There's no hope for this. Random checking shows that the vast majority of middle school articles are essentially catalog entries. When the private schools are excluded, there isn't a one I've found that shows the slightest hint of notability. But we'll never be able to get rid of them. If we try, there will be a tremendous outcry, and the indiscriminate inclusionists will appear to support those whose editing ox is offered up for sacrifice. Perhaps there is some hope for a blanket statement that schools under the high school level are not intrinsically notable. Heck, I'd like to do that for high schools too, but it won't happen. But as it stands, the disambig page for all the "Martin Luther King, Jr." schools is going to be huge, because the direction is at the moment that all of them will eventually get articles.

Anthony wrote: Yeah! "Significant" is just another weasel word. Ec

----- Original Message ----- From: Anthony To: English Wikipedia Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 1:37 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Schools again Oh yeah, one more thing. On 7/2/07, Philippe Beaudette <philippebeaudette(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ignoring such things which some people like and isn't harming anyone else is a good step toward reaching a consensus. That is, assuming that one believes it isn't really harming the project (or anyone else, as you put it). One could also argue (as has been argued almost ad nauseum) that it is not, in fact, helpful to leave them in the project. Philippe _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Rob wrote: And also because not everyone is going to agree that this is "sensible". I've merged plenty of articles in my time, but the recent trend towards pasting together a whole bunch of small articles on narrowly-focused topics into one gigantic mega-article with a section on each, leaving a redirect behind, seems like a backwards way to go about it. All the same material is still there, it's just harder to find the specific thing you're looking for.

On 7/2/07, Rob <gamaliel8(a)gmail.com> wrote: A better merge would probably be of multiple schools into an article on the school district (or whatever grouping is used locally). And then only if there isn't much being said about the individual schools. More than one paragraph on one school and it should have its own article, IMO.

On 7/2/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Infoboxes wouldn't be a good way to organize an article on multiple schools - a table would be more appropriate. If you're going to combine multiple articles into one, please do more than just concatenate one article after another.

On 7/4/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia(a)downlode.org> wrote: This article is 150 kilobytes or more in size. Some browsers may have difficulty rendering this article. Please consider splitting it into multiple sections.

On 02/07/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: 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... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 7/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: As ridiculous as that sounds, it's true - there was a time when a lot of people insisted that "all schools are inherently non-notable". The voices of reason were drowned out, and as a result we got a huge backlash in the opposite direction. Johnleemk

On 7/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: As one of the inclusionists willing to compromise on this issue, I object to that. There were plenty enough people in the middle for a compromise to work. The rhetoric from the extremist-seeming deletionists sunk the various compromise attempts time and time again. We'd have long-had a standard that if you can't write a good article, you merge it into a city/town/school district article by now if you all hadn't polarized it so much. That compromise came under far more attack from the deletionists than the inclusionists. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

John Vandenberg wrote: As one of the deletionists perfectly fine with merging, I agree there were reasonable people (and unreasonable people) on both sides. I would hope an admin closing a deletion discussion would disregard any bald assertion that the person making it didn't bother to support, that's basically a bare vote, and I would also hope they would disregard any "All (insert class of something here) are notable." (I would similarly hope they would disregard any assertion such as "No (insert class of something here) are ever notable." The purpose of an AfD is to discuss whether -this- subject, -this- time, should be retained. I think the reason you saw so many going to AfD rather than being merged was because of those who would dig in their heels and revert the merge with "Revert, all schools are notable" edit summaries (and those were when they felt like being civil...). Sure, they probably should be mentioned, but nothing wrong with doing that in a combined list by school district rather than 100 permastubs. It came to a point where to get it gone and make it stick, you had to go to AfD.

On Sun, 8 Jul 2007 20:10:03 -0700, "George Herbert" <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sorry, but that's not how I remember it. The lengthy debate over [[WP:SCHOOLS]] was torpedoed mainly by a small number of people who flatly refused to consider anything other than "all schools are inherently notable". No merge was acceptable, no deletion was acceptable, however atrocious the article, they stated as an article of faith that every school merited an article. I don't recall a *single* deletionist raising any argument that was as dogmatic as those raised by the few militant inclusionists. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:14:30 -0400, "David Goodman" <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: yes, I know, but it took a long time to get there, and the process was hampered to a ridiculous degree by dogma. Probably on both sides, but I only saw it from the militant inclusionists. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:03:27 +0100, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com> wrote: Wikipedia does "consensus" not consensus. If you want consensus you need to ask the Religious Society of Friends, who will stay at the table until everyone agrees. This was a case where a Wikipedia-style consensus, as in pretty much everyone who had any flexibility at all, was impeded by the obduracy of one or two hold-outs, with the result that a guideline was effectively torpedoed and the matter had to be fought out in the court of AfD, which is never a good place. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 11/07/07, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which remains a major problem, as long as any single admin can make most decisions.

On 7/10/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Well, ok, but I don't remember anyone who was more than briefly active in the debates and who was to my left on the issue, and I proposed the merge-with-communities middle ground repeatedly in several of the many debates we've had on the topic. I never had any problems on my left. It was entirely with people insisting that they had the right to out and out delete stuff rather than letting us merge appropriately. "schools are inherently notable" is a belief I hold. It is NOT equivalent to "...and every school should have its own independent article", which I do not hold. There are a few people who believe that; they were a fringe minority in the debates. Want to make a run at another attempt at putting up a policy, since we all seem to have a happy middle ground here? -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 7/12/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Perhaps... Previous problem - coming at the problem from the "are they notable? yes/no" direction was the fatal flaw and unsolvable disagreement. Current approach - come at the problem this time from the viewpoint of "school articles should only contain notable and reliably sourced information. school stubs, with only minimal notable and reliably sourced information, should be merged into ..." We don't even have to come to a solution on the first problem, to solve the second one. 8-) -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 10/07/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: I do, however, remember them nominating school articles at a rate of 50/day, apparently indiscriminately. - d.

On 7/9/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Tried that. They ended up full of vandalism, copyvios (copying from school website and nicking pictures) and falsehoods. -- geni

On 7/10/07, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: We have no useful data to say. A difference is that most areas where we pick up large numbers of slightly notable article we have people prepared to look after them (although not in all cases). The problem with schools is that there doesn't appear to be any group really committed to looking after them. -- geni

On 7/10/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Is happening has never happened and given the number of geographical communities is never likely to happen. -- geni