Talk:École normale supérieure (Paris)

message: Should Grothendieck be on that list?  He began studies at ENS but left and completed his PhD elsewhere.  On the other hand, he wasn't exactly French.
:I would say no — at least, not in the main list.  It might be mentioned that both Grothendieck and Deligne attended courses at the ENS, but neither can be counted as a French fields medalist (Deligne is Belgian and Grothendieck was stateless at least for some time) nor as an ENS alumnus. --Gro-Tsen 12:28, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The ENS does not deliver degrees, so any student who went to the ENS, even for a year, can be considered as an ENS alumnus (the alumni refered to themselves as ancients élèves de l'ENS - former students of ENS - not as graduated from ENS). 82.242.236.21 18:12, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fields medalists 

message: Note that the official name of the Ulm establishment is "École normale supérieure", not "École normale supérieure de Paris" or "École normale supérieure de la rue d'Ulm". However, because of the awkward situation of having other establishments called ENS-Lyon etc., people often call it merely "Ulm" or "ENS-Ulm". David.Monniaux 17:53, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ecole normale supérieure 

message: Why has the French Science box been added to this page and given such prominence? The ENS is very implicated in letters, not just science. Furthermore, the French Science box seems to present this page as representing all the ENSes, whereas this page is an article about the ENS at the rue d'Ulm only.
-- MyPOV (talk) 22:50, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  French Science? 

message: What about École_normale_supérieure? --Saippuakauppias ⇄ 11:21, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: École normale supérieure deals with all the ENS like École normale supérieure (France) in the french version of Wikipédia. École Normale Supérieure deals with the ENS Ulm ( École normale supérieure (rue d'Ulm — Paris) in french). In french when you talk of Normal sup, you usually refer to the ENS Ulm, because it's the oldest ones and the most famous. Yves-Laurent (talk) 07:50, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Double article 

message: The page lists the ENS as having no undergraduates. This is misleading. There are essentially two kinds of students at ENS -
* élèves, entering the school at L3 level, and exiting at M2 level. In North American terms, this corresponds to entering as a junior or senior (having done the first two years at a classe préparatoire), and leaving with a master's. According to Wikipedia, there are 900 élèves currently; they enter by a highly selective contest. They generally live on campus (or in an off-campus dorm).
[There's also the aggrégation, but let's leave that out for the moment.]
* étudiants, or doctoral students. An élève may stay as an étudiant (if he or she finds a supervisor); an étudiant can also have done his or her first degree or master's elsewhere. 
It's pretty clear that we have a division here corresponding roughly to 'undergraduate' and 'graduate', though with a two-year shift. The info box should reflect this division.
Now, as for the famous or infamous world rankings. To judge in part from other Wikipedia pages, these are taken seriously by (a) second-tier Anglo-Saxon institutions that do better in them than they expect, (b) masochistic French politicians. (The rankings aren't used much in the US - in fact, in top institutions, people seem to find them silly and fake, in the rare ocassions they are aware of them.) It is my opinion that they should be omitted from the leading paragraphs - their classification of ENS as the best school in continental europe would be omitted as well, of course, for consistency.
If the rankings are mentioned elsewhere, they should be given with plenty of context. These rankings privilege (a) size, (b) institutions organised according to Anglo-American lines. In many ways, the sensible thing to compare ENS to is not, say, the University of Cambridge, but rather Trinity. If Trinity College were ranked on its own, by people completely unfamiliar with the way the Oxbridge college system works, then... 147.65.4.231 (talk) 11:35, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a misunderstanding here - the étudiants are not doctoral students, but students admitted to the ENS outside of the main entrance route, the national concours. However, academically they have the same program as the élèves (no two-year gap here), meaning that they start at the L3 (or sometimes M1) level. There *are* in fact doctoral students attached to the ENS, but they are outside of the étudiant-élève dichotomy. Furthermore, only few doctoral students are formally attached to the ENS; they might work in a lab that is part of the ENS, but could be registered at one of the nearby universities. Logosun (talk) 23:25, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undergraduates, ranking 

message: As of this week, the ENS has a new logo, see http://www.ens.fr/spip.php?article1670&lang=fr. I think it'd be a useful edit if someone experienced could replace the old one appearing on this page.
Logosun (talk) 17:20, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  New logo 

message: As I have made many modifications to the article over the last few days, I have thought it best to give a recap of what I have done and explain my method. 
-I created the 'History' section, mainly with the help of the corresponding article in the French wikipedia. It is still incompletely referenced. I think we should add the reference books about the history of ENS to a new 'references' section, like is the case on the French wikipedia article.
-I removed the 'Overview' segment, which was a disorganised repeat of the summary section at the top of the page. I replaced it with an 'Organisation' section, with separate sub-sections about sites, recruitment, divisions and libraries. 
-The 'Affiliations' and 'Influence abroad' section were very incomplete, I replaced them with the 'Domestic and foreign networks' section, whose title I admit is not too good. I created three sub-sections within this section: affiliations, domestic partnerships, international partnerships; this again mainly with help from the article on the French wikipedia. 
-There was a quasi-empty section called 'Free online content' which contained only two rather heterogeneous sentences about the online platform and the Presses de l'ENS. I removed this section and replaced it with a 'Public face' section (again the title is not perfect), with three sub-sections: online and book publishing, the ENS foundation, and rankings/reputation. The first two's content came especially from the French wikipedia once again. The last sub-section I filled with what I had removed from the summary header at the top of the page, as rankings do not in my mind have their place in the header (I checked on most of the big university pages, such as University of Oxford, and found that indeed most often a specific sub-section was written to accomodate them). 
-Finally, there was a bogus section called 'Alumni and faculty', which just featured a link to the List of École Normale Supérieure people page. I replaced this section with a 'Notable alumni' section like in other university pages, and wrote the section from scratch basing myself on what I saw was written for other universities. 
Referencing is still ongoing. 41.236.173.160 (talk) 11:52, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modifications November 2014