User:JoshuaZ/Schools

This is a response to User:Silensor/Schools. Comments on the talk page are invited. Grammar corrections are also invited. Since this is (as of yet) my personal viewpoint I would appreciate if other edits did not occur as such. Since it is intended as a response to that inclusionist essay I will pay more attention to issues or problems with the most commonly used keep arguments and not address why articles should or should not be kept aside from that essay.

(Non-indented numbered remarks are Silensor's. Indented remarks under them are my response)

Silensors reasons and my response: 1. eventualism
 * 1) Most Wikipedians are not eventualists.
 * 2) All the standard objections to extreme eventualism apply.

2. Schools are important public institutions and should probably be written about somewhere, even when they cannot sustain an article on their own. 2. a. Presently people do create school articles containing neutral, verifiable information and it is difficult to delete them, even though many think these articles are too trivial for Wikipedia. 2. b. Rather than striving for an elusive consensus to delete a given school article, some feel it is always preferable and usually takes much less energy to merge the text of the article into an article about a suitable habitation or administrative unit: a city, county or state, or a school district of local education authority of other school system, while taking care not to delete the information contained in the article. The article itself should be replaced by a redirect. (note: this particular argument for merges is not supported by all who favor keeping school articles, see and ).
 * 1) This is not an argument for keeping per se but an argument for inclusion of content which can be done also by merging(which is IMO a highly reasonable solution for small school articles of only a few lines).
 * 2) It isn't clear what important means in this context. A more precise statement might be useful.
 * 3) Related to the above many public institutions are "important" but we discuss them on the general city or town articles. For example, we would not have a separate article about a small town's town hall under almost any circumstances. Germane information would be included in the main town article.


 * 1) I have little disagreement here except to note this is essentially a merging not a keeping argument.

3. Those who advocate the deletion of schools sometimes use an argument to the effect that a school that doesn't have some special attribute--apart from being an institution of learning--has no identity and shouldn't be in Wikipedia. 3. a. This is a case of special pleading; there is no Wikipedia policy requirement that corresponds to this, it's just an ad hoc condition constructed to justify opposition to school articles.


 * 1) No it isn't. It is used in many notability tests. See for example WP:PROF.

3. b. Each school is different from every other school--a look at the latest school report card or HMI inspection report of any school should be enough to establish this truism. Someone who looks up the Oratory School would not want to see a link to the report card for Mount Tabor High School, and by providing readers with a way of finding out about individual schools, including what independent or government inspectors have to say about their teaching standards, Wikipedia performs a useful encyclopedic function.


 * 1) This is true only if truism equates to a tautology with no relevance. Sure any two schools are different. So are any two humans. WP:BIO still weeds out most humans on the planet from having articles.
 * 2) Again in comparison to WP:PROF (or WP:MUSIC if you prefer something else) having each one different from each other is not sufficient. Indeed, any two marginally successful academics have contributed new information never before discovered by any humans and these discoveries will add permanently to the body of human knowledge. It is hard to get more unique than that. And yet we don't include all researchers.
 * 3) As to the last part, this isn't an encyclopedic function so much as the function of a glorified directory and Wikipedia is not a directory.

3. c. Schools are not donut shops, traffic lights, or telephone books, they're where we spend a large proportion of our waking lives, where we learn to be adults, gain skills and make friends. They play a large part in determining what kind of society we have. Schools are also community gathering points, where many students and former students can share common experiences and knowledge - a central theme to Wikipedia.


 * 1) This isn't an argument, it is special pleading.

4. It is argued that wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, and that school articles only serve a narrow, local audience. However, Wikipedia is not paper and can afford to serve all audiences of reasonable size. Instead of removing material, technical means can be found to make general topics more prominent to researchers, such as rating more obscure pages "of little general interest" and demoting them in search results.


 * 1) The "Wikipedia is not paper" argument could be used to also include small bands excluded by WP:MUSIC or all those unique researchers excluded by WP:PROF. Furthermore as to the second idea about a prominence issue I fail to see its relevance and it is doubly irrelevant since the idea has not even been discussed almost anywhere.

5. Schools are an excellent entry point for new Wikipedians. In reviewing their contributions, we can educate and inform them about third party verifiability and NPOV as they help build the common knowledge base. A good experience collaboratively editing something "close to home" will encourage long term involvement in a positive way.


 * 1) This argument is  one of the strongest arguments for school inclusionism. However, why does it not apply to WP:PROF or WP:MUSIC? Under this logic we should include all minor professors and bands.

