Talk:Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

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potential copyright fixed
potential copyright fixed -- copyright phrases removed — Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.3.43.160 (talk) 19:10, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Copyright issue
It appears that only one section of text about the Mentorship program was plagiarized from the official FCPS school profile -- not the entire article. Can this section on the page not just be removed and rewritten, according to Wikipedia's content policy, instead of hijacking the entire page or showing this message stating that the entire article might need to be deleted? Jw12321 (talk) 00:09, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: https://www.tjhsst.edu/abouttj/schoolprofile/docs/2014-15TJHSST%20Profile.pdf. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and, if allowed under fair use, may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, providing it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore, such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:54, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
At least one major contributor to this article appears to have a close personal or professional connection to the topic, and thus to have a conflict of interest. Conflict-of-interest editors are strongly discouraged from editing the article directly, but are always welcome to propose changes on the talk page (i.e., here). You can attract the attention of other editors by putting request edit (exactly so, with the curly parentheses) at the beginning of your request, or by clicking the link on the lowest yellow notice above. Requests that are not supported by independent reliable sources are unlikely to be accepted.

Please also note that our Terms of Use state that "you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation." An editor who contributes as part of his or her paid employment is required to disclose that fact. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:55, 9 April 2017 (UTC)


 * What is the basis for this accusation? Ketone16 (talk) 01:58, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

