Wikipedia talk:Dashboard/schoolwatch/Archive 1

Merges should be discussed on article talk pages, not just with the 'person resonsible' Kappa 21:53, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. Kind of hard to form consensus otherwise (-: JYolkowski 21:58, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

More importantly, "unannounced merges" should not be summarily reverted as you say. Chris talk back 22:07, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I disagree on that point; if they aren't put back to their old state, it makes it much harder to read the article and judge it on its merits. I think a better idea would be to revert the article to its pre-redirect phase and get feedback on WP:RFC or WP:VfD. --BaronLarf 22:13, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. VfD is too cluttered as it is, and RFC shouldn't be used as a starting point. Anyone who wants to see the previous state of the article can browse the history. It's better form to discuss before reverting the article, rather than potentially launching into an edit war. JYolkowski 01:21, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Best High Schools

I added the Newsweek list of America's best high schools to my userpage. While I do not contend that this list exhausts the supply of notable high schools, I do feel that those on this list have a particularly strong claim, and that placement therein is good ammunition to bring out in vfd discussions. -- BD2412 ^thimkact 01:33, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Australian school for FAC

Just thought I'd mention that a major Australian school, Caulfield Grammar School, is currently a featured article candidate. It would be very beneficial to the school-inclusionists on Wikipedia to be able to point to a school with an FA article as proof of how helpful they can be. Harro5 05:04, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

Is there an anti-school project?

Is there an anti-school project for the more useful task of getting rid of all non-notable school articles? If not, why not? — P Ingerson (talk) 1 July 2005 12:16 (UTC)

I will uphold your effort to start such a project. Mandel 21:37, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

Aren't anti-school users using this project? There is a list of schools up for deletion and stats of what has happened to them. It does not seem inherently pro- or anti-school; just watching school articles. What would be different about an anti-school schoolwatch? DoubleBlue (Talk) 23:01, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

An anti-school schoolwatch might make it possible to get rid of some of the truly awful school articles out there. --Carnildo 23:45, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

And how would you do that?: List truly awful school articles, nominate them for deletion, and vote to delete? It seems you could skip a step, and just nominate for deletion and watch Schoolwatch to vote to delete nominated articles. Not that I object to you starting an anti-school project, I just don't understand how it could possibly be any different from this Watch. DoubleBlue (Talk) 23:52, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

• The problem is that every time something with the word "school" in the name comes up for deletion, there's a group of about 20 people who descend on the VfD and vote "keep", frequently with reasons that attack the nominator and any "delete" voters. --Carnildo 00:09, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Maybe you should take the hint. Grace Note 00:12, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Tell me, how is "- is an elementary school serving kindergarten through sixth grade." a worthwhile encyclopedia article? --Carnildo 01:09, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Sounds like a very expandable stub of an important institution. DoubleBlue (Talk) 01:49, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Here you go. --Carnildo 02:09, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• Of course, I would have no trouble considering your article a WP:CSD since it contained no context but Kappa has done a good job turning it into a reasonable dab and creating a fine brief school page which could be easily expanded further by those with time to find more information. DoubleBlue (Talk) 14:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
• I think the "no context" criterion is very subjective. To me the first version was a perfectly acceptable stub, but for the lack of location details. This is because there could be any number of Adams Elementary Schools of which that particular statement could be said. However there is an important point that the "no context" argument seems to miss: Google.
• In his white paper on free software development, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond deduced that Linus Torvalds' thinking was something along the lines of:
  • Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
• He then went on to paraphrase this, in a formulation that he dubbed Linus' Law:
  • ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. I dub this: ``Linus's Law.
• The point is that not everybody has the same skills or focus, or has the energy to deal with a whole project, but when there are many people working on a project it's as if you had a kind of supermind with enormous abilities to focus on nitpicking detail.
• I think Wikis can be seen as doing pretty much the same thing for content production. To some perhaps this stub looked useless, but to some of us it looks like an opportunity--an invitation, even--for expansion. Creating and expanding tiny stubs like that is the way some of us prefer to work. "Here is a statement about this school," it seems to say, "go verify it and expand it, just a bit." Even ten years ago such a task would have been well beyond the reach of the average person. Now rich hoards of information are available via google and other search engines, and on Wikipedia we have the tools to recognise verifiable information and amplify it by placing it into encyclopedia articles. And we're good at it. Within ten years, at current trends, practically anything public that you could want to know will be available somewhere, so articles that can only be intriguing stubs now may well be quite interesting, even exhaustive reviews of subject that, while obscure enough to attract few editors over days and weeks, may grow formidable over months and years. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 14:53, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

• This is not a discussion about stubs. This is a discussion about completely unremarkable schools that should never have an encyclopedia entry, no matter how detailed and well-written. That's what the WWW is for. --Tysto 19:50, 2005 August 13 (UTC)
• That's a matter of opinion. For instance I rescued a speedy the other day that turned out to be about a fairly new school (and the article originally said this) that has won the US blue ribbon twice in its short existence. The administrator who speedied it apparently thought that this didn't indicate notability. The Texas State Legislature thought otherwise, and passed HR999 in May, 2003 to commend that school, its principal and students. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 02:42, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

• But winning a couple of "good school" awards does begin to rise to the level of notability. On the other hand, you surely would not argue that every state champion football team deserves an article. --Tysto 03:01, 2005 August 14 (UTC)

