JAY JG said:
The reason it is hard to delete school articles is two-fold;
- Wikipedia deletion rules are stacked in favour of inclusion; at
least two-thirds of voters (and often more) must vote to delete for it to happen, and votes to re-direct are interpreted as "keep", though the obvious intent is that the article should not stand on its own.
When I close, I usually go for 75-80%, depends how confident I am about the presence of socks and the like.
- School inclusionists are now organized, and have set up a
"Schoolwatch" page to ensure that all schools are kept. These people vote to keep every single school, usually with cut and paste comments. Thus a group of a dozen or so inclusionists can easily force Wikipedia to keep every single school article, no matter how silly, uninformative, trivial or unverifiable they are. And, in fact, that's exactly what they do. However, whether these dozen people represent the consensus of Wikipedia is another question.
I think the group of inclusionists you describe may well exist. I think it is more than likely that, like me, they have been influenced by a perception that there exists a campaign to delete school articles and to use VfD, as David Gerard has put it, or the purpose of quality control. In my case the perception arose from the actions following the closing of an article on Mahajana School with a keep decision. The school was inexplicably redirected to the Erode article and then speedy deleted. It was restored following a long discussion on votes for undeletion, but then relisted for deletion again very soon after.
More recently, the robotic listing for deletion of over 50 schools in the space of 3 days did nothing to dispel my impression that a deletion campaign was under way. I can find no other explanation for carrying out such a procedure on that timescale.
That kind of activity does tend to attract attention. The kind of people who are most likely to do something about it rather than just shrug it off tend to be those who, like me, don't like what they see happening. It may also cause some people, like me, to rethink their attitude towards deletion. It tends to radicalize people.
So yes, there's something in what you say. But there is also some truth to the old story about sowing dragon's teeth.