Talk:Oak Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio)

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[edit] Why merge/redirect is bad

I'm going ot elaborate on why a merge/redirect to a district article is bad. This is something of a repeat of talk page discussion.

• Articles in wikipedia should all be found via categories. This is critical to navigation. Redirects do not appear in categories
• Logically anybody looking for this school, would look in Category:High schools in Ohio if they don't find it, they'll assume it doesn't exist. They might:
  • Create a new school article (maybe with a slight spelling difference)
  • They may put info about the school in another article (e.g. the community, or "schools of ..." type article)
  • They may assume it's not here and give up
• Example: Suppose I'm editing a bio article, and I record that fact their an alumni of this school. I wish to to have a two-way link between the bio and the school. I probably won't find the school (if it's merged), and will never update the notable list, and hence, the info will never expand enough to warrant its own article (viscious cycle). Also, if I'm doing a bio article about somebody, I don't want to link to a district article, filled with irrelevant info, I just want to link the school of the person my bio article is about (as that's all my bio readers care about).
• How is somebody supposed to know which school district a school is in. The city I live is entirely within the boundries of four school overlapping school boards/districts. When, looking for a school, I wouldn't know which one to look in. In this case, I suppose there's just one district, but how are outsiders supposed to know this?
• What happens when somebody opens a private school or charter in the area, and an article is made? Where does that merge to? If district schools go to the district article, where on Earth are people supposed to look for private or charter schools? A private and public school can appear in the same category, but they can't both be in the district article (as it's obviously only for district schools).
• When this school is a redirect, the bio (or other) articles that link to it are likely to be "fixed" to avoid the redirect, by the countless people who do it as regular maintenance. Once the redirect is bypassed, the linkage between the bio and the school is lost. If the school article is ever spun-out separately, those links will point to the district article, not the school. --rob 14:41, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

1. The existence of a category does not dictate that all possible entries for that category should be created or exist independently. The inclusion of list articles such as list of high schools in Ohio in the category furthermore obviate any navigational problems for those schools that don't have independent articles and are mentioned elsewhere.
2. Why would someone be trying to find an article about a school in the first place if they don't even know where it is? They either a) know which school district it's in, in which case they'll find the school district article, b) know which community it's in, and the community article should mention what districts serve it, or c) can find either of those from the list article.
3. Preemptive redirecting is always the only solution to unnecessary duplication of article content under alternative names. Maintaining an article at a particular name instead of a redirect doesn't solve that, nor does its presence in a category, as there is no more guarantee that someone would search a category for its inclusion than a list article, or related topic such as the parent community article.
4. Private schools obviously have no district to be merged into; school districts are government entities, which consist of public schools as operating units. Though most private schools are likely to have substantial independent histories and statistics because of their very independence from a structure such as a school district, those that don't pose a problem to be solved, not a problem that justifies ignoring another problem.
5. Linking to redirected topics is not a problem specific to school articles, but a problem true of all articles that compile subjects of minimal content (see, e.g., List of minor Sith characters). One solution would be to end the "corrections" that remove links to redirects (a task of dubious worth that destroys the groupings of separate uses of the same topic), or, if/when the individual school article is split off into a separate article, just look at the "what links here" for the district article and check to see which ones should link directly to the article. The solution is not to abolish merging and redirecting so that every sub-topic of an article is branched off no matter how thin the content.

Furthermore, it is of questionable value to specify which public schools within a district an individual went to in their biographical article. How many articles list the elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools an individual went to? Why should they? Why would it be a better editorial decision to list "John Smith grew up in Boise, and attended Boise Early Childhood School, Boise Central Elementary, Boise Central Middle School, and Boise Central High School" instead of "John Smith grew up in Boise and attended Boise Central District Public Schools"? Even better would be "John Smith grew up in Boise and graduated from the Boise Central District Public School system."

See also my related comments on my talk page. Postdlf 01:39, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I read your talk comments also. Your making simplifying assumptions about school districts. Your approach can't be extended as a standard, since many communities (unlike this one) have multiple overlapping school districts (sometimes aligning, sometimes non-aligning boundries). I don't follow your logic on private schools, as you give no explanation where they would go. A school where I live could be in any of four different districts, be a charter, or be private. For many people, districts are an administrative detail they don't care about, and are barely aware of. Your founding assumption in mergers is individual schools aren't of interest to anybody. Of course, they are. This seems like an attempt to do through merge what can't be done through AFD. You seek to organize information on the basic assumption nobody is interested in it. Essentially, your approach seems to be: you can't throw something out, so you'll throw it on a pile in the basement, where nobody will find it.

Also, lots of people may be interested in where a bio subject went to school, but I don't suggest this is an absolute rule, to be applied everywhere. For instance, I wouldn't list every little town a famous person resided in, but I would always mention the town they were born in, and I *might* mention the town they spent a large chunk of their life, if appropriate. As an example, I think there's a relevant tie-in between Randolph School and Jimmy Wales, who probably benefited from school's early adoption of technology. --rob 06:05, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure you understand exactly what standard I'm talking about. I don't assume that individual schools aren't of interest to anybody. The particular subject matter is irrelevant to the standard I'm talking about. What I assume is that short, insubstantial articles are of no use to anyone and make Wikipedia look really bad, and that a short, insubstantial article about a school should be made useful by merging it into an article about its parent school district until such time as someone has done the research to expand it into an independent article. This is sensible editorial policy, and how Wikipedia is generally governed—that is my position, yet it is clearly not the position you are responding to. I think you have misunderstood, and so I would like you to reread my explanations and then re-comment.

I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying about "overlapping school districts." Are you claiming that some schools exist in more than one school district? Or are you claiming (rightfully) that some communities have more than one school district? If the former, could you give me examples in an off-site source so I can figure out how such a thing would work? If the latter, how does that affect this issue? Postdlf 06:19, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Here is the case in Alberta http://www.education.gov.ab.ca/ei/maps/. As I said above, this overlapping/parellel sytem doesn't apply in this case. But, lots of jurisdictions around the world have parellel types of schools boards. I like the idea of having a consistent approach for navigating through wikipedia, in order to find information. Also, in the US their are *lots* of private and charter schools, which you seem to regard as a minor exception. In fact, because most US states are divided into only single type of school districts, you tend to have lots more non-district schools (e.g. private and charter). Also, I notice a lot of "districts" in the US, are actually incredible small, and have just one type of school (e.g. only elementary). So, a single district article wouldn't even show all the public schools in their area, even in the US. The key thing we need to remember, is we're presenting info for people who don't already have the info. --rob 06:35, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

To clarify, I was saying one school can be inside the physical boundries of multiple school districts. However, it's governed in all cases by exactly one district board. --rob 06:43, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 08:33, 10 November 2007 (UTC)