Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cape Coral 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 per consensus and WP:SNOW. Article has shown improvement. Nomination withdrawn PeaceNT 08:55, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Cape Coral High School

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Appears to be a quasi-joke or nonsense page on a non-notable, though demonstrably existant, high school. -Toptomcat 04:01, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

NOMINATION WITHDRAWN. Noroton's excellent cleanup work has rendered the article much better. -Toptomcat 15:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The high school is definitely existent. However, this article is completely fact based. From looking at the history, it looks like a particular IP began to invalidate the article with obnoxious comments that brought about the speedy deletion discussion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DizzleDixon (talk • contribs)
 * Delete. I can't find a good version of the article to revert this to. Much of the article seems to be devoted to satirical and unsourced negative comments about the school; it would be better to warn the vandals, delete the article, and allow the creation of a more serious-minded article later. --Metropolitan90 05:05, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, as the school is legit and as deserving of its own article as any of the other 46,000 high schools on here. But obviously it's full of schoolboy crap. I might delete everything but the infobox and a sentence with a stub tag, with hopes that someone will add legit info later. In fact, as I was writing this, I decided to tackle the job myself. Realkyhick 06:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Non-notable school and no sources. Realkyhick, WP has started to cut down on all these school articles since editors realize that schools are NOT automatically notable and have to show notability just like anything else. TJ Spyke 06:36, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: Note that the other two high schools in Cape Coral, Mariner High School (Cape Coral, Florida) and Ida S. Baker High School, both have articles. We can debate their notability as well (I'd vote a weak keep on both), but they're there. I think it should be all-stay or all-go. Personally, I think virtually all high schools are typically notable enough in that they are often the focal point of a community, but that's another debate for another place. Realkyhick 06:44, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Those "all stay or go" comments don't mean much. It may be your opinion that all schools are notable (my opinion is that they are not), but it's not Wikipedia policy and I hate when some people vote Keep and just say that "all schools are notable" instead of basing it on current policies. TJ Spyke 06:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * TJ, could you specify those current policies? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I know WP:SCHOOLS is not policy, and when I looked at WP:ORG it not only has a "summary box" at the top that doesn't assert much authority, it refers to WP:SCHOOLS. If you're referring to WP:NOTABILITY, that doesn't seem to cover villages, towns and counties where notability is hardly ever asserted and deletion nominations are hardly ever made. (But if I'm missing some other rule or guideline, please point it out.) If a rule for schools exists, maybe some of the Wikipedians who are voting to keep the schools articles, including me, should start participating in the discussions at those guidelines talk pages, because there are plenty of us and Wikipedians, after all, make the rules. Noroton 18:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Also, this is interesting, from Articles for deletion/Common outcomes: "Schools are frequently nominated for deletion, but consensus is frequently not reached. Most of the approximately 270 school articles nominated for deletion in the eight months January to August, 2005, resulted in no consensus, with fewer than 15% actually deleted." Not a rule, maybe out of date, but interesting. Noroton 19:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete, non-notable school with no sources. Terence Ong 恭喜发财 08:24, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak keep it's borderline notable as an article subject, and now that it's sourced and all the potentially libelous nonsense attack-type stuff has been deleted, there's no real reason to delete it. I'd like to congratulate the clean-up crew. You changed a silly joke article into a presentable and sourced article. Mermaid from the Baltic Sea 17:55, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletions.   -- Noroton 18:05, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: I had some time on my hands and (inspired by Realkyhicks' cleaning up the page) I was interested in seeing what the article would look like with statistics from the "Great Schools" Web site, which has state Department of Education statistics on schools. I also included a list of clubs. It isn't much and doesn't address any notability issues, but you get a picture of a school that, despite some advantages (teacher experience and education, higher-than-Florida-average wealth) is not very good academically. If some people in that community who don't pay attention to the news down there happen to see the article, it seems to me it would be useful to them. Why is this relevant to our deletion discussion? Turn the question around: We're the one's who should be relevant to our readers' concerns (while staying within the context of an encyclopedia/almanac). Our encyclopedia is better off if it's relevant to some of the concerns of communities. What we do with community articles (on villages, towns, cities, counties) which don't need to assert notability, we should do with high school and school district articles: present a good encyclopedic description of the subject that people in the community can use. We can do it like no one else can. We should do the same thing for all hospitals and for the same reasons. We can get verifiable information on these institutions, and they're intensely, overwhelmingly important to their communities. I doubt any other types of institutions are as important (libraries, elementary and middle schools, fire departments), but if a good case could be made, I'd want articles on those as well. There's a limited number (even though it's vast, but Wikipedia is vast), we can still have standards for articles, and Wikipedia is none the worse for them, in fact, Wikipedia is better for having them. Noroton 18:24, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I believe that Wikipedia is worse for the inclusion of this article. If we continue down the route that this poster advocates, we will end up with articles on pretty much everything - schools, hospitals, post offices, roads, churches, shopping malls, broadcasting towers, et cetera, ad nauseam et ad infinitum. Of course this is great if you want Wikipedia to be a collection of indiscriminate information - a kind of Google, with people editing the directory entries for ease of reading - but it does mean that Wikipedia will cease to be an encyclopedia under any commonly understood definition of the term. I certainly wouldn't see any point in working on this project if it were to evolve in the way that Noroton wishes, and my hunch is that many of our best editors ( from which category I explicitly exclude myself ) would feel the same. The idea that "all must have prizes" was discredited in the educational establishment by the 1980s, at least in the UK, and surely it must be time for us to realise that where the "prize" is a Wikipedia entry the same is true for schools. If everything is "notable", nothing is. WMMartin 14:40, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Response: WMMartin, although we disagree, I respect your point of view and have no doubts about your sincerity, although I think you'd benefit by rereading my comments above. I think it's easier to respond point by point:
 * "this sentiment" &mdash; I'd call it a "point of view", it's not just emotional, but considered.
 * "we will end up with articles on pretty much everything" &mdash; as I said in so many words, I would limit wholesale acceptance of local institutions to those that have a powerful influence on most members of a community. That leaves out most schools other than high schools (I would also include private high schools for other reasons). That criterion would certainly include all hospitals but leave out the other institutions you mention: post offices, roads, churches, shopping malls, broadcasting towers, unless they could show a similar powerful influence on a broad swath of the population.
 * You can include any of these already if you find two newspaper articles focusing on them, correct? And it doesn't matter how small the independent publication or source is, as long as it's considered reliable, correct? (This is the way I read WP:NOTABILITY, perhaps I missed something.) And do you seriously doubt that any high school in the country, no matter how small or obscure, could meet that criteria? The effect of this criterion is to hurt schools in rural or lower-income areas that don't have newspapers with good enough advertising revenues to support much of a Web presence. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of the country. My town of about 18,000 people has two weekly newspapers full of ads, daily newspapers in each of two small cities bordering the town and a glossy magazine in addition to coverage it occasionally gets from other publications. This wealth alone ensures that there are reliable independent sources about nearly every institution in town. We can't eliminate all Wikipedia biases, but we can short-circuit some of them, and this is one, regarding high schools and hospitals, that should be short-circuited. Although all high schools get newspaper coverage, the poorer, more rural schools would have to wait longer to get Wikipedia articles as editors for those articles have to do a lot more scrambling to get the information. And to what purpose? Nearly every high school has its own Web site, and it's hard to imagine that those Web sites do a lot of exaggerating about the schools, so they provide some basic information to start building an article on. We've also got state statistics on each school, which is the thing schools would be most inclined to lie about if they were going to lie. What other purpose is a "Notability" criterion if not to establish that something exists and is important to enough people that it's worth having an article on? Why would you doubt that high schools wouldn't meet this criterion?
 * "Wikipedia will cease to be an encyclopedia under any commonly understood definition of the term" &mdash; As an open-source, Web-based, electronic encyclopedia it is already a new thing. In subject matter it already includes topics that would not go into other general encyclopedias -- Pokemon characters, gay porn stars, video games (we've all got our own list of outlandish types of articles, I'm sure). So your idea that Wikipedia will "become" a grab bag of odd articles is too late in the game. No open-source project like this can avoid popular taste unless it gets much tighter with its criteria for article inclusion &mdash; and what makes you think that's going to happen? The milk is spilled, the horse is past the barn door, the toothpaste is out of the tube. It is also inevitable that a nonpaper encyclopedia would expand to cover details that paper encyclopedias just didn't have the economic ability to cover.