"Alumni" section
WP:BLP concerns with this section - most of the living people listed have no references for being in the alumni group. Many or maybe even most of their Wikipedia articles don't even mention TJHSST and if they do there aren't references. I think this section needs some serious trimming and I'll be working on that. Shearonink (talk) 16:13, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Better to trim out the non-notable alumni and let editors improve the references for the notable alumni, since it's hard to fix content that has been cut from the article entirely. I'm not sure that the school needs to be mentioned in the articles on individual alumni, since high schools aren't always listed in biographies anyway.  Ketone16 (talk) 01:57, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, regarding deletion: WP:BLP does advise immediate deletion of contentious material, but I do not believe that this material is contentious (in fact, I suspect most or maybe all of it is true).  And per WP:Verifiability:  "In some cases, editors may object if you remove material without giving them time to provide references; consider adding a citation needed tag as an interim step."  I object to how much content on alumni (and article content in general) has been deleted over the past couple of days.  Wikipedia operates by consensus, and proposed large improvement projects should be discussed on the article talk page before implementation.  Ketone16 (talk) 02:13, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Contentious? Just because something isn't somehow "contentious" means we don't have to get it right especially about living people.  Wikipedia must get it right.  WP:BLP states:
 * This page in a nutshell: Material about living persons added to any Wikipedia page must be written with the greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality, and avoidance of original research.
 * Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page. Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity, and must adhere strictly to all applicable laws in the United States, to this policy, and to Wikipedia's three core content policies:
 * Neutral point of view (NPOV)
 * Verifiability (V)
 * No original research (NOR)
 * All the unsourced assertions about people in this article should be removed from the published page. Then, if references can be found for these people attending TJHSST, then the information could be added back in along with the proper references.  Besides, the editorial consensus seems to be for removing the unsourced assertions since multiple editors have removed all or part of this material.  Shearonink (talk) 04:04, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you, ; I agree. WP:BURDEN is clear on this: "Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source". I've removed a good deal of unreferenced stuff here over the last couple of days; I've done so slowly and carefully, in order to allow plenty of time for anyone who wanted to start fixing the problems to do so. Much of that content was anyway not – in my opinion – of any conceivable encyclopaedic relevance or interest; but if independent reliable sources can be found for it, then perhaps I'm wrong about that and it can be restored to the page. It's up to the editor who wants to include the content to provide those sources – perhaps would like to make a start? This is a high-profile institution, so it shouldn't be too hard to find good-quality sources that discuss it. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 07:12, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
 * No, you have not removed things "slowly and carefully", you have basically rewritten the entire article in less than a week, and you have removed a great deal of content, often on the basis of some unilateral opinion that the material is not "encyclopedic". Well, before undertaking an effort to remove half the article, how about discussing your proposed efforts on the talk page?  I have no problem with efforts to improve this article based on a lack of sources or the reliability of the information, but I do not think such large revisions should be made without some sort of consensus and a plan of action, because this article was put together over the course of years, and there's no way that future editors over the next few years are going to dig through dozens of edits made long in the past to figure out what material should be restored.  Ketone16 (talk) 18:09, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, I think that both of you, in your zeal to enforce WP:BLP (and it is zeal if you're quoting whole paragraphs out of the policy here), have badly misunderstood the actual spirit of the policy. The idea is that in order to avoid mischaracterizing or maligning living people who have active personality rights, false material should be removed immediately.  But just because something does not have a source in the article doesn't mean that it is false.  I mean, use some common sense here – obviously what is happening is that people who have personal knowledge of the alumni are adding their names.  Of course we need sources, but I think it is extremely presumptuous to decide that everything in the article that does not have a source needs to be removed immediately.  And of course I agree that unsourced material can be removed eventually, but if it is not contentious (i.e., see the actual policy), then it does not have to be removed immediately.  All I am saying is that a better course of action is to use the refimprove template and see if we can get some people together to actually improve the references.  Material can be deleted later.  By deleting huge sections now without giving people a chance to improve the sections, future editors will have a hugely difficult time putting together all that lost information again.  And it is not fair to just tell me to single-handedly put in all the references for material that was added by many editors over the years, whereas all you do is cut material.  Ketone16 (talk) 18:20, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, I think it is dishonest to portray yourselves as if you have some consensus among editors of this article. This article had a handful of non-regular editors swoop in in the wake of the copyvio problem with the passage on the mentorship program and do a hack job on the article.  If you want to claim you have some consensus on what to do with this article, put together some people who have actually added content over the years, rather than cut content.  Ketone16 (talk) 18:24, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Ketone16, I have reverted your re-addition of unsourced content to this article. Some of the material has been awaiting citations for many years. WP:BURDEN calls for the person adding or re-adding content to source it. Clean-up of Wikipedia articles is not restricted to regular editors of a page; anyone can do it. Of the top seven editors of the article, none of them have visited it in the last five years, so don't expect a big crowd to show up. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 19:59, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Diannaa, I think you know that I was not contesting WP:BURDEN or saying that editing is restricted to regular editors. My point was that this is not a case of removing an unsourced fact or two, this is a case of deleting most of the content of the article in one fell swoop without implementing any sort of good-faith plan to preserve and improve content.  Most of the deleted content — content that I think common sense would inform you is nearly all true, even if it lacks citations — is now lost deep in the edit history of this article.  A regular editor might have a chance of finding it by looking at the talk page and sifting through the edit history, but a casual editor likely will never know that content was there.  Therefore, instead of preserving content as a basis for improvement a little bit at a time through an improvement project — which was not considered by any of you before embarking on content deletion of such a large scope — content will probably be lost permanently given the low rate of edits to this article.  So, the result is that the article will "look better" but be less informative, as a result of hewing to the strictest interpretation of what is allowed under Wikipedia rules, which do not specify that this content has to be removed immediately in one fell swoop.  It seems that the current batch of editors has decided to take the easy path of deleting most of a long-standing article rather than actually doing something constructive for the article like writing content or finding references, or helping to organize an effort to do so, or at the very least preserving content until the article can be improved, since it is a large project.  Ketone16 (talk) 15:15, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
 * - Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit and everyone is welcome to edit - doesn't matter if you're an expert or a casual passer-by...besides, we all have to and had to start somewhere. If anyone out there wants to take on editing this B-Class article into a Wikipedia Good article like Nan Chiau High School, Wisbech Grammar School, Garden City High School (Kansas), or, even, eventually into a Feature article like Amador Valley High School and Stuyvesant High School I think that would be awesome. Shearonink (talk) 06:02, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Of course, I did not say that non-regular editors do not have the right to edit the article, I was merely implying that you don't have anything invested in this article, so you took destructive steps, which are easy, instead of constructive steps, which require effort. Ketone16 (talk) 15:15, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Proposed improvement plan
A while ago, wrote that "proposed large improvement projects should be discussed on the article talk page before implementation". That's not so, editors are under no obligation to discuss changes on the talk-page before making them. Nevertheless, in the case of an article with as many problems as this one, some discussion might help to get things moving. So here's a suggested plan of action: has already reminded us of the three core content policies – neutrality, verifiability and no original research – which apply as much to this page as they do anywhere else. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:00, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) Remove all unreferenced material
 * 2) Remove all self-published references and all content sourced only to them
 * 3) Remove all puffery and weasel language
 * 4) Identify some reliable independent third-party sources which cover the school in some detail (there may even already be some in the article)
 * 5) Write neutral factual content based on them.

