User:Silensor/Schools

This is an excerpt from Schools/Arguments. It represents my beliefs on why verifiable articles about educational institutions should be retained on Wikipedia, regardless of their shape or size.


 * 1. eventualism
 * 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 ).
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 importantance 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.


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