User talk:BombaClat

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Notable Parents
The mistake you're making is to confuse sources (books, articles) with encyclopedic content. The books and articles you're reading will almost always have a specific (and often political) axe to grind. This is almost always true when people write about schools, and is particularly true in the case of Holland Park School: the Guardian, for example, will list the parents of HPS students as a semi-explicit way of saying "all these clever people sent their children to a comprehensive school, so you should, too". As you know, sending children to HPS was an expressly political act in the 1960s and 70s. However, the way that we should deal with this kind of thing is to refer to it in the body text of the article itself (e.g. by writing something like "In the 1960s several politicians, including... (give a brief, non-exhaustive list of examples)..., sent their children to HPS for political reasons..."). What we're writing here is an encyclopedia entry about a school: creating a separate section for "Notable Parents" suggests that the topic of "Notable Parents" is one that belongs to every school. My own view is that this would be a very odd route to go down.

What I suppose I'm trying to say is that there's a big difference between being encyclopedic and being exhaustive. Our aim in the article about HPS isn't to list every fact about the school and anyone who's ever been connected to it, however distantly. If we did that, we'd end up writing a whole book about HPS, and then we'd have to do the same for every other school in London, and then the rest of the world. Our aim is to give the reader information about HPS, of course, but we also have to explain why HPS is important and what's worth knowing about it. Long lists of information rarely help with this process, as they tend to just create what we might call the "Google Information Overload Effect" - lots of random bits of information, but no way of fitting it all together. This doesn't make an article better, it just makes it harder to focus on the key facts. What makes Wikipedia an encyclopedia, rather than a search engine, is that we deal not just in information, but understanding.

RomanSpa (talk) 00:20, 21 October 2010 (UTC)