"Notable alumni"?...
Shearonink (talk) 08:21, 26 December 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) Per WP:BLP, any stated information about living people must be scrupulously sourced from reliable sources.
 * 2) For Wikipedia's purposes, IMDb is rarely (if ever ) considered to be a reliable source for information about living persons.
 * 3) Regardless of what the latest edit summary stated, the present version of this section (as of this edit)...is it really any shorter?
 * 4) In my opinion, the alumni section is now overwhelming much of the rest of the content in size and scope.
 * I agree completely and have acted on it. I've removed everyone that did not have a Wikipedia bio. None of them meet the requirements of WP:NLIST or WP:ALUMNI. Further, I removed all of the grad dates as none were referenced and that information is of little use to anyone outside the school community, hence out of guidelines. Additionally, I removed all of the resume type copy about the individuals, as the wikilink can supply that info and it is completely off the topic of the article, which is the school. Also incidentally cleaned up the MOS errors and punctuation. I really do not understand the subtopics, they seem quite random and I may eliminate them and just alpha order the list. Further, I haven't yet checked for sources to attendance but will be removing those without reliable sources for it (LinkedIn would not cut it in my book).


 * In general, this article is more of an advetorial than an encyclopedia article. It's quite disorganized, lacks vital components and is in no way a B class article. I'll be downgrading it to a C.


