Fred Bauder wrote:

There is extensive discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy/schools

My thought, which is probably a distinct minority, is that while it is a good policy to not include articles on high schools, is is good to tolerate articles made by contributors or groups of contributors who are currently attending a school.

Fred

This seems to encourage a fair-minded approach. While I do admit that while most of what might be written about a high school is of very little general interest or significance, there are pockets of people who have an interest in these things, and they should be respected. Given the enormous number of high schools around the world, it's unlikely that articles would appear about any more than a handful of them.. Most will be written by people who have or have had a direct connection with the school. If I were to write about a high school (which is NOT in my plans) I would be more inclined to write about the brand new one where my son just started attending, than the one that I graduated from many years ago. I could even justify this in terms of the study of the innovative educational policies that were applied in the plans for the school.

It is extremely frustrating to be perpetually needing to defend articles about obscure topics that directly affect a limited number of people. The fact that one of the high schools may have the largest student population of any school on the US Eastern Seabord does not translate into a corpus of a whole lot of wikipedians to defend it out of direct interest. The history of science and technology is an endless series of ideas that were conceived, published and ignored. That does not imply anything about the idea; maybe just nobody had the interest or the time to carry it further so it fell into obscurity. Nobody is suggesting that we go back and delete all of these dead end articles from the journals so that the journals may be more compact and fit more easily on the library shelves.

Among the arguments that may be raised against the death penalty is an economic one. (Please, this posting is not about the death penalty) It starts from an estimate of how much it might cost to keep a person in prison for the rest of his life. It then compares that to the costs of lawyers, courts and the rest of the justice system to keep the same person from being executed. If the appeals are successful, the costs of keeping him in prison will still be there. This can make the pursuit of capital punishment very expensive.

Dealing with proposed deletions is a severe drain of time on Wikipedians, because we must spend time defending free speech over trivial articles we are kept away from contributing at other things where our time might be better spent. As we defend these articles there is always the feeling that we need to keep looking over our shoulders to see where the deletionists may strike next; this makes for a generally stressful atmosphere. Any article presented with good faith that does no apparent harm should be retained.

Ec

On 11/29/03 1:21 AM, "Rick" giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:

You're an ass. I have no interest in discussing anything with you now, or in the future.

I do hope we can resolve our differences amicably in the future.