[WikiEN-l] Schools again

[Andrew Gray]

On 02/07/07, Anthony <wikimail at 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...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk