[Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

Fri Jan 26 04:48:49 UTC 2007

Well, if we have articles for towns with just 2 inhabitants just
because RamBot made them, and as long as we're allowing articles for
Swedish towns with over 25K inhabitants, I don't see the issue with
allowing articles for all high schools with more than 25K Current
students+Living Alumni. If not that, you could set a higher boundary,
like 50K. (I didn't count dead alumni because they're dead and
frankly, dead people don't count. absentees can vote, as can expats,
at least in many countries, but dead people can't vote anywhere)

Really, just because they're voting to delete it at AfD doesn't mean
it deserves to be deleted. The article deletion mechanism on Wikipedia
is badly broken -- this is no better than [[Wikipedia:Quickpolls]] (I
wonder who around here remembers those? fun, fun, fun) except for the
deletion of pages. It's mob rule of things that shouldn't be ruled by
a mob (just because the 50 people on AfD haven't heard of it and can't
find it in their google searches does not mean it doesn't belong in an
encyclopaedia.)

Speaking of deletion... Despite what the Wikipedia article about the
Pokémon argument says about the articles having been "improved", most
of the Pokémon articles still have much less information than they
should to be allowed to be kept, imho, considering there are over 400
of the critters (back when I cared about them, there were 151, and for
a few months before I lost interest, 251), and many of them have
either 1) never been mentioned on the anime and are unimportant to the
plots of any of the games or 2) have only been mentioned in one
episode on the anime and are totally unimportant in the plots of the
games. I'm not sure why we can't combine them all into 4 or so
Pokédex-type articles, with ''Main article: [[THIS POKEMON]]'' for the
ones that really _are_ notable and have information about them.

Mark

On 25/01/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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