User talk:Thesteve/Schools

I have to disagree with some of your reasoning here.

''A school is a community consisting of the teachers and students who go there. In order for there to be a school, there must be enough people to fill it, usually somewhere between 400 and 2000.''

Not necessarily true. In a good number of cases, you have schools in remote areas with fewer. The authorities know this, but may nto be able to close the school, as it may be too far for the students to travel.

There are also peripheral members of this community including the parents, the boy scouts who meet in the gym every week, and the local sports team that uses the soccer field on weekends.

Parents are irrelevant, unless you propose we can have articles on each of the 6 billion people in the world (excluding those deceased). In the last point, it should be the school that is mentioned in the article about the sports team, and not vice versa.
 * My point is that they are involved with the school, and it affects their lives, just as where they live does. The greater the effect something has, the more encyclopedic it becomes, which is why fame is often used as justification for inclusion.

''Students usually spend 4 years going to a high school for 6 hours every weekday, and the lasting effect on their lives in undeniable. Consensus is that all places merit inclusion, and it is a very small stretch to add schools, which are comparable in population to a small town.''

You know what it takes to get rid of a school? Typically, 8 councillors sat in the local council's education committee to say "aye" to the motion, and the school is closed (as a guide, there are some 10,000 councillors in the UK alone). You know what it takes to get rid of a small town? A serious natural disaster, or a ridiculous amount of explosives (there are probably 50 people in the world that could authorise this, and checks would be in place).
 * Do you know what "redistricting" is? The borders of towns and other imaginary geographical areas change all the time.  The mutability of such things has no bearing on whether it should be included or not.

''Schools also tend to include property and a building or two. The older the building, the more interesting it becomes. Some have unique architectural features. Almost all of them are of significant enough size to be landmarks, and are included on local maps.''

Compared to a human settlement, someone decided at some point, for very good reason, that they were going to settle in that spot. It's not a matter of "let's pitch our tents here and form a town" or "this cave seems nice, let's set up here", consideration goes into it. Schools are not the subject ofthe same consideration. Common reasons for a school site include "We've got some land here we can build on" or "the local church will donate this field for a school". For more recent schools, it's often "seems we've got some vacant buildings here". Again, the councillors around a table, if they wanted to, can pass an order saying "right, we're going to move your school 500 yards down the road".


 * I don't really see much difference between "This field can be used" and "This cave seems nice". Note that human settlements change, merge, seperate and are moved all the time.  I agree that schools are much smaller, but not so small that they don't merit inclusion here.

''Most schools have been around for some time and so interesting events, news stories, famous alumni, controversies, shootings and lawsuits that happened there tend to accumulate. Obviously, the older the school is, the more significant this becomes.''

Indeed they do. However, for the vast majority of schools, that pile tends to stay small, almost non-existent in some cases. Every school might be different, but the differences are rarely enough to merit that every school gets in.

Each of these reasons may not be enough, in and of itself, to merit inclusion, but taken together, they almost certainly do.

Taken together, they might merit inclusion, but it's no guarantee. When I see a school which meets them all, I vote keep. However, most of those that present themselves on VfD do not. It may well be that there is plenty of history behind them, but VfD is for voting on articles that should be deleted, not subjects which should not have an article. The latter may be a reason for the former, but that's not the objective. If the article does not demonstrate that it meets these qualities, then the article should be deleted, even if the subject at hand should be included. If it turns out that the subject should be in, then both the school and WP deserves better than the one or two sentences that get's written about most of them.
 * This is probably where we disagree the most. I vote on whether a subject can become a good article, not whether it is now a good article.  I have a lot of patience and I believe in the wiki principle of many people working to make a high quality article eventually.

People seem to forget that the fact that Wiki is not paper does not mean that we have room for these things. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that wiki is paper. Paper costs money. Paper, once used, has to go somewhere. Bandwidth costs money. Storage space costs money (think of it - every school in the world has somewhere in the region of 1k of WP history in storage, that's 10GB easily, and uncompressed en: is already 80GB). People may start adding all kinds of rubbish based on the idea that "XYZ school is prettty unimportant, and that's in, so why can't I be in?".

Maybe some combination of the facts that you mention might bring an article up to the threshold at which it becomes good enough to stay. However, without any evidence in the articles themselves, they still fail to meet the criteria to which we hold everything else in Wikipedia, and to make an exception for schools sets dangerous precedent.

Chris 16:43, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I notice you didn't comment on my solution of aggregating schools into larger, more encyclopedic articles. I respect the opinion of those who think schools are too small to merit their own article, and wonder if they might accept something more encompassing, like school boards or districts, with the schools redirecting to the larger article.   T h e St ev e  16:44, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

En fits on a single hard-disk uncompressed? I wonder how many hard disks could be bought using the amound by which en exceeded it's fundraising goals for this year? --L33tminion | (talk) 23:55, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)