User talk:Just Chilling/Schools

1. Secondary schools. Agreed, the only practical way is that all established public or church sponsored or independent schools are are notable.
Necessary exception: correspondence, for-profit, and "charter" schools in the US. Even at the secondary level, many are very small (sometimes les than 50- students) and not stable. Each needs to be considered individually. Also, "schools" physically located within other schools are really administrative units and usually not separately notable. (One HS near my home is technically 4 different high schools, all sharing parts of various floors for classrooms and time-sharing the gymnasium--these are the public school equivalents of charter schools. ).
Tutoring centers are not schools. I only know about the ones in India--a few but not all are notable.

2. Primary schools grouping: The proposal needs to allow specifically for the needs of US parochial Catholic schools, other religious schools, and independent schools. None of these fall under any government authority in the US, and so cannot be merged to school districts or other authorities.
US Catholic schools are easy--they go under the diocese usually. US dioceses are almost always large enough to have a number of schools. If the diocese has a subordinate education structure, they could go there. Episcopal schools possibly likewise, but they are nowhere near as many, and I do not know how they are organized. Some private and church-run schools of other types are logically organized by ownership or conference, etc. Otherwise, the reasonable place to put them is the town or county. (In the less populated areas of the US , there are some 1-school school districts. In these cases the county is probably a better unit--there are also some very small counties, but i think all counties would be accepted to be notable.)
For combination schools with HS elements, the primary school part can be a section of the HS article instead of the district. .

3. I do not like calling Blue ribbon elementary schools notable--& there is generally not much to say about them besides the fact. I can't speak for the UK. I think it would be enough that they be noted as having the award in the more general article, or that it is an element of notability, as as one of other factors. But I'll accept it in the interest of a generally acceptable proposal if others agree. I'd agree to almost anything at this point.

4. elements of notability for elementary and intermediate schools:
a. Academic awards, including blue ribbon. b. state-level athletic successes, c. notable alumni.. d. Headmasters notable in their own right. e. notable or historic buildings f. possibly, long-standing -- older than 1850 in eastern US?
not: individual crimes in or around the school unless notable enough for WP articles, use of the auditorium by the community, success at getting into elite secondary schools of colleges,

5. Special factors; combination schools with HS elements are notable as HSchools.
any others?

6. Caveat. This is not to be used as a precedent or model for notability if other community & municipal districts such as fire districts, police departments, sanitary districts, water supply districts, zoning districts, and the several dozen other types that are characteristic of the US and perhaps elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs)

My thoughts

I can't support the inclusion in Wikipedia of all secondary schools/high schools simply because they exist. If you accept that all such schools in the US/UK are notable then you could also potentially open the floodgates for articles on schools in all sorts of obscure countries where no reliable English language sources exist. There must be some element of notability. I tend to think that all secondary schools/high schools have the potential to be notable. There is usually sufficient information from reliable secondary sources to make a good article for any US high school or UK secondary school but the problem is that most editors won't make any effort unless a school article is nominated for deletion. I'd rather lead by example, improving existing articles and having a mechanism to speedily delete directory-style entries so that people are encouraged to make more effort. Dahliarose 20:35, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Essentially, we need some simple guidelines. The reason for including all high schools is that since they are never deleted then it will save a lot of work for them to be in. If we can't agree a wording for all/most high schools to be inherently notable then I expect that this effort will collapse :-( High schools in English speaking countries can always be sourced. Nominating articles for deletion to get them improved is not a good concept - we need to improve tagging, listing on the Schools project etc. as an alternative. The concept of non-English speaking countries is always a problem, in all Wikipedia articles, but I have put in some wording to deal with this. At the moment the onus is on editors to demonstrate clear notability. My revised wording reverses the burden of proof whilst keeping out the negligible stubs that you are rightly concerned about. Would you kindly look at the new wording (that'll be up about 10 mins after writing this!). If you are still not happy can you propose an alternative please? TerriersFan 22:23, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I know from past experience at Wikipedia:Schools that any guideline which proposes that all secondary/high schools are inherently notable is doomed to failure. Wikipedia:Schools, in its present form, is in fact fairly straightforward and I would have thought that all UK/US schools could easily satisfy the existing criteria, but the wording was considered too restrictive for the all schools are notable brigade. Perhaps the solution would be to expand the existing guideline in a more positive way to provide further examples of how schools can demonstrate their notability (eg, an outstanding Ofsted report, Blue Ribbon Schools, etc., a minimum number of references). I agree that the AfD process is often a complete waste of time. Many of the articles which are nominated often have more content than other articles which don't attract any attention whatsoever. I'm not sure there's an easy solution. Dahliarose 00:02, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments

I think the above are reasons for bouncing a school out of AfD. The idea of having to go and debate each high school is silly. New ones arrive at c. "quite a lot" a day. The Afd process's finger isn't big enough for the dyke.... it just wastes resource.

Reasons for including other schools are too many to be listed here, but I agree that generally all schools outside the list could be deleted. I noticed that in the recent US college shooting the perpetrators college and high school articles went to GA, but his elementary school received no attention whatsoever. The above advice at least reduces the energy in debating each high school. All foreign schools would have to be excluded from debates over deletion in a similar way.

One reason that might make a school notable would be whether the building was grade one listed ... but is the article about the school ... or the building? Victuallers

I think Dahliarose raises another issue... which is how do we manage schools who only want the heads name on wikipedia and the article remains trivial. Is that a different (and worthwhile) debate? Victuallers 20:42, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

we manage school articles by letting the community expand them. No school has a right to censor the article about it, though I have actually known some to try. The articles do tend to attract vandals, who are quickly spotted--those articles are given very careful attention at recent changes.

But the question isn't whether we will do perfect justice. We will not either by a blanket inclusion or by debating at afd get everything right. No real harm is done by a few non-notable schools with directory information only--the articles on the more important ons will be expanded. Real harm is done by the debates however, in time and trouble. following numbers hypothetical:

1. Blanket inclusion of high schools-- 70% are notable notable and included, 30% non notable and included anyway.
2. AfD debates on each of them-- 60% notable included, 10% notable but unfortunately excluded. 20% non-notable and properly excluded, 10% non notable but included due to odd results or missed schools.
   1. Is it worth discussing 10 or 20 schools a day to get from 1. to 2., considering it takes an average of 8 or 10 editors involved one way or another for each, and often gets people aroused into violating NPA and AGF.?? I know my answer. If this were BLP and a mistaken inclusion could do harm, it would be another matter. It never is If it were even frequently including flagrant personal or commercial self-promotion, it might be another matter, but it rarely is even that. It's just a small number of directory articles. What harm is done--they're just a sign that full articles have not yet ben written, not of lower standards . DGG (talk) 05:11, 22 August 2007 (UTC) 05:11, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Stub articles

The problem is that these two-line directory-style articles just sit there for months and nobody does any work on them. Most of them I suspect are added because people just want to include a link to the school's website. It's not just a small number either. Have a look at a few random articles in Category:New York school stubs as an example. At least if the articles get nominated for deletion something happens and they either get deleted or expanded. If people see that their neighbouring school has a stub they're more likely to add a two-line stub for their own school. If the rival school has a B-class article they're more likely to make an effort to write a proper article, and they will have some useful guidelines to follow. Competition is a great incentive. These stub articles serve no useful purpose whatsoever. If we set the barriers a little higher people will be forced to make more effort. I dread to think too of the numbers involved if there was any policy for blanket inclusion of all secondary school/high school articles. I'd love to see some more articles on Chinese schools for instance but the thought of thousands and thousands of two-line Chinese stubs would probably give the school assessors multiple heart attacks. By the way what is NPA, AGF and BLP? Dahliarose 11:15, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, a change in policy is most unlikely to have any effect on the number of stub articles created - people creating these stubs are unlikely to be aware of policy and probably care less. Nonetheless, I have amended the proposal, though, so that these stubs can easily be deleted. TerriersFan 16:37, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

There is no policy against stubs, and indeed the relevant policy, WP:STUB actually encourages them. I think creating all the highly school stub articles would actually be a pretty good idea, in encouraging people to write more complete ones. anyway, we should not have a policy for this that goes flatly against one of the other basic content policies. I think most other people will strongly oppose any policy against stubs in any wp article context, for I think that's the way content usually gets created. I'm not worried about the chinese schools--the contents of enWP has to be in English, and if they want to translate and make the stubs, so much the better. I dont see how the numbers are the least concern--we already have two million articles, another 100,000 even is just 5%, and storage is cheap.

AGF is WP:Assume good faith, NPA is WP:No personal attacks -- two requirements for discussion on WP that tend to get ignored in AfD debates. And WP:BLP is the policy against unsourced negative comments on living people, the sort of thing schoolkids tend to insert about their principals.

Many thanks for the explanations. The point is that you cannot have regional bias in a guideline. If you say that all American and British secondary/high schools are notable, then by implication those in other countries must be notable too. I've got more sympathy with foreign language editors who are working in their second language and I'd like to see many more school articles from non-English speaking countries but such articles are useless if no meaningful content can be found other than that the school exists. Here are a few non-articles I found at random which barely qualify even as stubs: Jurupa Unified School District (a title and a collection of categories!), Live Oak Elementary (Watson) (Note: the previous link was changed as the page and the pages it points to were updated -- the link remains for continuity), Beijing 101 Middle School, Cingshuei High School. I'm not sure how you get people to go about improving such articles but a policy of blanket inclusion will only encourage the creation of further such articles. Regardless of anything written here there are a sizeable number of editors who insist that schools must demonstrate their notability and I can't see any of them changing their viewpoint. On another point altogether I haven't even come across any articles about Local Education Authorities. Do any exist? Dahliarose 21:42, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

there are a number of editors who will oppose anything. Possibly we still can reach some sort of compromise. Looking at the examples in the paragraph above: School district articles serve the purpose of allowing for growth and for putting in the schools that don't have articles. I think it might be worth doing them automatically if we could get a good source to have a bot written. Live Oak elementary and Beijing Middle school are exactly the sort of schools that would not have articles automatically. The only problem is Cingshuei High School and i think the article could be expanded & I'd simply ask the author.

as for regional bias, --the Chinese schools that get articles here tend to be the elite ones, as do the Indian ones & it seems the Middle East and african ones. I've never worked on Singapore & the Philippines, but I'd imagine this would be the case as well. so no reason not to do the ones we get. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs)

simplified proposal

1. All secondary schools, including US high schools and their equivalents in other places, that have a distinct physical location and are accredited, are considered suitable for individual articles if the basic material is available. this does not apply to correspondence schools, tutoring institutes, and US "charter schools", which are judged individually. 2. Intermediate schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools, continue to be judged individually. The preference is to put these under the name of the school district or other appropriate unit. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs)

Comments from Camaron1

This proposal generally makes sense to me. I agree that we need some kind of guideline for notability on schools for editors to refer to - the trouble is making it accepted. Currently there is not even an accepted naming conventions guideline for schools - which has caused its own problems; hopefully WP:NC(S) will change all that sooner or later.

To make this guideline work we are going to have to compromise between the two groups of opinions on school articles. I agree that articles about small elementary like schools which do not do much more than state the schools existence should be deleted or merged to school district articles unless they individually establish notability. School district like articles themselves I think should in most cases should be treated as inherently notable - I consider them a fair compromise between arguments. I agree also that most secondary school and college articles should be generally considered inherently notable - unless sources are clearly not available available to make an article out of them.

The school types and source availability varies a lot between countries which could potentially be a big problem for this type of guideline. It is important that the guideline is not bias to-wards specific countries; but like with WP:NC(S), I think the solution might be to list individual mini-guidelines for every country which has an accepted practice based on how schools are set up in that country. Camaron1 | Chris 11:46, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

yes, this may be a problem below a secondary level. But the solution is to keep what we say general enough. such mini-guidlines are depreciated here as instruction creep. To the extent needed, examples are sometimes used to illustrate what's meant. And it's not just the individual country-places like the US have multiple totally independent systems with their own intrinsic organization, unlike I think the UK. DGG (talk) 05:53, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

For the moment, I am trying to establish whether consensus has in fact changed by commenting appropriately at afd discussions on high schools. DGG (talk) 05:53, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

The overall guideline would need to be kept simple, yes. Though country by country examples would be helpful in guidance and I do not consider them "instruction creep". While I do think examples for every district are unnesassery, another problem that has been found in the past is that it is difficult to interpret a guideline for a situation without country to country examples. Camaron1 | Chris 08:01, 31 August 2007 (UTC)