 * Also note that as one of the school project coordinators, this isn't my first rodeo with the wikilaywering garbage that is quite visable on this talk page. (I'm not referring to you, .) None of the many many individuals I've removed from the list today have any indication of meeting a SNG. IMO, therefore, the only way they'll meet the qualifications for NLIST is for articles to be written about them and passed into the encyclopedia, either via AfC or by having been written by an autopatrolled editor. Disputed content requires consensus, and that's what it's going to take to get my agreement. John from Idegon (talk) 09:56, 26 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I just removed the headers in the section, taken together & as a whole they made "Notable alumni" overwhelm the other sections in the Table of Contents. Also, the people who have WP articles - I just did a spot check and some of the people's articles mention TJ and some don't...will take a look at all the names later if I get a chance, removing the ones who don't have the school sourced within their WP articles. Shearonink (talk) 16:00, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Joshua Specht
Magnolia677, you incorrectly reverted my edits adding alumnus Joshua Specht for lack of notability. As clearly stated in the guidelines for School Alumni, it is not necessary that alumni have their own wikipedia page: All alumni information must be referenced. See Wikipedia:Footnoting for technical help. Individual alumni need a citation to (a) verify that they did indeed attend the school, and (b) verify the statement of their notability in their short one- or two-line description. When alumni have their own articles in mainspace, it is not necessary for their notability to be referenced, as long as it is done in the biographical articles[clarify]. Be sure to check the existing biography article to ensure that it demonstrates alumni status with a cited reference. Importantly, Specht's book Red Meat Republic is considered notable for inclusion in Wikipedia, and Specht is the sole author. The edits you removed gave references for (1) Specht's attendence at TJ, (2) Specht's professor position at the University of Notre Dame, and (3) coverage of Specht's book in the press. Significant other journalistic coverage for the book can be found at the book's wikipedia page. Jess_Riedel (talk) 18:57, 27 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Magnolia677 You have again incorrectly reverted my edit, and this time you have done so without bothering to engage with the above arguments I have given on this talk page.  In the comment for your edit, you wrote: "These was no consensus to add Joshua Specht, and you have misunderstood the meaning of 'notability' on Wikipedia. The selection criteria for this embedded list is that all names be "notable" (ie. have a Wikipedia article), per WP:LISTBIO, WP:SOURCELIST, and WP:ALUMNI. Please discuss."
 * First, the proper place for discussion and reaching a collective consensus is this talk page, not exchanging messages between the two of us through edit summaries.
 * Second, contrary to your claim, WP:ALUMNI does not say alumni must have a Wikipedia page to be included in a notable alumni section. Instead it says "Inclusion in Lists of alumni included as part of a large article should be determined by WP:SOURCELIST and the same criteria used to determine the inclusion of other material in the article according to Wikipedia policies and guidelines".  It is obvious that not every person mentioned on the TJHSST article needs to have their own Wikipedia page, and WP:ALUMNI states that this applies to the list of notable alumni just as well as it does to the main article text.  For instance, the article mentions the principal Ann Bonitatibus and former county School Board member Tina Hone, neither of whom have their own Wikipedia page.  Will you be removing their names from the TJHSST article? Of course not.
 * Third, as I already quoted above, WikiProject_Schools/Article_advice makes clear that having a wikipedia page is a sufficient but not necessary condition for for listing alumni: "Individual alumni need a citation to ...verify the statement of their notability...When alumni have their own articles in mainspace, it is not necessary for their notability to be referenced...".
 * Fourth, here are just a few examples of school "notable alumni" sections containing alumni who don't have their own Wikipedia page: Biola College (Anabel Muñoz), Fresno Pacific University (Karl Dewazien, Chris Haynes, and J.T. Thiesen), Stanford University (David Alvra Wood, Prem Sewak Sudhish, and Richard Sloan Wilbur), East Brunswick Technical High School (Brian Sicknick).
 * That last example is particularly clear: Brian Sicknick was an officer who died after being injured in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He is clearly a notable alumni, but only his death has a Wikipedia page; he himself does not. Likewise, Joshua Specht is notable solely for the book he authored, so the book has a wikipedia page even though he does not, and he should appear as a notable alumni. Jess_Riedel (talk) 12:22, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Joshua Specht is currently a redirect, and there are few sources to support this person's notability. Moreover, on this particular article, the section entitled "notable alumni" was added almost 16 years ago, and it has remained unchanged since then, indicating that being "notable" is an established criteria for inclusion on this embedded list. Magnolia677 (talk) 16:51, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The issue is that 'notable alumni' is a heading for the (non-editor) reader, and is intended to be interpreted according to its plain English meaning.  In other words, it is not the same thing as satisfying the Wikipedia notability criteria for having one's own Wikipedia page. As I pointed out above, the established Wikipedia criteria for inclusion in a 'notable alumni' list is roughly 'notable enough to mentioned in the main body of the text' (and, of course, not all persons mentioned in the main body of a Wikipedia article will have their own Wikipedia article).  I am happy to continue to discuss whether Specht satisfies this criteria, but I think we should agree on the criteria first. Cheers. Jess_Riedel (talk) 13:00, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The WP:ONUS is upon the person wanting to add content to establish a consensus for doing so which means you in this case. While some of the points you've are sorting worth discussing (others just seem to be a case of WP:OTHERCONTENT), you shouldn't keep re-adding the name to the list as long as doing so appears to be contentious. After the first removal, you should've been the one to seek consensus here on this talk page instead of engaging in WP:REVTALK. It cases such as this, it's better to follow a "bold-revert-discuss" approach and not the "bold-revert-start discussion-revert back 1 minute later" approach you seem to have taken. -- Marchjuly (talk) 23:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much for the thoughtful comment. Your general point regarding the order of discussion vs. revert is correct. I am happy to agree that whether Specht should be on this list is a subjective question about which reasonable people disagree, and that we should reach consensus on this talk page first if there are reasonable objections.  However, my issue with Magnolia677's edits was not about the disputable question of whether Specht should be on the list, but rather about the criteria that Magnolia677 was using: based on his/her original edit comments, and confirmed by recent comment on this talk page, Magnolia677 seems to think that "notable enough to be on a 'notable alumni' list" = "notable enough to have one's own Wikipedia page".  But this is just plainly a misinterpretation of existing policy.  Perhaps I am splitting hairs and I still erred, but that's how I was thinking about. Thank you! Jess_Riedel (talk) 13:00, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Removal of image
The image and caption on the right was removed by an editor with the edit summary "Sorry, dont see how this image expands the reader's understanding of the article." MOS:IMAGES states that "Images must be significant and relevant in the topic's context, not primarily decorative." This school has a strong robotics program, and the image depicts a portion of one of the school's robots. The image also features two students in googles, which also seems relevant to a school with "Science and Technology" in its name. MOS:IMAGES also encourages editors to "strive for variety" in the selection of images. Considering this was the only photo in the entire article, it seemed to show a fair bit of variety: a robot, a school lab, students, and a visiting politician. The input of others would be appreciated. Magnolia677 (talk) 02:38, 27 December 2017 (UTC)


 * First, and I am not moving away from opposing inclusion here, if it were to be included, it should be located in the section where Obama's visit was mentioned.