6. It has been said that school articles are not maintainable because, for instance, every time a school headmaster or principal changes it should be edited to accommodate the change. There are two counters with that argument:
 * 6. a. the historical view
 * From the historical view, that fact about a headmaster's appointment can be recorded as a historical detail: "In 1961 Jeff Smith was appointed head of Portnoy Boys". A later editor may add that in 1971 Jeff Smith retired and Veronica Spice replaced him.  In any case this is verifiable information about the school (school head appointments are public information) and also has historical value.
 * 6. b. the rejection of a trivial argument.
 * From the point of view of the rejection of trivial argument, the question of who is and is not the head of a school is a fact without which the school article can survive. If maintaining current staff information were considered to be problematic, the pragmatic solution of removing information about current staff solves the problem without removing other information about the school, including (in most countries) links to public sources of information about schools which go back years or even decades and give extremely detailed public information about the school and its performance relative to national expectations and to other schools in the district, region, and country. And, of course, information about who was the head teacher at the time of the inspection.
 * 6. c. Wikipedia's editors are its readers.
 * We attract readers only if we provide something of interest to them. Readers become and remain editors, only if we allow them to improve and create articles of importance and of interest to them and others.  Wikipedia is often more up to date than other encyclopedia's with far fewer articles, precisely because we're so open to growth (which means a larger number of active editors).  Keeping every school article doesn't mean instantly making one for every school today, so the editor count can grow with the growth of the article count.  The fact there are 6 billion people in the world doesn't make it hard to maintain school articles, it means we have that many more people to recruit editors from, if and only if we provide good encyclopedic content they are interested in.  Those who are interested in editing schools are as likely as anybody else to help out in other areas of Wikipedia.


 * 1) This argument is a strawman that I've never seen it argued in a deletion discussion for a school, although maintainability has come up as an issue for things which change more frequently(if someone can find examples where this came up in regard to schools I'd be very interested in seeing them}.
 * 2)  This isn't a keep argument but a response to a hypothetical deletion argument.

7. Jimbo Wales said people should relax and accommodate those who write high school articles, as long as they're not mass-inserting a ton of one line stubs. 


 * 1) First, note that this confuses Jimbo as dictating policy as God-Emperor and Jimbo giving his opinion as an editor. Jimbo is not omniscient. This is therefore a fallacious appeal to authority. Despite the fallacious nature of this argument I will for completeness examine other problems with the claim.
 * 2) Jimbo made this comment in 2003 when they general tone and tenor of the encyclopedia was different. It is not clear he would make the same statement today.
 * 3) Related to the above point, Jimbo specifically mentioned "The argument 'what if someone did this particular thing 100,000 times' is not a valid argument against letting them do it a few times." However, we are now having many users create such stubs and so Jimbo might very well reevalute his position.
 * 4) This claim takes Jimbo's remark partially out of context and is also distorted. First, Jimbo did not say "as long as they are not inserting a ton of one line stubs" or anything like that. His concrete example was "Let me make this more concrete.  Let's say I start writing an article about my high school, Randolph School, of Huntsville, Alabama.  I could write a decent 2 page article about it, citing information that can easily be verified by anyone who visits their website. Then I think people should relax and accomodate me.  It isn't hurting anything.  It'd be a good article, I'm a good contributor, and so cutting me some slack is a very reasonable thing to do." Note that he says this assuming he is already contributing and that it is a "decent 2 page article" hardly a one line stub. The only time in the article where he mentions 1 line stubs is where he says that "That's true *even if* we'd react differently to a ton of one-liners mass-imported saying nothing more than "Randolph School is a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, US" and "Indian Springs is a private school in Birmingham, Alabama, US" and on and on and on, ad nauseum." Note the context.

8. There are multitudes of US city articles which could be said to be "trivial", and one may say: 'well those cities usually have more people in them than a school'. Yet, Perth, Towner County, North Dakota, for example, only has a population of 13 people. So why include small cities over schools?

This point is a good one but it suffers from multiple flaws:
 * 1) There is a presumption of notability for locations in that whenever any individual has a biography article we almost immediately write where they were born. There is an attitude that this is an important type of detail.
 * 2) Many editors would have little issue with deleting or merging many of these small towns and villages.
 * 3) Almost all towns and villages contain schools so by the same vague calculus of notabilty/size that this argument is based on towns are more notable than the schools they contain.

9. The determination of schools accepted and not should be consistent across the board.

This sentence is still a bit hard for me to read every time I read it. I think what Silensor means is "We should have a consistent method of determining whether or not a school should be included" Subject to that intepretation:


 * 1) A need for consistency is in no way an argument for keeping any more than a need for consistent traffic laws is an argument for driving on the left side of the road. This is an argument for establishing some standard (like WP:PROF or WP:MUSIC). The fact that the  inclusionist WP:SCHOOLS guideline failed to reach any form of consensus argues that whatever the uniform standard should be it should be less inclusive than any of WP:SCHOOLS's incarnations, not more inclusive.