Talk:St. Mary's School (Medford, Oregon)

Basic listing is inaccurate
The name of the school is "St. Mary's School", not "St. Mary's High School". The school is split into two divisions. The Middle School is grades 6 through 8, and the High School is grades 9 through 12. My guess is that the original entry was submitted by a high school student who did not want to acknowledge the middle school.˜˜˜˜ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hal Wing (talk • contribs) 22:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

re: onesource tag
Currently the entire article is sourced by only referencing the school's own websites - essentially making the entire article self-sourced. To remedy this, some third-party references should be added in place of some or all of the self-sourced citations. Some potential options would be newpaper or television reports, or books on the school, or links to references of the school from the state board of education, or links to accreditation agency websites that substantiate those statements. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 18:36, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * See WikiProject_Schools and WikiProject_Schools/Article_guidelines for specific guidelines. The tags themselves contain links to additional guidelines and policies. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 16:14, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, last chance User:Filmmanvick16, please stop reverting the community WP:CONSENSUS. Leave the tags until items are addressed, and then let someone else know you think they have been addressed, and then someone else can see if they agree and remove the tags. Your behavior here could be considered Disruptive editing (along with using an IP address which could be considered sock puppetry) and will lead to an WP:RFC if you continue. There is a clear WP:CONSENSUS by established editors that these tags need to be here at this time and that your editing constitutes ownership of this article. It does not matter that these are the only online sources for the school you could find. Others may be able to find some online, off-line sources that meet reliable source guidelines also work, and if these are the only sources available then the article fails notability guidelines and needs to be deleted. Not to mention than you removed three problem template tags while one did not relate specifically to citations, but the overall poor quality of the article. Thus, you removed a template yet again without actually addressing the issue. Editors have tried to direct you in the right direction, but instead of heeding our advice you ignore the community. If you want to be a constructive editor I suggest you listen to the community. Aboutmovies (talk) 08:29, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I realize this article has drawn a lot of criticism for having a high percentage of its data derived from the school's own website. However, aLL of the historical data was collected by the school's alumni director, who researched articles drawn from the archives of the Southern Oregon Historical Society. Like so many other libraries and research facilities nationwide, and especially in this region, there are severe budget limitations now imposed on SOHS that have made it impossible to retrieve data online and, frankly, overall research availability is severely curtailed. I hope that the editors and users of this data will remain patient. I must admit that I am a little sensitive to the tone of some of the comments, a tone which seems to imply that the dependence on the school's website is done out of either laziness or ignorance of the value of primary documentation. Hal Wing (talk) 18:27, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

TMI and editing out non-notable data
Hal Wing reverted my major cleanup of this school article without giving a reason. So here are my reasons for cleaning up the page in the first place:

I removed sections that were non-notable and/or unencyclopedic. For instance, all schools have clubs and sports. A rough guideline would be to show notability outside of the local community for the clubs or sports- for instance, winning a state award or championship.

Given the guidelines of Wikipedia, and especially WikiProject_Schools/Article_guidelines, I see no reason why lists of where students went to college, lists of all athletic programs, lists of clubs, and long descriptions of grade-by-grade curriculum should remain.

These are the reasons I edited the article in the first place. This gives us a chance to use the WP:BRD cycle- both Hal (who didn't use an edit summary!) and others (I'll send a note over to User:Aboutmovies). Otherwise I feel my changes should stand. tedder (talk) 01:55, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I would tend to agree with tedder's edits. College placement sections always strike me as a bit like advertising, lists of clubs and activities tend to date quickly and are discouraged, and the play-by-plays of each year's program do not strike me as particularly notable, as all schools have different programs for different grades. A section about community service and administration might be useful, those seem more notable to me. The main problem, however, is that this article relies on a single source. If the sections on academics were to be kept, we would need to find outside sources that highlight particular aspects of the program. Is there anything unique about the school's programs? And note that any school's website is going to claim their school is unique. What do the outside sources say? For a third opinion, we might alert the folks over at WikiProject Schools and get the official word on all this. Katr67 (talk) 02:33, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Many of the changes tedder did are great, they address the problems that have existed with this article since its creation and through the disruptive editing of the students (I think, but its been awhile) with removing tags. But, remember that notability only applies to the existence of an article, not the content. So having a list of sports/clubs in-itself is not a notability issue. Now how it is presented here was. For the sports, use an outside source (the OSAA has this info, see Tualatin Valley Junior Academy on how a good way to incorporate this looks like and is sourced) and present it in prose format, and no need to link the sports as that violates WP:LINK. And in general, that is how these sections should be presented, in prose format and sourced to outside sources. And things like accreditation should be combined into the academic section. College placement (the list of schools at least) does not belong here at all as that refers to the students achievement's as individuals, so unless the teachers are doing the kids homework and taking the SAT, those achievements should be listed on the article for each of those student's, not on the school's page (obviously the student's likely fail notability guidelines, so in reality that means the info simply remains outside of Wikipedia, but is more than welcome to stay in the career counseling brochure for the school and the recruitment packet sent to prospective parents/students). The actual rate is fine if it is sourced to an independent source, but again should be combined into the academic section. Aboutmovies (talk) 08:56, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

(deindenting) I've made a second round of edits to the page. That brings it in line with the school article guidelines, both by removing the advert content and adding references. tedder (talk) 05:06, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

reqphoto
I added the reqphoto tag. There's a logo, but it'd be nice to have a photo of the campus. tedder (talk) 05:07, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Please revert this page
I glanced at the page and saw a couple of minor errors. I took a more extensive look and realize that the page has been significantly vandalized (i.e., school located in Saudi Arabia, school affiliated with Seventh-Day Adventists, absurd numbers listed for the founding date and size of the original school). Would one of the editors be so kind as to revert this back to the previous version? For some reason, I am locked out from doing so.

Hal WingHal Wing (talk) 20:24, 22 November 2013 (UTC)