User:Idont Havaname/Wikiphilosophies

Here are a few of my Wiki philosophies. I have moved them to this page so that I can expand them later. If anything I've written here is confusing, I welcome questions at the talk page and at my main talk page.

NPOV
This is a user subpage and thus does not need to be NPOV. However, in the main article space, I do try to maintain a neutral point of view as best as I can, and I encourage others to do the same.

Deletion in general
I am for the most part a deletionist with a dash of mergist thrown in.

Schools
The goal of this Wikiphilosophy is to provide more concrete thoughts on school inclusion criteria than we currently have, taken from somebody who has participated in many school AfDs and who is neither an extreme inclusionist nor an extreme deletionist. User:Soltak has a similar schools philosophy, and I generally agree with it.

I apologize up front if some of the terms in this section confuse you; coming from the U.S., I'm not sure what the various schools are called in other countries. I'm using the terms with which I'm familiar, which are the U.S. terms.

What school articles should contain

 * Information on what specific innovations that they (not their county/state/country/whatever - that should be in the article on that county/state/country) have made in education
 * Size of their student body
 * Appearances in national news
 * A list of alumni who have become famous enough to have articles here

What school articles should not contain

 * Articles on primary, middle, and high schools should not contain a listing of the teachers unless they are notable for reasons other than being at that school. When writing a school article and thinking about mentioning a teacher or not (or especially writing a whole paragraph or more on said teacher), ask yourself if they could have an article here without having it AfD'd or speedied as vanity.
 * What they've done for school spirit days this year. If the school has a long-running tradition, then mention it.  Otherwise, it's probably schoolcruft.
 * Student vanity of any type
 * Extra contact information such as telephone number, email address, etc. Mailing addresses can probably also be left off, if the school has a separate website of its own.  We are not a substitute for the school's actual website.

Universities
Universities should always be kept. And a university article should usually be longer than an article on a school of a lower level. These articles should have a list of notable professors, descriptions of some of the research that the school has done, and a list of traditions/ famous student organizations that they have, in addition to what I've listed in the section above this. However, student groups with no significant history, no news coverage outside school publications, and/or a low membership (unless it is an "elite" student group) should not be included here; that merely constitutes free advertising for that student group. Student groups that have been covered in the news a lot (e.g. the Skull and Bones secret society) should be included, and they do deserve separate articles, especially if they have a long list of members who are notable for reasons other than being in the group.

Degree mills are a slightly different story; unless especially covered in national news (say, CNN, MSNBC, an AOL welcome screen since that is seen by millions of members in a day, etc.), they should be deleted. However, I did expand a stub on Colby Nolan, a cat that received a degree from a degree mill and whose story was covered in news sources across the country.

High schools
I'm less harsh on high schools than I used to be. Most high schools do deserve an article, and a listing of notable alumni should always be included. In addition, I generally support their inclusion because many people stop their education at the high school level (i.e. do not attend a college or university). For high schools that don't have any of these things, it might be best to just merge them into a single article on high schools in their district, and to split the entry into a new article should something noteworthy regarding the school occur.

Middle schools
If they are part of a "secondary school" that is a combination middle and high school, then they should be kept along with the high school. Stand-alone middle schools should not be kept unless they have received attention from the press in a national news story. Generally speaking, those who finish the last year of middle school do attend high school, even if they end up dropping out; and I've yet to see anyone whose resume included their middle school as part of the education section.

Primary schools
Again, the resume argument from the previous section applies. Unless they are the subjects of a national news story, they should be "smerged" (to borrow another editor's term, meaning "slight merge") back into the articles on their town or school district.

Kindergartens, preschools, and day care centers
We don't need articles on these; we are not the Yellow Pages. If somebody is interested in finding one of these, they can pick up a telephone book and find one.

Bands
They can stay if they can prove that they've made WP:MUSIC in some form or fashion. See Falling Up's AfD debate for an example where I fought hard to save an article of a notable band whose music I hadn't even heard!

Vanity
I think they should be speedy deleted if obviously vanity (or if the first several AfD voters provide compelling evidence for it to be vanity), and expanding the criteria for speedy deletion is a fantastic idea. Whenever there's a proposal to do that, I try to get there as soon as I see it listed on the Policy Consensus section of WP:AfD. As for proving the vanity of people, bands, pets, and everything, I often use the Google test; it works most of the time.

