Talk:Adams Middle School (Redondo Beach, California)

message: Victuallers 19:16, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

message: I closed the deletion debate on this article tonight as a "Keep and cleanup." What this means is that your article stays at Wikipedia, but there's a lot of work to do on it to keep it from possibly being renominated for deletion.
With this in mind, here are some concrete things to work on:
* Read the Manual of style. Format the article according to similar articles. Take a look at one of the Featured articles to see what our best work looks like.
* Remove most or all the references to who teaches what subject and at what time. Is that kind of thing found in a written encyclopedia? No, it's not – and it shouldn't be in this article, either. 
* Take all the "you go," "you walk," and their cousin phrases out. Example: Under "P.E./Teachers," drop the "you are put into one of five classes..." and consider "There are five P.E. teachers" instead. 
** In this vein, if you list the names of school personnel, keep in mind that you're putting their names on one of the top 10 websites in the world, and some of your teachers and support staff may not want that level of notoriety. Google indexes Wikipedia very quickly and it's hard to take back a name once you've put it out there. It may be better to err on the side of caution.
* There are redundancies here that must be eliminated. I took out the duplicate top section, but there are still two 'External links' sections and one has to go. Also, put in links to other Wikipedia articles – basketball and American football, for example. 
* Find some verifiable sources to back up your assertions and format them correctly.
* Please, please, please the "Show preview" button! Making dozens of teeny edits every few seconds, as some of you have been doing, really, _really_ puts a heavy load on our servers and recent changes logs. Worse, it can give other users a "Wikipedia is busy" error because the server is busy saving your entire article when the only changes were a couple of words. Please be kind to other Wikipedians by using 'preview' to check your work before you save it. 
I hope these suggestions help you with the article. You need to know that the article can be renominated for deletion at any time, and if it does not improve in an encyclopedic manner it probably will be renominated. 
Don't take these discussions personally because it's absolutely not personal. There are users all over the English-speaking world who use Wikipedia and they have as much (sometimes more) input as American users do. They could be interested in the history of your school. They're _not_ interested in the length and time of your lunch hour. See the difference between encyclopedic things and things that... well, that aren't? 
Finally, your class needs to understand something:  We're happy you're editing at Wikipedia and hope you find it useful – but we're here to write an encyclopedia, not to be your class project. Commenters at the AfD discussion said that the article would improve, so we've given you the benefit of the doubt. However, if the article isn't or does not become encyclopedic, it will most likely find its way back to AfD. Make this article encyclopedic and keep it that way. :-)
If you have questions or need help, leave a message on my talk page. Good luck - KrakatoaKatie 07:01, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: AfD discussion