[Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

[Andrew Gray]

On 26/01/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:
> > The Cunctator a écrit :
> > > Is this really a Foundation-level issue?
> > The problem is that complaints about school articles generate a steady
> > flow to OTRS, which is picked up by Foundation volunteers. Then, the
> > decisions of these volunteers are challenged.
>
> There needs to be more visibility into these problems by the community
> at large.

What can we really do to contact the nebulous "community", though?
David and I and others have been bitching and moaning about this at
the slightest provocation for six months, but the project is big and
you can only chat to so many people. Short of putting out quarterly
Signpost announcements saying "The following seven areas of coverage
are the ones that piss our readers off the most. Please make them less
crap, we'd all live happier lives", I'm not sure we can easily do much
about it.

> First I'd heard that OTRS was seeing lots of school-related complaints.

Between that and non-notable people with flytrap articles, it's a big
timewaster. Article-deletion complaints, too, many of which deserve
more attention than we can give (but that's another rant, and one I've
made this month already)

> Can you describe in more detail what types of complaints?

Surprisingly often, these are explicit allegations of illegal activity
- "The headmaster is a convicted paedo" and the like - or lots and
lots of junk personally-identifiable vandalism - "Mickey Smith is
---".

A common but less worrying issue is a simple lack of context and scale
- many of these articles are seized by one enterprising student or
another to write about the school as they see it; these usually aren't
*so* bad, but they tend to have a very blurred line as to what is and
isn't appropriate material, which then leads into articles that the
school is understandably annoyed by the existence of simply because,
well, they're linked with this amateurish, hit-and-miss, erratically
accurate and conceptually blinkered article. (These are often the
hardest to deal with, in many ways)

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