Fancruft
A whole lot of that stuff needs to be thrown into its own separate wiki; when the level of detail gets too high, it's not really encyclopedic. Ten years ago, I was in elementary school, and there was this fad in my school called Pogs; just think of how silly we'd look if Wikipedia had its own article for every single Pog that had ever been released! Stuff like Star Wars characters can stay (even though I'm not a fan of anything Star Wars-related, save for Yoda), as can anything else that has stood the test of time. We don't need articles on every nook and cranny of Pokemon though. I think it damages the credibility of our encyclopedia if we take our minds off of writing good encyclopedic articles about encyclopedic topics and resort to turning our site into a directory of pop culture phenomena.

Anonymous editors and newbies on AfD
Anon editors and newbies on AfD - There are anons who edit in good faith, and anons who edit in bad faith. If you're editing from an IP, then there are so many vandals editing from IPs that it's hard to tell them apart; we're only looking at numbers separated by dots, after all. I often encourage anons to register their own user accounts. As for newbies, I'd only discount their votes if they were made in obviously bad faith. My first edit here was to an AfD for one of my favorite articles here, so I'm proof that people who start off editing on AfD (or, when I started here, it was VfD) can stick around and make quite a few edits.

Vandalism
Vandals, whether on wheels or not, really distract us from making a good encyclopedia here. I like to propose all obvious vandals for deletion, and I have aided in the blocking of several of them.

Redirects
Redirects - only make the sensible ones, such as for spelling errors/variants or common names used by the press. Please do not make practical joke redirects such as Culture of England to Pub (which made it into WP:BJAODN).

Adminship
See User:Idont Havaname/Admin for a detailed discussion.

Userboxes
A posting by me in Userbox policy poll:


 * 1) Oppose. The User namespace should not be NPOV; a user page is a user's page (or so I understand; I've asked on the talk page of WP:OWN), and they should be allowed to say what they want to, any way they want to.  Personally, I don't use a lot of userboxes, just language boxes, the admin box, and a box saying that I'm male.  But I'm not going around speedy-deleting (or editing down) other people's user pages just so that they don't look stupid, cluttered, or what have you.  Also, even though I'm an administrator myself, I don't trust other admins' judgment with regards to what is POV and what isn't, any more than I trust anyone's judgment about it in article space.  A general problem at the core of evaluating POV vs. NPOV is that people often fail to see their own biases as being biases, while saying that those who disagree with them are biased against them.  This scenario comes up in politics quite frequently, and probably in Wiki politics too, in the form of inclusionist/deletionist debates and so forth.  While admins have been trained in policy, there are still some who have acted out of line with regards to policy, and if anything policies of this nature should be keeping admins in line rather than letting them be above the law when they want to be.  Therefore, allowing speedy deletion of userboxes perceived as "biased" opens up admins to acting unilaterally, and it gives us a policy which allows admins to act unilaterally in this case.  This is different from simple speedy deletions of patent nonsense or short articles with little or no context, as there is meaningful content here which is, in most cases, used by legitimate users of the project.  Admins acting unilaterally with regards to userboxes has already led to RfC's, RfAr's, and the like. --Idont Havaname (Talk) 23:24, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I'll clarify this further if I have time, but this is generally how I feel about this.

Ignore all rules and the confusion of essays with policy
I like most of our policies here; and for that reason, I don't like this one. IAR essentially tells people that it is fine to circumvent policy whenever they want to. In my earlier time here, I saw people voting to keep schools based on WP:SCH, which was not policy, thinking that it was policy. More recently, I have seen admins deleting articles based on essays such as WP:DENY, which are not policy. Such actions are quite irresponsible of administrators, who should have a thorough grounding in Wikipedia policy before they are given the permissions to use the sysop tools. Many RfA voters have expressed concern that candidates might not be able to be trusted with sysop tools, based on their potential to abuse them; ignoring all rules, particularly in regards to sysop actions, merely invites admins (especially new ones) to abuse their tools - and, in so doing, set a bad example for the rest of the Wikipedia community.

Possibly somewhat ironically, I think that the solution to this problem involves making a current essay a policy. We should interpret rules where there are gray areas, since there is undoubtedly some ground that policies here do not adequately cover. Especially as the site continues to grow, it may become much harder for the community to arrive at consensus regarding new policies. Evidence of that can be seen through various attempts to expand the criteria for speedy deletion.