Charlotte Webb wrote:
On 5/22/07, Angela Anuszewski angela.anuszewski@gmail.com wrote:
My earlier reading made me consider whether or not school districts are notable simply because they exist, or some more significant event or achievement should be required to create or retain an article on the subject.
If a wealth of verifiable information about a school or district... total enrollment, dropout rate, square footage of the facility, date of establishment, geographical coordinates, mascot, sports team uniform colors, number and average salary of faculty, nearest state highway (most, if not all, of those will have articles)... can be added to Wikipedia, any (inherently subjective) measure of "notability" is not relevant.
I may be sceptical about some of the items on the list, but you are definitely on the right track.
If it's only a small amount, more can always be added later, particularly by somebody living in the area who is more likely to have access to back issues of local newspapers, which might not be available online, and could reveal additional information — there may have been a shooting incident or other violent crime on campus which was covered locally but did not attract national media attention, as would probably be the case if no serious injuries or deaths resulted.
If information exists, somebody will add it. Try not to be too quick in completely writing off certain topics. Stub templates exist for a reason.
Absolutely they become something to build on. A school article may only have a few bits of basic data at the start, but that's a basic structure on which someone can build in the future. Someone less familiar with the basic structures will not be inclined to start an article from scratch. In the early days all there was at [[Tucson, Arizon]] was "Tucson is a city in Arizona." that was an excuse to edd, not to subtract. We can expect that as Wikipedia gets bigger we will need to pay attention to ever narrower subjects; that's just as it should be.
Ec