Talk:List of presidents of the College of William & Mary

Merger Proposal
This article should be merged with the similarly-named section in the College of William and Mary article. --TommyBoy 03:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

There's too much information on this page (List of presidents...) to put on the main College of William and Mary page. The main W&M page has already had to be shortened to keep it readable. Or were you suggesting moving some of the main article content here? WWC 03:31, 1 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. This list has too much information to merged into the WM article. It's fine as a stand alone. If anything, the list of presidents should be taken out of the WM article and a link should be directed to this page.--Bkwillwm 17:36, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Response to WWC's Concerns
I can think of two possible solutions to this question.

- The similarly-named section in the main article could be deleted and a link to this list article provided in its place.

- Although it would be a major task, the biographical data on the W&M Presidents could be deleted from this list article and incorporated into both new and existing articles on the individual presidents, which would render this article's content similar to the content in the main article, and thus deletable. --TommyBoy 04:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

==
 * University articles on Wikipedia generally have far too many lists (people, departments, even subjects and programmes) taking out space where one would wish for readable narrative content. But take a look at the list that is placed within a box beside the main text in the History of Michigan State University page – that's the way to do it when including a list in an article page. (That article is featured and very good, as far as I can tell.) u p p l a n d 06:27, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Merger Proposal Dropped
As an alternative to merging, I have replaced the similarly-named list in the main article with a link to this article. --TommyBoy 17:22, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Copyright concerns
The list is very nicely done, but unfortunately the text describing the presidents is taken directly (except for the last couple) from the official website, which is clearly reserved. While information cannot be protected and the information is fairly straightforward, copyright does protect less tangible features of creativity, including facts that are chosen and the order of their presentation. One possible solution here is to remove the nutshell descriptions of the presidents. Of course, if the College is willing to license their text, that would eliminate all concerns; see Requesting copyright permission. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 21:00, 14 March 2010 (UTC)