On 26/09/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 26/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
So rambot usable lists of the data, and create a forest of redirects.
School articles do need some sort of canonical naming format. [[School name, Town, State, Country]] or something equivalent - something like the naming format for cities and towns with school name on the front.
This will (a) include all verifiable schools (b) having the entry be a redirect to a list until there's something real to write an article about will save on people coughing up their own skulls in disgust.
- d.
I realise the opinion of just one person doesn't count for much here, but I'd like to suggest the following for schools and all other "it exists, therefore it should be on Wikipedia" items. I do to some extent subscribe to that view. But I think there are far more logical ways in dealing with the situation than "an article for every school" or "delete anything that isn't nationally/regionally/historically notable".
Surely the thing to do is to concatenate entries of a related nature? Here in Ireland even reasonably small towns have several schools. Surely a single article can cover all the schools, with the individual schools getting their own articles if there is too much content for that parent article? If there are details added to Wikipedia for just one or two schools in an area, surely they can be added to a related more important article such as the town or area?
I'm not suggesting there wouldn't be awkward instances not covered by this, but the concatenation approach should be used more widely on Wikipedia in my opinion. If nothing else, it would ensure that we have decent "parent" articles when very narrow topics later have their own articles. There are far too many situations where we have articles on the minuitia of things, and poorly scratched together ones, or non-existent ones for the broader topic (often such articles don't even do something quick and cheap to improve things, like scraping the introductory paragraph from the sub-articles).
Zoney