Wikipedia talk:Schools/Archive 9

message: I'm pleased we are finally making progress. I'm puzzled as to the existence of Note 5. Why is there any need to mention tertiary institutions in a guideline on schools? Surely we are only dealing here with primary and secondary schools, not with universities and other institutions of further education. Dahliarose 10:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: * Wrong! It just doesn't have to get that complicated.  If they bee techin lurnin, it'z a skewl. --Kevin Murray 05:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tertiary education institutions 

message: As the discussion continues here, I imagine that'll continue again. Would anyone object to siccing Werdnabot on this page, say a 7- or 10- day archive period? Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 14:21, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If it can be trained to put the archives in the right place (note the "V3" prefix, after the mess from moving the old proposal out of the way), then I would have no objections.  I've trimmed everything down to 14 days for now, and we are at least down to 78k from 288k.  Chris cheese whine 14:27, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It can be trained to put the archives on any subpage you like, and I trained it to do just that. :) The code's added, it's currently set to archive any thread that hasn't had any new messages posted after 7 days. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 14:52, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Massive page

message: That's all the WP:School policy needs to say. A simple, easy to interpret policy that would never need a nutshell summary, because the policy itself is only 4 words.  All Schools are Notable.  Jerry lavoie 23:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, we could do an even shorter one then that-just a redirect to WP:N! Wouldn't need a nutshell summary then either, no one would ever even see the page, and that way we make it clear-secondary sources, period. Of course, there is that issue of getting consensus to do either one. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 23:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well it looks like we have two new votes for that course of action. --Kevin Murray 23:18, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I vote for the 4 word WP:Schools policy KeepOnTruckin 14:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is impossible to have a policy which states that all schools are notable as then you are committed to including in Wikipedia every single school worldwide. For many schools, especially those in third world countries, you would struggle even to find the names of the existing schools let alone find enough information to write an article about them. I would imagine that the majority of schools at secondary school level in most English-speaking countries will have sufficient information to write a properly sourced article. However, I don't see how anyone can sensibly claim that every single school at primary and nursery level is notable. However, the current problem is that so many schools already have extremely poor articles. Let's focus on improving what we already have rather than encouraging the creation of a huge sea of trivial stubs. If we set the standards with high-quality articles then there will be no need for any guidelines. Dahliarose 15:42, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As perhaps an optimist regarding Wikipedia's capabilities. The project is already committed to collecting  information on all branches of knowledge, and it is open to contributions from anyone willing to make them. I don't know why we should ever bypass a subject because it is difficult to obtain information. The structure of the project allows for contributions to be added at any time. Contributions do not need to be full or complete to meet our standards. They just need to be neutral and verifiable. Every article started with something. People come along later and fill in the missing pieces. Stubs are not evidence of a problem if the topic has the potential for a good article. Standards have already been set by the featured article process. Discouraging contributions is counterproductive to the bigger goal. --Dystopos 22:23, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: And, how do we verify that content is neutral and verifiable, without it being, well, verifiable? That seems a bit circular? Sure, if there's enough information out there to one day have a good article, the fact that we don't today is not a problem. The issue, though, is when it's not there, period. And just like it's every editor's job to write in a neutral manner (from the very first edit that creates an article), it's their job to attribute their information (from the very first edit that creates an article), and to establish notability so that we know reliable independent sources have found the subject worthy of coverage. It's not our job to put our personal opinions into Wikipedia, and that includes deciding what subjects are worthy of coverage or not. Just like we rely on the writers of reliable sources to determine appropriate content for articles, we also rely on them to determine the appropriate subjects of articles. It is not for us to decide what is notable or not. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 22:33, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

text: That would be a 10% expansion of WP--and they just list the US. Since WP is international, we would need for consistency to include all schools elsewhere. --this might come to a 50% expansion.  Given lists such as you cite, what s the possible purpose of duplicating them? DGG 00:31, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't recommend adding all 140,000 schools in the United States at one time. They should probably be added in gradually via a bot, ramping up over time. The process should start by creating stubs for school districts listing the schools within them, and followed by high schools. Every Wikipedia article must provide sources, and the excuse of having an alternative destination has never been a legitimate obstacle to adding information on Wikipedia. I'm not sure that the English language Wikipedia should have articles for all schools in the world, at least at this time, and we should probably focus on schools in English-speaking countries as a start. As Wikipedia will be growing faster than the number of schools, it should remain a small percentage of the overall total, as long as the articles are added over a period of time. Alansohn 00:46, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, such a prohibition does exist, see WP:NOT a directory. (And, once again, WP:N). Our articles are supposed to be on things in which we can summarize several secondary sources, not act as a web mirror for a primary source. One would hope such a bot would never be approved. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 01:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've edited hundreds of articles for municipalities in the United States, all of which had initially been created using a bot that formatted data readily available elsewhere to create article stubs. Many of these stubs have been left unedited for years, with their only reference being a generic link to the United States Census Bureau. Many others have become the starting point for excellent articles, replete with the reliable and verifiable sources we all want to see. I've seem hundreds of articles for United States Congressmen, which consist of text loaded in from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Let's use the available sources we have to create stubs that can direct future editors in the proper direction to create excellent articles. This will save much of the time wasted here on discussing policies, and eliminate huge numbers of AfDs. I haven't seen any municipality articles deleted, even if all they had was bot-loaded data. Alansohn 01:15, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's exactly the point-municipality articles have never been deleted, a bot for that purpose is appropriate. School articles have been, leading to an obvious question of notability. In practice, municipalities have all been treated as notable and acceptable for inclusion, schools have not been. Therefore, schools should be looked at individually for appropriateness to include. Similarly, this guideline cannot say "All schools are notable"-in practice, it has been decided that this is not the case. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 01:20, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's why I'd start with school districts, where we have agreement on notability. High schools would follow, with elementary and middle schools much farther down the line. I agree with you that all schools are not notable. An overwhelming number are, and as long as we have a standard stub, there should be little argument. Alansohn 01:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Districts I'd tend to agree to, high schools, again, in practice, they haven't been determined all notable, so an editor should individually look for sources each time. A bot can't do that. I'm also not sure where an "overwhelming majority" of schools is notable either. I see that yelled a lot at AfD, but I sure don't see it backed up by the citing of nontrivial secondary sources. It's not true just because it gets repeated a lot. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 09:52, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Better infobox in what way?  I might try my hand at that. Shimeru 10:12, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you want to test your theory that all schools are notable then you should choose a school at random in, say, Iraq or North Korea. If you can write a properly verifiable article with secondary sources and no original research on any school in either of these countries then you will have proved your theory that all schools are notable. My guess is that the sources simply do not exist to provide properly verifiable articles on schools in most countries without creating exceptions to the existing Wikipedia guidelines W:N, WP:V, WP:NOT, WP:NOR. You cannot have one rule for schools in America and completely ignore the rest of the world. Dahliarose 12:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't believe a random sample of one is generally a representative sample-especially Iraq, I'm sure there are schools there that have gotten plenty of media coverage right now. Twenty, picked genuinely at random, might start to convince me, but even then I've sure seen a lot of AfD's with a lot of howls of "All schools are notable! All schools are notable!" and not a single source cited to back that up. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 13:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: All municipalities are notable. We don't have an article for every municipality in Iraq. All politicians elected to the North Korean parliament are notable, yet we don't have articles for them either. I don't see your claim of some sort of systematic bias being relevant in these cases or for schools. First of all, this is the English-language Wikipedia; those items should be added (or may already be found) on the Arabic- and Korean-language Wikipedias, respectively. The absence of any one article does not make all other similar articles invalid. We have suggested focusing first on the school districts and high schools in English-speaking countries. I happen to be more familiar with New Jersey schools, but I would think a charge of bias would not be justified simply because I happen to focus on New Jersey schools and school districts, and not those in Idaho or Anbar Province. I assume other people will pick up the slack in Idaho, as well as for Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand and all other Anglophone countries. I encourage you to pick a group of schools, perhaps those in Iraq and North Korea, which could become your fields of expertise. I am more than happy to help you in any way with your work. Other than that, using Iraq or North Korea as a basis to determine what belongs in the English-language Wikipedia is laughable. Alansohn 15:14, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that all towns and villages are notable. Books have been written about them, they are included in gazetteers and it is possible to locate verifiable sources for them. Iraqi politicians are mentioned in international newspapers and it would be quite easy to to write articles about them. However, schools in many countries are not the subject of such verifiable sources. You are the one who is claiming that all schools are notable. You did not say all American schools are notable though that seems to be what you really believe. If you really believe that all schools are notable then the onus is on you to provide the proof to back up your claim. I very much doubt that many schools in Iraq or North Korea have any claim to notability.  