User:Fæ/Alumni

Where embedded or stand alone lists of people are created for organization membership, these lists still have to follow the policy of notability and verifiability. In particular an organization may be notable, but this does not necessarily mean that all members, staff, teachers, fellows or executives are notable or worth listing.

A potential solution for editors who are keen to maintain such a list is to ensure that the lead text has clear criteria for how notability is defined for inclusion of names on the list.

For large lists, a key maintenance problem is the tendency for editors to include blue-link article names with no references, the established consensus is to include references in the article as any articles linked are subject to change over time with references being removed or articles deleted. If the list includes a reference to an authoritative alumni membership directory this may be sufficient to avoid the work of double-checking entries.

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Notable list, non-notable alumni
In general, lists of alumni must be a list of notable alumni. In specific rare instances the list itself may be notable and includes names which by themselves would not be notable.

For example a List of Boy Scouts could only contain notable entries and an individual who happened to be a previous President of the Boy Scouts would not be notable solely for that reason, however the List of national presidents of the Boy Scouts of America can be argued to be notable in its own right and has a well defined selection criteria. Consequently this list may contain names that are not notable but can be verified as members of that list.

Examples of types of alumni list
The following list gives single examples of different types of alumni lists (examples may not be of good quality):
 * 1) List of Juilliard School people - a notable school-alumni stand-alone list (SAL) including notable teachers
 * 2) Cambridge School of Culinary Arts - a notable school-alumni embedded list
 * 3) List of University of Oxford people in business - a narrowly defined (sub-list) alumni SAL
 * 4) List of headmasters at Bristol Grammar School - a notable list (due to dating back to the 16th century) of holders of a non-notable post where the individuals may not be notable

The following list is a sample of alumni lists that are at Good Article status:
 * 1) List of Brigham Young University alumni

For more examples see Category:Lists of people by institutional affiliation.