On 02/07/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
If you have an argument that these articles are harming the project, I for one would like to hear it.
They're magnets for crap; they go bad, they don't improve, and they thus lower the average quality of the articles we possess. (This is anecdotal, but I can provide a theory explaining the observed evidence...)
Very little community involvement in them because of their specialised interest; the articles tend to get "owned" by a group of pupils at that school. As a result, we either get a well-meaning (but usually rambling and parochial) brochure/student-newspaper, which isn't wonderful but is tolerable, or we get a scurrilous attack page about this-or-that trivial "scandal" at the school, or just abusive attacks on the staff. And because of the lack of eyeballs on them, they fester.
Part two of this - now speculative - is that the people this impacts most are the schools; they react badly against us, assumping This Sort Of Thing is symptomatic, and thus the very people we ought to be reaching out to are being systematically pissed-off because of our optomistic toleration of this stuff...