However, I am sure that if articles could be written on such schools they would be far more interesting than the much-cited trivial article on Springfield School in Virginia which, despite much input, has still done little to prove its notability and is of no interest to anyone outside the locality. I agree that the absence of any one article does not make all such articles invalid, but each school article has to be judged on its own merits and if there are no secondary sources then you will have no article. Dahliarose 15:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not all towns and villages have been the subject of books. Presence in gazetteers provides even less useful information than what is available from the National Center for Education Statistics for every single school in the country. While a small handful of Iraqi politicians do have readily available information in the Western press we biased people read, there is not an article for every single member of the 275-member Iraqi Council of Representatives or the 687 members of the North Korean Supreme People's Assembly, whose absence does not undermine the notability of all American congressmen and British MPs, contrary to your argument. Springfield Park Elementary School was offered to all of us as the poster child of the unimprovable article. You have clearly not read the article for Springfield Park Elementary School, which is a perfect example of the "no schools are notable" bias, so aptly demonstrated by your remarks. I couldn't care less that you are uninterested in Springfield Park Elementary School, and your lack of interest or threshold of boredom is meaningless in determining notability. Wikipedia is still not a popularity contest, let alone based on what your personal distastes and biases are. Personally, I couldn't care less about Notus, Idaho, and I am sure that "is of no interest to anyone outside the locality". Nor does the article have a relevant source, or make a claim of notability, nor has any new data been added in some 18 months. Yet it remains an article, undeleted. I encourage you to actually read the Springfield Park Elementary School article from top to bottom, verify each and every reference, compare it to your favorite Pokemon or Stars War planet article and tell us honestly that notability by any standard has not been met. Alansohn 17:30, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: *Likely true as to our Idaho example. (I never said that I supported the "all locations are notable" bit, just that it's the way it's worked out in practice). You did improve Springfield Elementary, and while none of the online sources establish notability (they're either primary or trivial), I will presume that the offline ones do. Several other ones have also thus been improved, and indeed, I just made two keep arguments on AfD for school alongside a few deletes. The difference? The ones I argued to keep cited nontrivial secondary source coverage. The ones I argued to delete did not. Really, that's all there is to it. If you can find such sources for every school in the entire world, I will happily argue to keep every last one of those articles. But they got to be individual-the government is the parent organization of any public school, so a government report on a public school is primary, as is a report by a school board. Statistics lists are similarly primary, only interpretation of those by a qualified expert is secondary. And so on. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 17:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: *Notus, Idaho is a local government. All of the material in its article (other than the blurb linking to a church), comes straight from the United States Census Bureau, which by your definition is a primary source. Hence the article should be deleted. Yet it still exists. In the federal system of government used in the United States, local government bodies run schools, and in many cases, management and operation of public schools is separate even from the locality in which the schools reside. The school board in my community has been at odds over municipal efforts to have a financial advisory board looking over their shoulders, citing a constitutional separation of powers. Their not the same within my own municipality, let alone at the state or federal government level. The claim that the National Center for Education Statistics is a primary source -- despite the fact that it comes from a federal agency in the executive branch acting independently of states, localities and school districts -- based on your interpretation that all government is all one big conglomerated body, is the stuff of paranoiac conspiracy theories, not a serious argument. Let's start with where we have greatest agreement, and use the independent sources we have from the NCES, and create stub articles for each and every public school district in the United States. Others with access to data in other Anglophone countries can do the same. You can pick either Iraq or North Korea. By choosing school districts, we not only have strong consensus, we can also tie these articles to their parent or constituent municipalities, and we have a place to keep school-level information until we can break down the defiant objections on school notability. We can start focusing on high schools (public first, of course) and work our way down the chain as we all get more comfortable with increasing numbers of school articles. This proposal is a major step forward in finding a way to get past the petty arguments for each article. A show of good faith from the deletionist side that shows that we can jointly work on a broad range of articles, and not fight the battle on a school-by-school basis, would go a long way to breaking the bottleneck and stubborn resistance we have faced for far too long. Alansohn 18:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: * I agree with what you say, but not where you are saying it.  This should become a Project and follow that procedure.  Stubs which have the support of an established project will have a better chance of survival. --Kevin Murray 19:46, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: All schools are notable

message: I just created the article Sausalito Marin City School District using only information from one page at the National Center for Education Statistics as an experiment.  The assumption being tested is that a reasonable stub or start-class article can be created using this single reliable source.  The hope is that districts and high schools (at least) could be added automatically using this database, just as all Census designated places were added at once.  The next step is to improve the article using only the District's official website.  The final step (for me) is to improve it to Good Article quality using online sources only. I hope that a better infobox template can be created specifically for the information available from NCES, but I'm not up to that, yet.  
