Talk:Lists of universities and colleges

Untitled
A very good "College and University" list can be found at http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html which was built up by Christina DeMello in 1995. I'll contact her to ask her if
 * we are allowed to copy her list to this project
 * if she is willing to help us on building up this list here at wikipedia.

Tobias Hoevekamp
 * There's no reason why we can use the list data itself. It's simply an alphabetical listing of colleges and universities, which cannot be put under copyright. As long as we don't make an exact copy of her layout, we can import the list. --Stephen Gilbert

What do other people think of reorganizing this in a roughly hierarchical format, such as Country->State or Province->City->Institution? It makes more sense to me than a flat alphabetical list. -- Claudine

Very good idea. --css

There's nothing to say we can't do both an alphabetical and a geographical index. if I was looking one up by name, I may not know where the university physically is. Like National University, doesn't exactly tell me that it is in San Diego California....

I would think the browser's 'find in page' facility would obviate the need for a flat alphabetical list.

I've organised the list by country at Claudine/Demo - perhaps it doesn't need further subdivision at this stage.


 * I think it looks much nicer. It'll encourage people to list the universities near them. --DanKeshet

Part of the point of wiki is that we can have multiple indexing schemes on whatever set of pages.

Thanks for the comments so far. I'm still not sure how multiple indexing schemes would be implemented. I've added a Colleges_and_universities/ByCountry subpage, but this means people adding a university have to add it to two pages. Is there a better way? I still have a lot to learn about wiki concepts. --Claudine

Yes, it means someone would have to add it to two pages. I suppose what we really need is, as well as the wiki, some auxiliary databases, of things like unis, people, etc., and then to get multiple category schemes just run different reports on the databases... everyone will probably say my idea is too far-fetched though... Anyway, hi Claudine. -- Simon J Kissane

I've taken the raw list data from DeMello's pages and wikified it. I'll be putting it up within the next day or so, but I'm going to need help editing. I currently have it organized in a separated alphabetical list and by country. --Stephen Gilbert

Thank you to Stephen for beefing up the list! I think Simon's idea (hi Simon!) has some potential but does anyone have any idea how it could be put in practice? For the time being I think new schools should still be added to both the main (alphabetical) and geographical ones.

Magnus Manske is currently working on new Wikipedia software (tentatively named Pediawiki). It is a wiki script written in PHP that would interact with an SQL database. So, a database-driven Wikipedia is in the works, but it might be a while.

For now, I think the alphabetical and by country lists are the way to go. I have the large alphabetical list divided up by country as well, but it needs a little work before I post it. It might be a bit of a nightmare to maintain both, but if at least three of us work on it, we can give it a go. --Stephen Gilbert

Do we really want a Wikipedia entry for every college and university in the world? There are 3000 or so just in the United States (sorry to be US-centric, but I don't have even ballpark numbers for other countries).

If we're going to do this, though, we should do it right--there's no point to entries that contain nothing but a link to the school's homepage. -- Vicki Rosenzweig
 * Yep, that's what I'm aiming for, anyway: an article for every college and university in the world. It's going to take a while... --Stephen Gilbert

I was just looking at the letter "U" list with over 700 items, most of them begining with something like "University of ...". It seems to me that we would do better to move these to the letter for the meaningful word in the name. Thus University of Colorado should be in the "C" list.

Also, are we insisting on the English form of the name? I've just seen a few appear under the Catalan word "Universitat". Eclecticology, Thursday, July 11, 2002

Get with the times, "under construction" signs are so last year :) Excised text follows. -- Tim Starling 09:06, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)

There's still much more to do (please help!):


 * There are many non-English schools that should have the accented characters inserted in a similar manner:  Abo Akademi University  should become  Åbo Akademi University .
 * Each school should have its city and country listed next to link. I know darn well you Americans are going to list the city and state for American schools, but c'est la vie. For schools that have the same names, the city should be included in the link (for example,  American University, Cairo  and  American University, Paris 
 * Schools that aren't in the list should be added, and those that no longer exist or have changed their names should be removed (and relisted as necessary).
 * Write articles about your favorite universities! There's a lot to cover!

English names or local names for universities ?
I had thought of editing some pages related to French universities and institutions, and I feel that some coherence should first be given to the choice of name to be used for each of these. See a bit above a similar remark (dated July 2002) about Catalan universities.

Reading Naming_conventions_%28use_English%29 and its discussion page (notably the paragraph about parliaments or political parties) I am rather more puzzled than I could be before.

If I browse through various pro country university lists, I can only discover that there has been no common policy as what to do with university names, e.g.


 * for Germany or Italy, the English name is systematically used, with a redirection from the local name ;


 * for Belgium, the English name redirects to the local name, as well in French speaking or Dutch speaking Belgium ;


 * in French speaking Canada, there are entries for University of Montreal and for Laval University, but on the other hand for Université de Sherbrooke and Université du Québec ;


 * in France, the Grandes Écoles like École Polytechnique seem systematically described under their French name, while universities proper seem to be ordered under their English name (e.g. University of Poitiers) (very few are already in the Wikipedia).

The page List_of_colleges_and_universities_starting_with_U is a special mess, with its mix of translated names (e.g. "university of Modena") and native names (e.g. "universita degli Studi di Pavia").

I think that some more precise instructions should be precious to future editors. --French Tourist 21:46, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Poll on University Naming Conventions
A new survey has been created to assess consensus with respect to university naming conventions, specifically regarding the usage of terms like "University of Texas" vs. "University of Texas at Austin". The poll addresses this issue both in the specific case of the "University of Maryland" and proposes an amendment to Naming conventions which could impact a large number of additional pages. It doesn't directly impact this page, but I figure that people editting here may be interested in the topic. Dragons flight 17:56, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Art colleges
Would anyone be interested in helping to complile a list of Art Colleges? There appears to be none as yet, and I believe it would be most usefull. Cageybee 19:26, 26 December 2006 (UTC)