 * "All must have prizes" &mdash; You won't find anything I've said that supports that idea. I love my home town in Connecticut (well, at least I like it), but when I read that it was the home to the head of the state Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and a center of Klan activity, I included that in the article about it. I regularly have to check the article because that bit of information has often been removed by anonymous editors, some of whom make comments in which, I swear, you can just hear the howls of pain. An NPOV article, particularly as we get more information about the subject, is often far from a prize. I'm particularly suprised you would make this statement in a deletion discussion about Cape Coral High School. As I mention above, the statistics I put in the article show the school has embarassing problems.
 * "I certainly wouldn't see any point in working on this project if it were to evolve in the way that Noroton wishes, and my hunch is that many of our best editors ( from which category I explicitly exclude myself ) would feel the same." Why? And why leave if post offices are covered when you haven't already left since pokemon characters and porn stars are covered? What is the reasoning behind this idea that separates it from mere sentiment?
 * There are at least two major differences between Pokemon and porn star articles on the one hand and articles on high schools and other local institutions on the other &mdash; the local institutions (a) will likely last over time, meaning that the articles will get many more readers long after the P. and p.s. articles are forgotten; (b) the latter category is one readers will find useful in non-trivial ways, including as a source of negative information that the institutions themselves will hardly ever put on their own Web sites and which might be difficult to find elsewhere.
 * "If everything is notable, then nothing is" I agree, but expanding automatic notability to high schools and hospitals doesn't mean everything else has to be included. We will always have some boundaries to defend. Noroton 17:41, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: Wow! Heck of an argument, Norton. Great job! Also a great job on the article expansion. Realkyhick 17:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep for the reasons in my comment, just above, and as I also argue here. Noroton 18:24, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep and a "bravo" for Noroton. I couldn't agree more. There is too much Wikispace devoted to unimportant characters in "Spongebob Squarepants" and the latest edition of "Everquest," and not enough devoted to things that actually make people's lives work, such as schools and hospitals. Dino 20:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, but it's much too "listy". &mdash; RJH (talk) 23:45, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, Kudos to Norton, for taking the time to help out a poorly constructed article aimed at poking fun at the school. I believe that now we should focus our ideas collectively, to help in fairly representing this school with accurate data and up to date information. Its amazing that a group of silly school kids have uninherently helped there school by aiding in disseminating information that is relavent to their school. I would request that if anyone does intend to add to this article, that it be as up to date as possible. Thank you to Norton and to anyone else who had helped in this article, for taking the initiative to fix this article and further develop it and help this school and its community.MachiavellianSociety 24:24, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Norton, you didn't really do anything to make the article keep-worthy. Nothing you added makes the school notable. TJ Spyke 00:55, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * You mean you want multiple independent sources? Well, there's the Daily News of Naples article referred to in the second paragraph and there's this: link, with multiple articles about the school -- especially numbers 5 and 9. How's that? Noroton 01:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep with the collaborative and gradual efforts, wiki users and cape high students can monitor and alter the page as needed. ive added a bit in the clubs and added athletics which i can get more info about tomorrow. i also replaced a section belittleing local news stations written by a student with the achievements section. Wfe_x_4 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wfe x 4 (talk • contribs) 01:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC).
 * Delete. I come to this article after Noroton's work. Sadly, although the article is informative, it still doesn't indicate why the school is notable, nor provide evidence that it is notable. The fact that Noroton likes the school is not actually relevant: he hasn't shown that it's any more notable than its peers. WMMartin 14:40, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * It's notable enough to have been the subject of multiple newspaper articles, but I think every high school in the country can claim that. Of course, I think they're all notable enough for inclusion here. (And actually, I don't happen to like or dislike the school.) Noroton 16:20, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Strong Keep In 30 seconds of research I discovered that the school had been recognized in 1988-89 by the Blue Ribbon Schools Program, the country's highest honor for a school in the United States, which would be a very strong and explicit claim of notability, certainly moreso than its peers, contrary to WMMartin's claim. Contrary to the absolutely false statements made by TJ Spyke, most schools are notable, and all it takes is someone to lift their finger to add the required information to demonstrate this fact. Alansohn 01:00, 4 March 2007 (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.