Please feel free to discuss both the article and the experiment on the article's talk page or here.--Hjal 10:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Better infobox in what way?  I might try my hand at that. Shimeru 10:12, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you want to test your theory that all schools are notable then you should choose a school at random in, say, Iraq or North Korea. If you can write a properly verifiable article with secondary sources and no original research on any school in either of these countries then you will have proved your theory that all schools are notable. My guess is that the sources simply do not exist to provide properly verifiable articles on schools in most countries without creating exceptions to the existing Wikipedia guidelines W:N, WP:V, WP:NOT, WP:NOR. You cannot have one rule for schools in America and completely ignore the rest of the world. Dahliarose 12:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't believe a random sample of one is generally a representative sample-especially Iraq, I'm sure there are schools there that have gotten plenty of media coverage right now. Twenty, picked genuinely at random, might start to convince me, but even then I've sure seen a lot of AfD's with a lot of howls of "All schools are notable! All schools are notable!" and not a single source cited to back that up. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 13:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: All municipalities are notable. We don't have an article for every municipality in Iraq. All politicians elected to the North Korean parliament are notable, yet we don't have articles for them either. I don't see your claim of some sort of systematic bias being relevant in these cases or for schools. First of all, this is the English-language Wikipedia; those items should be added (or may already be found) on the Arabic- and Korean-language Wikipedias, respectively. The absence of any one article does not make all other similar articles invalid. We have suggested focusing first on the school districts and high schools in English-speaking countries. I happen to be more familiar with New Jersey schools, but I would think a charge of bias would not be justified simply because I happen to focus on New Jersey schools and school districts, and not those in Idaho or Anbar Province. I assume other people will pick up the slack in Idaho, as well as for Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand and all other Anglophone countries. I encourage you to pick a group of schools, perhaps those in Iraq and North Korea, which could become your fields of expertise. I am more than happy to help you in any way with your work. Other than that, using Iraq or North Korea as a basis to determine what belongs in the English-language Wikipedia is laughable. Alansohn 15:14, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that all towns and villages are notable. Books have been written about them, they are included in gazetteers and it is possible to locate verifiable sources for them. Iraqi politicians are mentioned in international newspapers and it would be quite easy to to write articles about them. However, schools in many countries are not the subject of such verifiable sources. You are the one who is claiming that all schools are notable. You did not say all American schools are notable though that seems to be what you really believe. If you really believe that all schools are notable then the onus is on you to provide the proof to back up your claim. I very much doubt that many schools in Iraq or North Korea have any claim to notability.  However, I am sure that if articles could be written on such schools they would be far more interesting than the much-cited trivial article on Springfield School in Virginia which, despite much input, has still done little to prove its notability and is of no interest to anyone outside the locality. I agree that the absence of any one article does not make all such articles invalid, but each school article has to be judged on its own merits and if there are no secondary sources then you will have no article. Dahliarose 15:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not all towns and villages have been the subject of books. Presence in gazetteers provides even less useful information than what is available from the National Center for Education Statistics for every single school in the country. While a small handful of Iraqi politicians do have readily available information in the Western press we biased people read, there is not an article for every single member of the 275-member Iraqi Council of Representatives or the 687 members of the North Korean Supreme People's Assembly, whose absence does not undermine the notability of all American congressmen and British MPs, contrary to your argument. Springfield Park Elementary School was offered to all of us as the poster child of the unimprovable article. You have clearly not read the article for Springfield Park Elementary School, which is a perfect example of the "no schools are notable" bias, so aptly demonstrated by your remarks. I couldn't care less that you are uninterested in Springfield Park Elementary School, and your lack of interest or threshold of boredom is meaningless in determining notability. Wikipedia is still not a popularity contest, let alone based on what your personal distastes and biases are. Personally, I couldn't care less about Notus, Idaho, and I am sure that "is of no interest to anyone outside the locality". Nor does the article have a relevant source, or make a claim of notability, nor has any new data been added in some 18 months. Yet it remains an article, undeleted. I encourage you to actually read the Springfield Park Elementary