[Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

[David Goodman]

On 1/25/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> The thing about high schools is that they have alumni. A particularly
> large high school could have, I don't know, maybe 50,000 alumni? How
> off am I?
>
> Anyhow, just because not that many people go to it *right now* does
> not mean it's not notable. Junior high schools, elementary schools,
> sure, but larger-volume schools that have upwards of 1000 students at
> any given time are certainly notable.
>
> We may not have someone to maintain them, but that's because while we
> have RamBot, we don't have SchoolBot. Maybe we should. (and unlike
> city/town articles, we'd also need a SchoolAntiVandalBot to monitor
> all the changes to those articles... the problem with high schools is
> that those most interested in them tend to be their current students,
> and their current students tend to include a large percentage of
> dipshit vandals).
>
> Mark
>
> On 25/01/07, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> > David Monniaux wrote:
> >
> > > But there's no reason we should have an article on my neighbouring
> > > highschool, unless we also want articles on every company or organization...
> >
> > However, this "unless" is problematic.  A printed encyclopedia in
> > 20 volumes can only contain so many articles, and has to cut off
> > the long tail.  Wikipedia is far bigger and steadily growing.
> > Small towns with 25,000 inhabitants in Sweden would never have an
> > article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, but now have articles in the
> > English Wikipedia, and everybody seem to agree that they *are*
> > sufficiently notable.  So where is the limit drawn?  Should the
> > three schools in that town also have articles? Maybe the answer
> > is: Not now, when Wikipedia only has 1.6 million articles, because
> > these schools are not among the 1.6 million most notable objects
> > in this world.  But in five years time, when Wikipedia has 20
> > million articles, this might be different.
> >
> > Maybe if the article is added now, and in five years time it is
> > still one of the least used ones, ranking not 1.6M but 20M, then
> > we know that now was not the right time to add this article? In
> > that case, notability is not a property of the topic itself, but
> > an issue in which order to add articles to Wikipedia.  But it is
> > difficult to assess today if a topic has rank 20M when Wikipedia
> > only has 1.6M articles.
> >
> > Can we compute a rank of how much each article is used now, and
> > relate this to how many articles existed at the time when each
> > article was created?  Then we would know how premature the
> > addition of each article was.
> >
> > Again, my position is not that of judging what should be included
> > now.  I'm only trying to understand the math behind this.
> >
> >
> > --
> >   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
> >   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> >
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> >
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As it seems, there is no consensus, even among the few of us in this
exchange, because i do not think size is enough to make a school
notable. What makes it notable is either things that may have happened
there, or notable alumni.  Notable events are the same standard as any
other N or  N-news.  For most, it will be alumni, and the practical
question comes down to: how many- (of course it also depends who they
are--One Nobel prize winner is enough) ). AfD seems to be deleting
high school  articles with only 1 notable alumnus and no other special
features.  I am not sure what the attitude would be towards 2, 3, etc.
I am not even sure where I would draw the line.

Intermediate and elementary schools are another matter; I wouldn't use
the alumni criterion here for anyone less than the President, and
there are rarely news events.

The suggestion of giving each of the schools in a town section in a
longer article is workable, though there be problems with cities.

I recognize, however, that in much of the US, high schools, and
especially high school athletic teams, may be the center of community
life. So merging a single town school in with the article for the town
is another possibility.

-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.