User:Noroton/notes schools

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• Comment: I had some time on my hands and (inspired by Realkyhicks' cleaning up the page) I was interested in seeing what the article would look like with statistics from the "Great Schools" Web site, which has state Department of Education statistics on schools. I also included a list of clubs. It isn't much and doesn't address any notability issues, but you get a picture of a school that, despite some advantages (teacher experience and education, higher-than-Florida-average wealth) is not very good academically. If some people in that community who don't pay attention to the news down there happen to see the article, it seems to me it would be useful to them. Why is this relevant to our deletion discussion? Turn the question around: We're the one's who should be relevant to our readers' concerns (while staying within the context of an encyclopedia/almanac). Our encyclopedia is better off if it's relevant to some of the concerns of communities. What we do with community articles (on villages, towns, cities, counties) which don't need to assert notability, we should do with high school and school district articles: present a good encyclopedic description of the subject that people in the community can use. We can do it like no one else can. We should do the same thing for all hospitals and for the same reasons. We can get verifiable information on these institutions, and they're intensely, overwhelmingly important to their communities. I doubt any other types of institutions are as important (libraries, elementary and middle schools, fire departments), but if a good case could be made, I'd want articles on those as well. There's a limited number (even though it's vast, but Wikipedia is vast), we can still have standards for articles, and Wikipedia is none the worse for them, in fact, Wikipedia is better for having them. Noroton 18:24, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment. I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I believe that Wikipedia is worse for the inclusion of this article. If we continue down the route that this poster advocates, we will end up with articles on pretty much everything - schools, hospitals, post offices, roads, churches, shopping malls, broadcasting towers, et cetera, ad nauseam et ad infinitum. Of course this is great if you want Wikipedia to be a collection of indiscriminate information - a kind of Google, with people editing the directory entries for ease of reading - but it does mean that Wikipedia will cease to be an encyclopedia under any commonly understood definition of the term. I certainly wouldn't see any point in working on this project if it were to evolve in the way that Noroton wishes, and my hunch is that many of our best editors ( from which category I explicitly exclude myself ) would feel the same. The idea that "all must have prizes" was discredited in the educational establishment by the 1980s, at least in the UK, and surely it must be time for us to realise that where the "prize" is a Wikipedia entry the same is true for schools. If everything is "notable", nothing is. WMMartin 14:40, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Response: WMMartin, although we disagree, I respect your point of view and have no doubts about your sincerity, although I think you'd benefit by rereading my comments above. I think it's easier to respond point by point:

1. "this sentiment" — I'd call it a "point of view", it's not just emotional, but considered.
2. "we will end up with articles on pretty much everything" — as I said in so many words, I would limit wholesale acceptance of local institutions to those that have a powerful influence on most members of a community. That leaves out most schools other than high schools (I would also include private high schools for other reasons). That criterion would certainly include all hospitals but leave out the other institutions you mention: post offices, roads, churches, shopping malls, broadcasting towers, unless they could show a similar powerful influence on a broad swath of the population.
3. You can include any of these already if you find two newspaper articles focusing on them, correct? And it doesn't matter how small the independent publication or source is, as long as it's considered reliable, correct? (This is the way I read WP:NOTABILITY, perhaps I missed something.) And do you seriously doubt that any high school in the country, no matter how small or obscure, could meet that criteria? The effect of this criterion is to hurt schools in rural or lower-income areas that don't have newspapers with good enough advertising revenues to support much of a Web presence. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of the country. My town of about 18,000 people has two weekly newspapers full of ads, daily newspapers in each of two small cities bordering the town and a glossy magazine in addition to coverage it occasionally gets from other publications. This wealth alone ensures that there are reliable independent sources about nearly every institution in town. We can't eliminate all Wikipedia biases, but we can short-circuit some of them, and this is one, regarding high schools and hospitals, that should be short-circuited. Although all high schools get newspaper coverage, the poorer, more rural schools would have to wait longer to get Wikipedia articles as editors for those articles have to do a lot more scrambling to get the information. And to what purpose? Nearly every high school has its own Web site, and it's hard to imagine that those Web sites do a lot of exaggerating about the schools, so they provide some basic information to start building an article on. We've also got state statistics on each school, which is the thing schools would be most inclined to lie about if they were going to lie. What other purpose is a "Notability" criterion if not to establish that something exists and is important to enough people that it's worth having an article on? Why would you doubt that high schools wouldn't meet this criterion?
4. "Wikipedia will cease to be an encyclopedia under any commonly understood definition of the term" — As an open-source, Web-based, electronic encyclopedia it is already a new thing. In subject matter it already includes topics that would not go into other general encyclopedias -- Pokemon characters, gay porn stars, video games (we've all got our own list of outlandish types of articles, I'm sure). So your idea that Wikipedia will "become" a grab bag of odd articles is too late in the game. No open-source project like this can avoid popular taste unless it gets much tighter with its criteria for article inclusion — and what makes you think that's going to happen? The milk is spilled, the horse is past the barn door, the toothpaste is out of the tube. It is also inevitable that a nonpaper encyclopedia would expand to cover details that paper encyclopedias just didn't have the economic ability to cover.
5. "All must have prizes" — You won't find anything I've said that supports that idea. I love my home town in Connecticut (well, at least I like it), but when I read that it was the home to the head of the state Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and a center of Klan activity, I included that in the article about it. I regularly have to check the article because that bit of information has often been removed by anonymous editors, some of whom make comments in which, I swear, you can just hear the howls of pain. An NPOV article, particularly as we get more information about the subject, is often far from a prize. I'm particularly suprised you would make this statement in a deletion discussion about Cape Coral High School. As I mention above, the statistics I put in the article show the school has embarassing problems.
6. "I certainly wouldn't see any point in working on this project if it were to evolve in the way that Noroton wishes, and my hunch is that many of our best editors ( from which category I explicitly exclude myself ) would feel the same." Why? And why leave if post offices are covered when you haven't already left since pokemon characters and porn stars are covered? What is the reasoning behind this idea that separates it from mere sentiment?
7. There are at least two major differences between Pokemon and porn star articles on the one hand and articles on high schools and other local institutions on the other — the local institutions (a) will likely last over time, meaning that the articles will get many more readers long after the P. and p.s. articles are forgotten; (b) the latter category is one readers will find useful in non-trivial ways, including as a source of negative information that the institutions themselves will hardly ever put on their own Web sites and which might be difficult to find elsewhere.
8. "If everything is notable, then nothing is" I agree, but expanding automatic notability to high schools and hospitals doesn't mean everything else has to be included. We will always have some boundaries to defend. Noroton 17:41, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] re: blanket notability for high schools

Hi Noroton, remember me? Truly forgiven and forgotten about my deletion thing (I hope the same from your end) but I have been looking at AfD's (although commenting on very few) and have read with interest your and Necrothesp's pages on the inherent notability of high schools. I really have little passion about the topic although it would be nice to have a consensus reached as there is a lot of sound and fury being expended over the subject. As 'WP is not paper' I probably would come down on the inclusionist side, but I have a question. You say in your rationale page, 'High schools are inherently notable IMHO, and no harm would be done if every high school in the nation had a Wikipedia article' (emphasis mine), and I wonder if you limit this blanket notability to US or Western culture schools. I have spent several years in Nepal, and lesser amounts of time in other developing countries and if anything the arguments re: the importance of these schools to the students and indeed the countries themselves is as great or greater than it is in Western/US schools. Truly, no agenda here, I'm just interested in your thoughts. Thnx --killing sparrows 07:38, 26 March 2007 (UTC)