Wikipedia:Schools/March 2007

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Schools are frequently important to their communities, and are often the subject of the sort of reliable published sources that are needed to complete an article. Wikipedia articles about schools should show that there is sufficient coverage of that school to allow for the creation of a complete article.

A school may be best handled in a separate article if it is the main subject of multiple reliable independent ¹ non-trivial ^{2 3 4} published works. If it is not, then it is likely that sufficient information to expand the article does not yet exist, and any verifiable information might best be merged and redirected to an article about the locality or school district in which the school resides.

A school may meet the criterion of being the principal subject of multiple reliable independent non-trivial published works in several ways:⁵

1. The school has been the focus of multiple non-trivial ³ published works whose source is independent of the school itself. This includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books,⁶ magazine articles, television documentaries, and reports by consumer watchdog organizations.²
2. The school has gained national recognition for its curriculum or program of instruction, or for its success at the national level in extracurricular activities such as art or athletics. For example, the school has been recognized with a notable national award, has won a science competition at the national level, or its athletic teams hold a nationwide record. Or, the school has gained recognition at the regional level on more than one occasion or in multiple such areas.⁷
3. The school has gained national recognition by virtue of its architecture or history. For example, the buildings used by some English schools have been classified by English Heritage as listed buildings and are included on the Images of England website, while some American schools are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Many schools have published histories. Details will be found in one of the online catalogues such as Worldcat or, for UK schools, COPAC.

Articles about schools that do not meet the above criteria may be unexpandable save for demographic data. Such articles may be merged into an article about their parent community. However, this is not an excuse to turn community articles into directory listings. See Wikipedia:Places of local interest for more suggestions for dealing with such articles. In general, even when a merger is non-optimal, it is preferable to make redirects out of small stubs and not delete the history, rather than to delete the articles.

In addition, Wikipedia is neither a directory nor a phonebook. Articles should not list upcoming events, phone numbers, schedules, etc.

[edit] Notes

• Note 1: Self-promotion is not the route to having an encyclopaedia article. The published works must be someone else writing about the school. (See Wikipedia:Autobiography for the verifiability and neutrality problems that affect material where the subject of the article itself is the source of the material.) The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the subject itself have actually considered the school notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works that focus upon it.
  • Any work (such as a school newspaper or an alumni journal) published by the school itself or by its staff, students, or faculty is not an independent source. While these works may be used, with appropriate care for verifiability and neutrality, to expand the article, they may not be considered an indicator of notability.
• Note 2: Non-triviality is partially a measure of the depth of content of a published work, and how far removed that content is from a simple directory entry or a mention in passing that does not discuss the subject in detail. However, in order to be non-trivial it must have some non-routine element. So anything that occurs for all schools such as a standard government report is by definition trivial.
• Note 3: "Trivial" can have several meanings in this context:
  • A source that merely mentions the name of the school in passing is trivial. (Eg. "Bob Smith, a student at Example Middle School, won the local poetry contest." — the primary subject of the piece is Bob Smith, but the school is only mentioned in passing, giving no basis for expanding the school's article.) In other words, if the school is not the primary focus of the work, that work is probably not a non-trivial source.
  • Directories of schools that offer nothing more than demographic data, or lists of staff and alumni that offer no content beyond names and graduation dates, are trivial. While the information they contain might prove useful to the article, and they can be used as a source for such information, they do not offer sufficient information to expand the article beyond a stub.
  • Brief mentions in news stories about common school events such as typical athletic matches, school performances, changes in staff or administration, etc., do not indicate any special notability for the school.
  • Standard government reports made on all or most schools, such as Ofsted reports.² These occur for the vast majority of schools and do not indicate that anyone has especially "taken note" of a given school. The information within them, however, can be of use if the school in question does have sufficient coverage elsewhere to establish notability.
  • Other works which would not meet Wikipedia's reliable source criterion.
• Note 4: The term "trivial" in this guideline should be interpreted from the perspective of the reliable source, and not from the prospective of us (Wikipedians). The depth and substance of the article indicates if the reliable source treats the topic as trivial or non-trivial. Often sources give trivial coverage to what we think is non-trivial, and non-trivial coverage to what we think is trivial. We must set aside our opinion of what should be deemed trivial, and accept what has been found by reliable sources to be non-trivial (or vice versa).
• Note 5: Tertiary educational institutions which are distinctly for-profit should also be examined with Wikipedia:Notability (companies and corporations).
• Note 6: Some examples: Rift Valley Academy and The King's School, Worcester have been the subjects of books. Maywood Avenue School has been the subject of several full-length newspaper articles.
• Note 7: Regional implies a geographic and/or political area larger in scope than the school's home community, but smaller than nation-wide. Examples would include a U.S. state, a Canadian province, or a county in the U.K. For instance, a school that is rated among the top schools in Ontario, or that has won a state-wide competition in the U.S., has achieved regional recognition.