Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Birrong Girls High School


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. \ Backslash Forwardslash / {talk} 00:27, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Birrong Girls High School

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way too short and no references Extremepro (talk) 11:47, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions.  — Cliff smith  talk  16:58, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete non notable school. oppose redirect to Birrong the suburb as someone can just type Birrong. LibStar (talk) 13:00, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Unsourced and no indications it is notable (and NO, schools are NOT automatically notable and no guideline or policy says they are automatically notable).  TJ   Spyke   16:14, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - high school for which sources are available. Needs cleaning and expansion not deletion. TerriersFan (talk) 17:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete Unsourced and no indication of notability. --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 18:40, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment TerriersFan, if you are willing to find the sources and cite them, please feel free to do so. A search of Google News revealed 10 hits, of which most are of the "abc went to this school" variety, and a couple of news hits about minor events that happened at the school. Although a normal Google search returns over 2000 hits, most of them are either school directories, or not from reliable sites - I'd be interested to see which sources you have found that would show this school's notability. --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 18:40, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions.  —Eastmain (talk) 19:08, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. All high schools are notable. -- Eastmain (talk) 19:08, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - Eastmain, could you please give a reference to a wikipedia guideline or policy (not an essay, as these are neither policy nor guidelines) that says this? --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 19:13, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment WP:CLUB states Non-commercial organizations: Organizations are usually notable if they meet both of the following standards: 1)The scope of their activities is national or international in scale. 2) Information about the organization and its activities can be verified by third-party, independent, reliable sources. (In other words, they must satisfy the primary criterion for all organizations as described above.) --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me,  My Contribs ) 19:15, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep All high schools are considered notable at  Wikipedia, precisely to avoid the problems of debating each one individually to weed out a few percent.  Almost always sources can in fact be located with enough digging in local print sources--and, given Google News Archive, this will continue to get easier. This has been a stable compromise for over a year and a half now. (I was not too happy with it myself, because i tend to be deletionist for local institutions, but it works & avoids the previous dozen or so daily debates, almost all of which ended in keeps when the evidence was found) The only reason it isn't a formal guideline is because a few determined people can prevent the adoption of one because or our difficulty in defining what's need for consensus there. What we do is our guidelines as much as what we say.  DGG (talk) 19:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep As Editor:DGG states high schools have been given some leniency as to the guidelines.--Buster7 (talk) 22:40, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per DGG. It is rare I ever agree with him anything in recent memory but I agree with him on this one thing.  JBsupreme (talk) 23:41, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per DGG. High schools are presumed notable per established practice.  ReverendWayne (talk) 21:01, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment The argument put forward by DGG is, of course, just a fancy way of saying "What about X?". Instead of making a case about why other schools may be notable, this discussion would be better focused on reasons why this school may be notable. This may include actually citing policy and guidelines (and not actually pretending it doesn't exist if it is inconvenient) -- Mattinbgn\talk 03:51, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep as per DGG. Long-established precedent is that all secondary schools are notable for the reasons he lists. Edward321 (talk) 05:18, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment long-established precedent surely isn't a sound basis? We've done this before, let's continue doing it isn't really a policy or a guideline, is it? Personally, I feel that if all high schools are to be automatically counted as notable, for example, because a search of local papers would find sources we could use, then (1) this should be made explicit wikipedia policy - we should have a vote on this somewhere and finalise it. (2) couldn't the same argument be made for all primary/elementary schools, colleges, universities? So perhaps we should have a policy that states that all educational establishments are always counted as notable, no matter where they are, how they are licenced, how many students they have, etc. I'm not being flippant here - every other organisation on wikipedia has to have reliable sources - why should schools be treated any differently. Part of the notability for a school (whether primary or higher) should surely be that it either offers something different to the average school, or has a few notable alumni (who would have articles on here). Where would we start a formal discussion on the adoption (or otherwise) of school notability being automatic? --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me,  My Contribs ) 07:30, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Postscript Incidently, people argue that local sources might be able to verify a high school's notability - two comments on that: (1) The same argument could be used for college athletes who otherwise are non-notable; small companies that we would count as non-notable, etc - why should schools have a lower standard of notability? (2) If in a high school article, I saw citations coming from a local newspaper (e.g. "The Birrong Times, 20 April 2009 edition, page 6 Birrong Girl's High School Wins National Competition), I'd accept those - I can't check those out, but others could.
 * (cont) I don't know how many high schools there are in the world (and on the same logic, we'd need to include elementary schools, surely) but on wikipedia, most of them would just be a one line article saying "abc is a high school in xyz." - we wouldn't accept this level of article for a company, a person, a work of fiction, etc... why should schools be treated differently? --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 07:45, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * RFC - I have started a policy RFC at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools, if people would like to make comments - I've got to go out now, so I'll leave my comments later today when I get a chance --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 07:57, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete I don't agree that schools are inherently notable. It might be common practice but that doesn't make it in line with published policy. Listed references are generally either self-published (by education department that the school is a branch of) or not substantially about the school - they are about an issue.Garrie 14:07, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment.... The founder of wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is an inclusionist. Quotes:
 * School articles "if someone wants to write an article about their high school, we should relax and accommodate them, even if we wish they wouldn't do it. And that's true *even if* we should react differently if someone comes in and starts mass-adding articles on every high school in the world. 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 accommodate 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." (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-November/008266.html Partial solution to rampant deletionism] WikiEN-l, Jimmy Wales)...--Buster7 (talk) 04:47, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per general consensus that High schools are notable, and there are some refs within the article too. - SpacemanSpiff Calvin&#8225;Hobbes 18:26, 8 August 2009 (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 a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.