 * I will generally always oppose photos that feature students in an identifiable way. It would have to offer a considerable improvement to the article to override the privacy concerns. Most everyone knows what Obama looks like. The only thing that even places it in this school is the description. It's the former president and two students that we cannot and should not identify in a lab that could be in any school or university in the world. Any content in a school article should be differentiating. This isn't.


 * Last, and I'll be darned if I cannot remember which of the many image guidelines and essays mention this, but images should only be included if they expand and explain existing content in a way words cannot. I'm not seeing that here. A photo of the building is what is needed most. Other possible illustrations might include a photo of the satellite mentioned. John from Idegon (talk) 04:07, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

References for admissions policy changes
I'm adding this information to the talk page just in case it gets removed from the article:


 * "If the board's new policy is implemented, the principal effect will be to greatly reduce the percentage of Asian-American students at TJ, while greatly increasing the percentage of whites."


 * "One of the most fascinating aspects of the new admissions plan is that the largest beneficiaries would not be racial minorities, but white students."

--JHP (talk) 08:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

The Hill writes that text messages show that the Fairfax County School Board knowingly discriminated against Asian-Americans when they changed the school's admissions policy. --JHP (talk) 02:18, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Admissions section is disorganized
The "Admissions" section has a lot of info about different things related to the school's demographic composition, changes to the admissions process that took place in 2020, and litigation and activism about those changes. I think it should be split into separate sections, with the new "Admission" section being a simple explanation of how the admissions process currently works and a new section to hold all the information about demographics and litigation over the admissions process. Perhaps "Admissions Controversies", or "History of the admissions process". I know this has been edited recently so I don't want to make any significant changes to it without discussion. DinoInNameOnly (talk) 05:48, 21 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I've created a subsection for the admissions controversy, modeled after the similar section on the page for Stuyvesant High School, which is a featured article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School#Demographics_and_SHSAT_controversy DinoInNameOnly (talk) 01:34, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

School hid info from students
These sources are claiming that the school's Principal, as well as the school's Director of Student Services, deliberately avoided telling high achieving students about their possible eligibility for academic awards and scholarships because too many of them were Asian-American.

I think this information should be included in the article.

What do others here think?

Here are some primary sources, as well as a few documents and a video that are linked to from those sources:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-top-high-school-hid-213034509.html

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/top-ranked-virginia-high-school-accused-of-depriving-students-of-merit-awards

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/top-u-s-high-school-deprived-students-of-national-merit-awards-as-part-of-equity-policy/

https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-merit-takes-bizarre-turn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpcvIsMZBU

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23466063-national-merit-tjhsst-emails

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23466082/national-merit-scholarship-corporation-emails.pdf

SquirrelHill1971 (talk) 15:56, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

I just added the following to the article:

In December 2022, it was reported that during the previous five years, Principal Ann Bonitatibus and Director of Student Services Brandon Kosatka had deliberately avoided telling at least 1,200 high achieving students about their possible eligibility for academic awards and scholarships because too many of them were Asian-American. Kosatka explained their actions by saying, “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements." Kosatka also said that he and Bonitatibus did not want to “hurt” the feelings of students who did not receive any of these awards. A lawyer named Shawna Yashar, whose son was one of the students at the school whose award information had been withheld by the school until it was too late, said, “Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state.”  However, after these initial news reports came out, the school later changed its story, and said that this was a "one-time human error" and denied that it had been deliberate.

SquirrelHill1971 (talk) 18:15, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

There was also a George Will editorial: As it is an editorial, it's best to use it to source George Will's opinion while using non-editorials to source facts. WhisperToMe (talk) 02:43, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

"TechMUN" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TechMUN&redirect=no TechMUN] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. #prodraxis connect 17:19, 13 September 2023 (UTC)