[WikiEN-l] School Districts and notability

[Will Beback]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 22/05/07, Will Beback <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  tried "prodding" a vandalized article about a junior high school and
>> found that there are editors who watch the PROD category just to remove
>> school articles. While I appreciate that the matter of school notability
>> is hotly debated, I don't think anyone likes having hundreds or
>> thousands of school articles that are unattended targets of libelous
>> vandalism. Other than reducing the number of school articles I don't see
>> a good solution. Perhaps a compromise would be to favor merging school
>> articles into school district articles.
>>     
> Ask these editors to please keep a closer eye on the articles in
> question, not just watching for prods. If they do, that'll help the
> problem greatly.
> - d.
That was my first response, and in one case an editor did reply 
positively.  However it takes much more time to maintain a couple of 
hundred school articles than to check PROD and AfD once a day. The basic 
problem is that we've got more school articles than we can maintain. 
There are over 1200 public high schools in the state of California 
alone, and even more middle schools. There could easily be 30,000 public 
middle and high schools in the U.S. I don't know how many of those now 
have articles, but according to current WP practices they all could. 
Maintaining such a large number of vandal magnets is an enormous burden. 
In exchange for all of that work we are basically just repeating the 
information on the schools' own websites. Why should we bother? What's 
the benefit?

By comparison, school district articles seem to be much less prone to 
vandalism and there are far fewer of them.

Will Beback