Of course, it doesn't help that a certain pro-school admin has refused to delete school articles even when doing so is called for by VfD. --Carnildo 07:20, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

There was no consensus to delete on that article. As I believe you've said yourself, BJAODN would involve moving the article to BJAODN, not deleting it. I was tempted to interpret the BJAODN votes as deletes, but concluded that they were not consistent with deletion because the material would be lost to BJAODN. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:42, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

So you kept the article, against the wishes of the people who voted BJAODN and/or delete, abusing your role as closer and twisting the wishes of the people who voted. Ambi 14:43, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

The BJAODN votes didn't need to be interpreted as deletes or keeps. They were explicit deletes. Ignoring that was abusive. --Tysto 19:46, 2005 August 13 (UTC)

• There was an RfC on this, brought by Ambi and one other. The overwhelming consensus seems to be in favor of my response. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 02:24, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

• I read the original vote. The overwhelming response was for deletion and you deliberately misinterpreted it. --Tysto 03:01, 2005 August 14 (UTC)

If you read the original vote you would have seen that the vote was divided between delete and BJAODN, which latter I was unable to interpret as a vote for deletion. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 03:06, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Unable or unwilling? Johntex\^talk 04:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Uh, take a look at the date-stamps. This thread has been dormant for some time. In a while, I'll probably archive this page, to avoid future mistakes like this. --Rob 04:32, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Vote for Deletion

This article survived a Vote for Deletion. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 02:35, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Northview High School, Duluth Georgia

This one needs some expansion. --TimPope 10:15, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Seoul International School - I offer you this one too. --TimPope 10:38, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm moving on

Without meaning to, over the past five months I've become a principal commentator and enthusiastic cheerleader in the absolutely fascinating debate on schools. I've enjoyed interacting with just about everybody involved. Again without meaning to, I've somehow become the principal maintainer of the lists--I update and prune the list of schools up for deletion, copyvios, etc, and I have created and maintained an archive of school deletion discussions, as well as summarising the results in the table on the main page. More recently I've created a week or so of snapshot of new school articles.

It was this latter that shocked me out of my little bubble. It's evident to me that the AfD discussions, except insofar as they result in the improvement of school articles, is a sideshow. School articles are being created at a much greater rate than they are being deleted. In the circumstances I feel that I could spend my energies more effectively elsewhere; nothing AfD could do would ever stop the growth and improvement of school articles on Wikipedia.

So I'm moving on. Effective immediately, I will no longer maintain any part of schoolwatch. You'll still see me around, but you probably won't see me involved in school deletion discussions to the same extent. Remember that at least one other editor maintains a schoolwatch subpage in his user space. If anyone has some spare time, and a broadband connection, it takes about ten minutes to search the Afd day log (linked from User:Tony Sidaway/Deletion) for the current day, copy the names of any schools from the contents list, and add relevant links to the watch list and the archive. I usually search on the character strings "colleg", "demy" (for academy) and "school". If you do that once a day the watchlist and the archive will be maintained. Which would be nice, but not so nice that I myself am prepared to keep on doing it. Five months or so has been fun, and I've seen some interesting and promising changes. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 19:38, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

• That's indeed an interesting list, and it makes clear that in order to that the regular editors of the encyclopedia will have to be more or less unified against the inclusion of school articles to halt the growth which is largely coming from minor contributors and anons. It's reassuring that the long tail of Wikipedia editors does have the ability to steer the encyclopedia in the right direction even while the high-frequency editors are bickering. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:18, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Get rid of duplication

Why do we list schools here, if there listed at Wikipedia:Watch/schoolwatch/Votes for deletion archive, which shows the most recent additions on top, where there easy to find? It seems the list here is often out-of-date, and it would be best to remove it (keeping everything else as is). --rob 10:35, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

total vandalism

Nashoba Regional High School has been vandalized. It needs a complete rewrite.

South Luton High School

Er, not exactly clear on the procedures for getting school articles improved (I'm sort of in a hurry here), but this new article on a high school needs sufficient cleanup and wikifying. --FuriousFreddy 15:25, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools/alumni

FYI, there's a new subpage for adding notable alumni, for school's without having articles yet. Rather than just making a substub with the one alum, or throwing out the info, I made Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools as a repository. When a school has a enough notable alumni and other signficant information, an article can be made, and the info transferred. Also, when picking which school to write a new aricle on, one factor to consider is how many notable alumni the school has. This is out of article space, so no regular users will see it. --Rob 06:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Bennett, Colorado

I'm pretty much opposed to the agenda of the "pro-school-inclusionists" in Wikipedia ( usual reasons ). But when a school becomes "notable" I feel we should have an article. Accordingly, I'd like to request an entry in Wikipedia for Bennett Elementary School in Bennett, Colorado, following today's controversy over the showing of an opera video to some students. WMMartin 18:50, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

If you wish an article on this school, then go do it. You show a rather negative attitude in your comments, and it would be unfortunate, if anybody responded to you by doing your bidding (though if they were going to make an article on it anyhow, that would be fine). Do you plan on posting a talk message every time you read about a school in the news? Schools do make the news all the time, and if you wish to write about any one of them, go ahead and do so. --Rob 23:45, 3 February 2006 (UTC)