Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Benjamin Cory Elementary School

 This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was no consensus -- Joolz 20:14, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Benjamin Cory Elementary School
Elementary school; importance not established. TimPope 10:09, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, part of the sum of human knowledge wikipedia promises me. Kappa 10:45, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Kappa, please, "the sum of human knowledge" is a reference to the Encyclopaedia Britannica's slogan. It means "knowledge" in the sense of "learning, erudition;" it does not mean an indiscriminate collection of information. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:37, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This isn't indiscriminate information, and the Britannica thing is obscure. Kappa 00:17, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * keep please it is jimbos wishes we keep this Yuckfoo 18:13, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete Do you people realize how many other elementary schools are in southern california alone? Let's stop cluttering wikipedia with this useless nonsense. --Kennyisinvisible 19:10, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not paper, so the idea that it is being "cluttered" is itself nonsense. Kappa 19:12, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * "Clutter" can happen well before space runs out. My room can be cluttered even if not filled to the brim. My directory can be cluttered even if not even close to being full. Each additional article leads to extra work for everyone. Sdedeo 21:34, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This is a self-sufficient article and require no work except from people who might wish to improve it. Apart from that, no-one but random page users needs to encounter it. Kappa 21:40, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Problems a non-notable article might be subject to include vandalism. Also, non-notability usually leads to severe NPOV problems, since the only people who are aware of it are those with personal connections. All of these lead to strain on wikipedia editors who now have to keep track. Sdedeo 22:05, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * We should be focusing on making useful articles better anyway. Quality, not quantity. --Kennyisinvisible 19:16, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Feel free to focus your efforts wherever you like, but deleting this article will diminish wikipedia in both quality and quantity. Kappa 20:02, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Please reply on talk page How about merging this information somewhere? Then nothing is lost, eh? -  brenneman (t) (c)  03:18, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete like most primary shcols, not notable. Dunc|&#9786; 19:24, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete &mdash; Covered on San Jose Unified School District. Institutions below High School are generally non-notable and should be covered on school district pages. &mdash; RJH 19:57, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. Too large to merge into San Jose Unified School District parent article.  That, and it's notable.  &mdash;RaD Man (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Another non-notable elementary school. Quale 21:32, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Weak keep. Barely notable, but admirably sourced. Sdedeo 21:34, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep magnet school. -- DS1953 22:19, September 3, 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep - Schools are notable. UniReb 23:36, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, because this article mentions nothing notable about this school. It may be true that all schools are notable and, if so, someone should find the notable thing about this school and add it to the article. If this is done prior expiration of AfD discussion I'll withdraw this vote. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:39, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete per User:Soltak/Views Soltak | Talk 23:47, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. Excellent article of which Wikipedia can be rightly proud. --Tony Sidaway Talk  01:36, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not notable. - brenneman (t) (c)  02:03, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, article does not indicate anything notable about this school. Nandesuka 02:14, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Clutter. Gamaliel 03:32, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. More of Project Drown Wikipedia in Trivia. --Calton | Talk 03:51, September 4, 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Non-notable grade school. Jonathunder 15:26, 2005 September 4 (UTC)
 * Keep, verifiable, good article. JYolkowski // talk 15:57, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep A good start. CalJW 19:41, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, notability established. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:42, 2005 September 4 (UTC)
 * Keep. Looks like a school to me. --Nicodemus75 08:23, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Four walls and a roof are not encyclopaedic. Proto t c 12:51, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * keep, notable. 24ip | lolol 22:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, I've been to this school, it's less notable then my dog and per Schools for Deletion.Gateman1997 03:19, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Speedy delete - I don't know if the school is notable or not (from above comments, I would guess not), but the article itself makes absolutely no assertion of notability. Cmadler 14:38, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment. The article isn't about a person, so it wouldn't be eligible for deletion on those grounds. --Tony Sidaway Talk 14:44, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * It isn't eligible for speedy deletion on those grounds. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:33, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * If only people were eligible for deletion on the basis of notability (or lack thereof), then we may begin to see an article on every individual building ("101 Elm Street, Townville", "102 Elm Street, Townville", "103 Elm Street, Townville", etc.). If I wrote an article about my house, which is insignificant apart from my living there, that could be considered nothing more than a vanity (by association) article. I hope that Tony Sidaway (and the rest of the "all schools are notable" crowd) see the folly and the absurdity of taking Wikipedia down this path. Any article not asserting notability should be eligible for speedy deletion. Cmadler 18:49, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I hope you see the absurdity of deleting articles about universities, villages, rivers and species of bug which don't assert notability. Kappa 20:11, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, to clarify: I meant it cannot be speedied on the grounds that it makes no assertion of notability--that's a CSD A7 criterion that applies only to articles about people. --Tony Sidaway Talk  02:50, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep Notable School  Guerberj 16:46, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete not a notable school --SpaceMonkey 18:57, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is a school which is no doubt important to its community.  If Wikipedia is really trying to accomplish its goal of being the sum of all human knowledge, this article falls under that umbrella and should be kept.  Silensor 19:00, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * If "information" and "knowledge" were the same thing, then "the sum of all human knowledge" would be "an indiscriminate collection of information." Why do you consider this article to qualify as "knowledge," rather than merely "information" or "data?" Dpbsmith (talk) 20:05, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Also define important. I've seen this school and it's not that important to its community either. If it were to close the students would just go to another box, I mean school. It's barely above a preschool.Gateman1997 21:11, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Text should be merged with San Jose Unified School District, or moved to a new Elementary schools of the San Jose Unified School District article.  Blank Verse  &empty;  19:27, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep. This school was nominated for deletion less than 24 hours after creation.  Please give other editors a chance.  Bahn Mi 01:05, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. I know wikipedia is not paper, however, neither is it a yellowpages and this is just clutter.  If every school, and every teacher, not to mention all the university professors, had a page, then that content would dwarf the useful content in wikipedia by many fold.  This is stamp collecting gone mad. More is NOT better.  David D. (Talk) 04:10, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Suppose it were true that an article on every single school in the world were ever likely to appear on Wikipedia. Suppose further that these articles would, in their number, "dwarf" all the other content of Wikipedia.  Why would this be a problem?  You don't have to look at articles you aren't interested in looking at.  If I go to the article Embryogenesis, in what way is my reading experiences affected by the existence of 1000 or so articles about Pokemon? --Tony Sidaway Talk  19:48, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This is true, and subtrivial-but-probably-accurate articles are almost harmless. Wikipedia is not intended to be mainly used via the "random article" link. And it doesn't have an easily visible list of contents. But let me ask: if I go to the article Embryogenesis, in what way is my reading experience affected by the existence of inaccuracies in articles on other topics? If there is, say, a group of people who wish to contribute inaccurate articles about a topic that is of interest mainly to other people who tolerate these inaccuracies, should anyone be concerned? If so, why? Dpbsmith (talk) 20:22, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I'd definitely like to see a coherent answer to this. Why does it matter that WP has lots of articles about schools or any other marginally interesting thing? Surely our primary concern ought to be that the articles are well written, so that if someone were to look up X chool, they are not faced with nonsense or ugliness? Why would it matter if there were 64 million articles in Wikipedia, and 60 million were about schools? You keep saying it matters, guys, but you never actually explain why. Do you feel it is a question of dignity? Do you think it somehow reflects badly on you?
 * I don't understand your question, Dpbsmith, which is a pity because you are at least more thoughtful than most of the wannabe deletionists in this area. Your enjoyment of an article is not in the least affected by inaccuracies in other articles so long as it doesn't link to them except that if you read many very inaccurate articles, your faith in the accuracy of the article in question is damaged. This would seem to be an argument for accuracy (and by extension verifiability) and nothing much to do with whether articles should be included. If you are trying to argue that deletionists should be encouraged to spend more time ensuring that articles we have are accurate and less on trying to delete things they don't like, I wholeheartedly agree. If you are arguing that we should be encouraging people to contribute poor articles because others who tend to read them don't care about their mistakes (which you seem to be suggesting), then I don't agree. We should neither encourage nor discourage it, but should do our best to mitigate it by fixing up the bad stuff. Grace Note 02:38, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Tony seemed to be arguing that I shouldn't care about articles if they are not on topics of interest to me, because if they don't interest me I'll never see them and therefore they don't affect me. I'm saying, well, copyvios and inaccurate articles and POV and hoaxes do affect me even if they are on topics on which I would never consult WIkipedia. Therefore, I say, yes, I do have some interest in the quality of Wikipedia as a whole.
 * Now, let's take this to the next step. Should really low-quality articles ever be deleted, simply because they are of low quality? This is tough, because we all recognize that Wikipedia articles are improved over time. But not at the same rate. There's no harm in a low-quality article about Beethoven, or Buddy Holly, or Wisconsin, because a lot of people know something about these topics and they will get improved quickly. On the other hand, very few people know much about Heathcote Elementary School. If the first person to write about it write a good-quality stub, good. If not, it may be months or years before anybody gets around to writing one&mdash;and it will likely be an independent event, i.e. the new article will probably not have "grown" from the old one.
 * Let's suppose that, for some reason, there is a class of topic that is attracting the contribution of large numbers of low-quality articles. If they are being contributed faster than they are being improved, yes, that's a problem.
 * There are no absolutes here. School articles are less of a problem than they used to be, because there are more serious, experienced editors working on them than there used to be.
 * People can't believe the Wikipedia process actually works. Well, it does work&mdash;but not automatically and not without conditions. One of the conditions is that there really be "many eyes." The problem with "non-notable" topics is that they attract few eyes.
 * At some point, articles are deletable if they are about something that is too non-notable. As you'd expect, not everyone draws the line at the same place. And, as you'd expect, at the borderline, there is great contention. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:30, 10 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, I think I can respond to that. I think the point is precisely this: that school articles are generally of such high quality, or can be made so, that deletion of a school article is actually quite a rare and surprising event.  For nearly 276 school article deletion nominations, we've only had 37 school article deletions--less than 15% of those listed.
 * So is the problem that most school stubs created are rubbish? Well no, I don't think that claim can be defended either.  Here is a log I have just created linking to every school article created on Wikipedia in the past three or four days: Watch/schoolwatch/New.  There are some duds in there, but I'd happily take on most of them and pilot them through a AfD with a very high confidence of keeping the result.
 * Okay, is the problem that most school stubs aren't being improved, and there are too few eyes? I think one has to adopt a very blinkered approach to article production to support this hypothesis.  Firstly, I think it's highly likely that Wikipedia or some successor project is likely to maintain this knowledge base in some publicly editable form for many decades.  Secondly, only articles that people want to edit ever get created.  There is no evidence that some mechanical script, like the one that created all those articles about tiny blips on the US census map, is at work here.
 * But finally I just don't buy the thesis. Schools are public institutions, so there is plenty of verifiable information about them.  There is no reason to support the hypothesis that lack of eyes will be a problem.  Any reasonably well educated, reasonably bright person can look at any school article and determine whether the statements in the article are adequately sourced and neutral.  There is no problem with school articles that cannot be solved by the normal process of editing. --Tony Sidaway Talk  03:55, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Three questions. 1) Is it possible that there could be a class of article that attracts a rate of creation of articles of low quality and has a very low rate of article review and improvement&mdash;so that, at any given time, the average article quality was very low? 2) Would such a hypothetical class of article be a problem for Wikipedia? 3) Are school articles an instance of such a class? Obviously your answer to #3 is "no." But what about 1 and 2? Dpbsmith (talk) 11:14, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't buy 1 and 2, really. I think it's an interesting hypothesis but I don't find a lot of articles that are likely to be a problem for Wikipedia.  A low rate of improvement is absolutely of no concern here; there is no deadline.   I've got some concrete examples, too.  Of the sixteen school articles created since midnight, UTC, I'd say three or four need cleanup, but the others are already pretty good stubs.  Not bad going for their first day. Older schools get more edits and I think they tend to fare better at AfD. --Tony Sidaway Talk  12:15, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Wikipedia may not be paper, but it is not toilet paper, either. --Carnildo 07:32, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep and stop nominating schools until consensus is reached on them --Ryan Delaney talk 10:21, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * There is yet no consensus on schools, and that's why on occasion they crop up on AfD. Especially if the article is as trite as this. Pilatus 20:05, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Replace with an article called "Elementary schools in California" or "California elementary schools" which would list the schools and mention any notable information concerning specific ones. That way the knowledge is included in Wikipedia but in the most compact, kilobit-economical way.  --wayland 11:34, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * To all 'keepers', what is your argument against Waylands suggestion? David D. (Talk) 14:45, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep it's a school. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 19:50, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. It's a non-notable elementary school. / Peter Isotalo 19:52, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete It accepts 430 students each year and has had its picture taken. 129.215.194.205 19:55, 7 September 2005 (UTC) Pilatus 19:57, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * delete NN elementary school. Keep all secondary schools Roodog2k (talk) 20:38, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Somehow K-2 seems to be a pushing the limits a bit.  Vegaswikian 04:24, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep Schools don't need to be notable any more than small towns, population 10.  Unfocused 05:12, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete completely nn school. Dottore So 23:54, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete per User:Soltak/Views. --Idont Havaname 14:32, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep, relevant to education in San Jose, California; especially important for its Hispanic community. Nice picture too. --Vsion 23:16, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep the grass is green today... so keep. ALKIVAR &trade;[[Image:Radioactive.svg|18px|]] 05:26, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.