that we should do away with guidelines. I'm also not in favor of including every single school as a separate article. But these guidelines are only intended to determine whether a school gets its own article or is merged somewhere. Right? So I don't think we need to be that hard-core about the restrictions as long as that is true.
So looking at JoshuaZ's issue individually here:
  • News articles—The text specifically excludes trivial coverage. That would appear to exclude puff pieces in my mind. If not then it is up to JoshuaZ to clarify his criteria.
  • 50-year criteria—This is already being debated above, and I don't see a problem with changing it to, say, 100 years.
  • 3—This requires a two state or one national championship, so it's not that easy to satisfy. But this does allow for schools to distinguish themselves on the basis of excelling in some particular extracurricular activity. Most likely this will allow the inclusion of most large high schools in urban areas, which is what I was aiming for.
— RJH (talk) 16:08, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Almuni v. "multiple alumni"

What I thought was a clarification has been reverted which leaves me confused. So when we say alumni do we really mean an alumnus? If we mean two(which IMO makes far more sense both as a standard and as a reading of what we currently have) then the phrase "multiple alumni" is stricter. JoshuaZ 03:00, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I suppose this goes to the question of whether this guideline is demanding fully complete articles, from the first draft, or will permit stubs to grow later. Often information is found in pieces, and gathered from multiple places, by multiple people. If you delete an article with one alum, nobody will see the article, to add the second one. --Rob 04:03, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
This is often a problem with guidelines in general where a prong has a number greater than 1 involved in part of it (this comes up especially as an issue for WP:CORP, WP:BIO and WP:PROF). I think most editors understand that if there is a fraction of a criterion satisifed they should either let the article lie for a while or actively see if they can finish the prong. In any event, if we mean alumnus or alumna we should say so. JoshuaZ 04:07, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Unaccredited post secondary

A firm guideline must be put in place to prevent diploma mills from spamming wikipedia (example of one that was deleted:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Regent International University). As it reads now, postsecondary schools that are for profit must meet WP:CORP. But it is not easy to determine whether a school is for profit, especially none-US schools it is difficult(example: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Trinity School of Apologetics & Theology). However, it is easy, using online databases to tell if it is accredited, was accredited, or is a canidate for accreditation.

  • I propose it is changed to: All postsecondary schools that had, have, or are canidates for accreditation should be included. Those that are not accredited must meet WP:CORP.
This means all legitmate schools public and private, in the past or near future will be included. Those that lack proof of academic rigor are based on notability standards. That is, schools of questionable WP:V are rightfully left out. So institutes like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/International Institute of Management are treated per notability.

This is basically how things are treated now, but not how the guideline reads on the proposed policy.Arbusto 06:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree and would like to see this text placed in the guideline. This has been here for over a month and I don't see any objections. Does silence give consent in this case? --JaimeLesMaths (talk!edits) 00:23, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
No objections because Failed Consensus. You can't wait for people to drop off the discussion because there is no progress of any kind -- then validate your POV. Thanks; sorry if a bit harsh.--Ling.Nut 17:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, that completely was not what I was doing - I just came to this discussion yesterday via an AfD. I see now that the proposal has been rejected; does that mean we start again from square one? We really do need a guideline on this issue. --JaimeLesMaths (talk!edits) 20:44, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Reports by schools inspection agencies

