On 9/28/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
So, the current situation is that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_%28town%29%2C_New_York
contains the following completely out-of-context and unverified and unverifiable paragraph:
"Private education
Finger Lakes Christian School is a private Pre-K-Grade 12 school located in Seneca Falls, New York. It shares the building with the 1st Baptist Church. The current principal is the Rev. Scott Van Kirk. The school was established in 1991.
This is all verifyable with the New York State board of education. I had all the links up a few days ago and will go back and find them again sometime in the next few days, and reference the article.
Linked to The First Baptist Church of Seneca Falls,
its aims were to offer an alternative for Christian children.
This is only verifyable off the school website and student info packet/application.
The school
has about 75 students.
This is verifyable with the New York State board of education.
Its admission policy is that at least one parent
or guardian must be a born-again Christian. As well as the general curriculum, pupils at the school attend Bible classes twice a week, and students have devotional meetings with their teachers or a Pastor at least weekly and have a weekly Chapel service."
This is only verifyable off the school website and student info packet/application
I would go in and simply delete it myself and insist that it not be
added back until someone finds a source better than the school's own homemade website, but I don't want to be seen as creating *actual policy* in this area by my edits.
I'm just saying.
I think you're applying too high a bar for verifyability. The basic factual existence, location, size and management of the school are independently verifyable. This will be as a rule easily true for any of the 124,000-ish schools in the US.
I think that using a school website for additional descriptive information of the nature of the tidbits above is eminently reasonable. Once we establish that an organization such as a school exists, and verify its general information, then "flavor" details from its website or own published information should count as reasonably verified. The fundamental focus of verifyability needs to be avoiding the publication of untracable false information. In this case, we are tracing the information to the publications of the organization itself, whose existence the NY State Board of Education vouches for.
One could use a stricter verifyability standard and strip out own-website sourced school information, but I ask you (and the assembled throngs), to what end? If the intent is to both provide accurate information and verifiable (referenced) information, then the second is met (school's existence and statistics easily externally confirmed, so it becomes a credible reference regarding itself). Schools as a rule would get in huge amounts of trouble if they started lying in public publications or websites about themselves, so we should make a reasonable assumption of accuracy for those websites.