I'm thinking out loud, and I am not making any specific proposal or coming to any particular conclusion.
I haven't been following the recent school brouhaha, but it seems to me there's an aspect to the school issue that people have been tapdancing around.
In addition to the general encyclopedias, there are a host of single-volume encyclopedias on limited topics. The Encyclopedia of Chicago. The Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History. The American Horticultural Society A to Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants. The New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. Donna Kooler's Encyclopedia of Crochet. The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. The Star Wars Encyclopedia. The Comic Book Encyclopedia.
My guess is that I would personally accept 99% of this material as being "encyclopedic," even if much of it is on material I personally have little interest in. Why? Because to me, encyclopedic does not mean "of personal interest to me." It means "having _some_ reasonable level of thoroughness, accuracy, and scholarship." An article _needs_ to have these things if it is to serve the reader.
But Wikipedia is an all-volunteer contribution. That means that it also needs to serve contributors. But there has to be some kind of balance.
A vanity page is an obvious example of a page that is out of balance. It serves _primarily_ the ego of the contributor.
Now, what happens when someone wants to contribute to Wikipedia, but doesn't really have the skill set to do so?
I suspect that a lot of the arguments about certain classes of article are really related to age-specific interest, and to age-related levels of skill and maturity. I sometimes fancy I hear in these debates the voices older siblings putting younger ones in their place. Articles about Pokemon are baby stuff--wait until you grow up and can write articles about _serious_ things like Harry Potter. Harry Potter articles are cruft--they're not _important,_ like Hilary Duff, or Britney Spears, or Justin Timberlake.
I sometimes fancy that when people say "let _articles_ undergo organic growth," which is nonsense because article do not grow, people write them, what they are really saying is "don't discourage young _contributors_" (who certainly will undergo organic growth).
The problem with high schools has little to do with notability. It is that the people most likely to be interested in writing articles about them are people of high-school age, who _for the most part_ tend not to have the skills to write very good encyclopedia articles. These articles tend to be out of balance: they mostly serve the needs of the contributors, rather than the needs of readers.
Now if, in fact, we actually have a crowd of serious worker bees who really will swarm around all the little irritating particles of school substubs and deposit the nacre of scholarship on them until they become sparkling crystals :-) then there's probably no harm in them...
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/