School article from top to bottom, verify each and every reference, compare it to your favorite Pokemon or Stars War planet article and tell us honestly that notability by any standard has not been met. Alansohn 17:30, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: *Likely true as to our Idaho example. (I never said that I supported the "all locations are notable" bit, just that it's the way it's worked out in practice). You did improve Springfield Elementary, and while none of the online sources establish notability (they're either primary or trivial), I will presume that the offline ones do. Several other ones have also thus been improved, and indeed, I just made two keep arguments on AfD for school alongside a few deletes. The difference? The ones I argued to keep cited nontrivial secondary source coverage. The ones I argued to delete did not. Really, that's all there is to it. If you can find such sources for every school in the entire world, I will happily argue to keep every last one of those articles. But they got to be individual-the government is the parent organization of any public school, so a government report on a public school is primary, as is a report by a school board. Statistics lists are similarly primary, only interpretation of those by a qualified expert is secondary. And so on. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 17:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: *Notus, Idaho is a local government. All of the material in its article (other than the blurb linking to a church), comes straight from the United States Census Bureau, which by your definition is a primary source. Hence the article should be deleted. Yet it still exists. In the federal system of government used in the United States, local government bodies run schools, and in many cases, management and operation of public schools is separate even from the locality in which the schools reside. The school board in my community has been at odds over municipal efforts to have a financial advisory board looking over their shoulders, citing a constitutional separation of powers. Their not the same within my own municipality, let alone at the state or federal government level. The claim that the National Center for Education Statistics is a primary source -- despite the fact that it comes from a federal agency in the executive branch acting independently of states, localities and school districts -- based on your interpretation that all government is all one big conglomerated body, is the stuff of paranoiac conspiracy theories, not a serious argument. Let's start with where we have greatest agreement, and use the independent sources we have from the NCES, and create stub articles for each and every public school district in the United States. Others with access to data in other Anglophone countries can do the same. You can pick either Iraq or North Korea. By choosing school districts, we not only have strong consensus, we can also tie these articles to their parent or constituent municipalities, and we have a place to keep school-level information until we can break down the defiant objections on school notability. We can start focusing on high schools (public first, of course) and work our way down the chain as we all get more comfortable with increasing numbers of school articles. This proposal is a major step forward in finding a way to get past the petty arguments for each article. A show of good faith from the deletionist side that shows that we can jointly work on a broad range of articles, and not fight the battle on a school-by-school basis, would go a long way to breaking the bottleneck and stubborn resistance we have faced for far too long. Alansohn 18:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: * I agree with what you say, but not where you are saying it.  This should become a Project and follow that procedure.  Stubs which have the support of an established project will have a better chance of survival. --Kevin Murray 19:46, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Experiment re "All Schools are notable" 

message: I have loaded all of the NCES data on the three schools in the Sausalito Marin City School District into the District article.  It looks klunky, in part becasue I am limiting this edition to what's in the NCES database, and in part becasue I'm setting up the page to break the indivudal schools out into separate articles after searching the district's own website for more information.  As a result, the page looks overloaded with infoboxes and geolinks, plus I ended up with coordinates for the two different campuses overlaying each other at the top of the page.  I'm sure that some of the NCES information would look better in tabular form, but I don't have much experience with making tables yet, and I don't know what a bot could be capable of, so I'm keeping it simple.  I left a couple of terms from NCES in, even though they aren't well known—I plan to add some discussions of terminology at the NCES article, so the redlinks will go away.  I left in the NCES and California ID numbers for the District and its schools, but I'm not sure that they will be useful here.  One thing that is obvious, is that this article would not fit into a typical locality article—it's already too long for that in its plain vanilla format.  Besides, it would have to go into two articles—Sausalito and Marin City.  With a district article like this set up, I can put a paragraph about education in each of the town articles with a link to the District article or the appropriate schoo articles.
Please review and comment, here or at the article or at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools.--Hjal 07:38, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Experiment re NCES data, phase II