Are not non-trivial in nature since by defintion any school has them. This would be like making tax returns and basic incorporation documents count as non-trivial sources for purposes of WP:CORP. JoshuaZ 14:12, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this proposal appears designed to admit nearly every school in existence. —Centrx→talk • 17:45, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
If this is true, why are users continuing to claim this is somehow a compromise from the previously failed guideline? This is ridiculous. JoshuaZ 20:12, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
It's a compromise because it seeks to ensure that articles on school have content beyond basic directory information. The point is to ensure an organizational scheme in which articles are not needlessly fragmented. This is not being achieved by the current process of continually making deletion proposals that will surely fail.
Obviously if your goal is to ensure that most school articles get deleted, this proposal isn't helpful. (It doesn't even recommend deletion for schools that don't meet the requirements.) Why anyone would have such an agenda, however, is a mystery. Christopher Parham (talk) 20:28, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm not in favor of the deletion of "most school articles" the majority of school articles we have would (in my view)meet a reasonable set of notability requirements. The ones which get to AfD are often the ones that don't. In fact, I doubt many school "inclusionists" want stubs which are just directory information either so it is hard to see what this is compromising. This doesn't change the fact that since all schools have inspection reports this will make every school almost automatically get an article. Given that the major disagreement is whether some of these schools should have articles at all a guideline which makes all of them have articles hardly constitutes a reasonable compromise. JoshuaZ 21:02, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
This is a compromise in the same way that "keep all schools, all schools are notable" is a compromise. In the UK, not only every school of any level but also every single nursery school has an OFSTED inspection. What this means is, in practical terms, that every single school, nursery school and playgroup in Britain - several tens of thousands of instutions - passes this guideline. Which is absurd. The real test should be: is there enough information for more than a small stub. If not, then it should be redirected to the community and discussed there. Guy 06:44, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I think it is fair to say that this proposal is going to fail just as the previous one did unless some actual standards are imposed. JoshuaZ 06:55, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I think your focus on arguing on the meaning of "trivial", misses the use of the word "multiple". One source may "count", but not be sufficient *alone*. Guy, you're in a way contradicting yourself. You discount reports based on them being so common. Yet, you say the purpose of the requirement is to have verifiable articles, that expand beyond stubs (e.g. be full length articles). We can disagree about how much the standard school reports should count, but we should be able to agree that "all things being equal" they do contribute in favor of the article. Countries with a higher degree of reliable reporting on schools, will have more schools that qualify for an article, and I see no problem with that. If we define notability based on how common something is, we should keep almost all articles on unaccredited grade schools in the UK, because they are (hopefully) uncommon. But, of course, we shouldn't since, while rare, they're also likely to be unverifiable. Also, lets keep in mind, not all government reports are created equal. Depending on the jurisdiction, and type of school, some are substantially more in-depth than others. --Rob 12:19, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
No it doesn't. If this counts as a non-trivial source then multiple becomes meaningless since everything starts at one source by default (and if one includes other basic government docs then every school probably easily gets 3 or 4 sources). JoshuaZ 17:39, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) Regarding the use of the word "compromise" above, guidelines are intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Their purpose is to reflect best practices that are already going on. While it's true that we keep almost all school articles (It's not true that we "keep all schools"; I personally deleted one yesterday), it can be useful to think about why almost no schools are deleted through AfD. Here's my list:

  • The longer and higher quality a school article is, the more likely people are to "vote" keep, assuming that the text meets content policies. For example, if an OFSTED report provides a lot of information about the school that then gets added to the article, it's more likely to be kept.
  • Nominators often don't use the best reason for deletion. Take a look at Wikipedia:Watch/schoolwatch/Schools for deletion archive, and especially the AfD debates for the redlinks. You'll notice that, in most of those debates, someone has raised serious WP:V concerns. In most of the bluelinks, none were raised in a timely manner, even for articles that might have such concerns.
  • Nominators often don't consider options such as merging and cleanup first. People who do merge school articles, particularly borderline ones, can usually do so with immunity.

Therefore, it makes sense for this guideline to reflect what works:

  • Emphasise that school articles should have the potential to be good, whether by showing that sufficient references are either available or likely to be so. Commonplace OFSTED reports should "count" in the guidelines because schools with these reports are more likely to be kept.
  • Encourage people to only nominate schools for deletion if they don't meet WP:V, WP:NOR or other such policies.
  • Encourage merging of mediocre school articles.

I think that the proposal covers these topics reasonably well (not perfectly yet). If anyone thinks there are any other points that haven't been covered, please speak up. JYolkowski // talk 22:07, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

    • People seem to have conflicting views on what this proposed guideline is supposed to do. I have now heard the claim that a) the guideline is some sort of "compromise with the inclusionists" and b) that it somehow is supposed to reflect what normally happens. If we can't even get the pro-WP:SCHOOLS people to agree what this i supposed to be doing we aren't going to get very far. And no, this precisely doesn't address the main issue of people who are in fact nominating schools, namely that many of these schools are simply non-notable and not encyclopedic (for crying out loud, we are now at the point where the elementary schools are closing as no consensus) JoshuaZ 02:26, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
      • There's a difference between reflecting "what normally happens" and reflecting "best practices that are already going on." What normally happens at the moment is not a best practice at all. The goal is to replace the unproductive AFD nominations with a more productive practice that is proven and known to be generally supported. This proposal doesn't waste time talking about the deletion of school content -- why suggest as a general policy something that has been rejected in hundreds and hundreds of specific cases? The proposal is intended to appeal to both sides of this dispute in that it will (1) reduce the number of short stubs on schools without sufficent verifiable information to support a whole article, while (2) reducing the number of contentious, time-wasting AFD debates on schools. Obviously, anyone who is dead set on the idea that this information should not be included won't find the proposal very appealing; nevertheless, even for them it could hardly be worse than the status quo. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:45, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
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