Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Article guidelines/Archive 1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

A few thoughts

I've changed the order on the bottom section and removed the sentence about encouraging the creation of parent articles on school areas. As far as I am aware school districts are a North American phenomenon. Such articles are presumably welcomed for American schools but I'm not sure that we really want to encourage the creation of similar articles for the rest of the world. In the UK we have Local Education Authorities but I don't think any of them have their own page. People don't know normally know which LEA a particular school would come under and the logical place to look for the article is the one on the place where the school is situated.

I wonder too if we ought to have a recommended deletion process, eg, - mass deletions are not recommended and are unlikely to be successful. SeeWikipedia:Articles for deletion/Beaver Creek Elementary School. - PRODs should only be used for primary/elementary schools. Do a Google search as a test of notability before prodding. If in doubt take to AfD. - Does anyone have time to do a count of deletion outcomes for high schools/secondary schools so that we could quote the figures? Very few seem to get deleted. If people see the statistics they will be less likely to nominate such a school for deletion. - Recommend that articles should have a notability tag if there is any doubt about the school's notability. Presumably there is a way that schools with such tags can be picked up by a bot, and then monitored. It would be much better to have people actively working to improve articles rather than trying to delete them. Dahliarose 15:10, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of a bot checking for Schools articles that have a notability tag. In that way or otherwise, it feels like there needs to be a way for someone (especially someone outside the project) to easily point out articles that are probably notable but need attention.

At the same time, though, I'm realizing that a lot of the problems being "solved" with this page were already solved:

• school articles were sometimes posted in the Project's talk page if someone thought they needed attention
• AfD noms that were mentioned on the Project's talk page were (universally? almost?) grown into notable articles
• I was unaware, but there is a list of Common AfD outcomes for Education articles

If this subpage is worth keeping, we might need to clarify or expand the scope (maybe I'm just being overly critical of a page that hasn't had a chance to grow much yet). ---- Hebisddave (talk) 18:06, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that there are still huge numbers of very poor school articles. Of the nearly 10,000 school articles which have the WPSchools tag over 4,000 have been assessed as stubs (and I've assessed a fair number already so I've got a good idea of the scale of the problem). There are still some 2,000 awaiting assessment. Some of these stubs might be reasonable articles but most of them are not and they're all at risk of deletion, especially if they have no references and very little content. Only a tiny minority of school articles come to AfD or get posted on the Project page. There are some editors who come to the rescue of schools in AfDs but they can only do so much and you only get five days to turn the article around. If there are lots of schools nominated at once or if the key editors are on holiday then potentially some notable schools will and do get deleted. We really need to get people to write proper articles in the first place.

The common outcomes page is now very out of date. It would be useful to have an update but it is probably quite a time-consuming process to go through all the archives. -- Dahliarose (talk) 18:32, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Overall I think the page is good, and I have no regrets in suggesting its creation. There are problems with schools and the deletion process; I think that this page can help give more guidance to this issue, even if it is only WikiProject advice; some AFDs are getting very repetitive in their results and arguments made are often over pages such as WP:N - which are often simply to general. For example, secondary schools are regularly nominated for deletion despite the fact they are rarely deleted, some advice and statistics on this would be good here. A suggestion I do have on adding to this page is bringing up the re-directs issue, in many cases it is better just to re-direct (and merging as necessary) non-notable school articles, rather than going through AFD/PROD to get a total deletion. Camaron1 | Chris 19:12, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

A proposal

The proposed guidelines in WP:School are a development of this project page and fully compatible with it. However, as written, I think that the guidelines in this project page are too general to be much help. What I should like to do is copy the WP:School page across. I think the much more specific criteria will be of great help to article creators. TerriersFan (talk) 00:24, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

It appears WP:SCL is unlikely to succeed as a Wikipedia guideline, and looking at the talk page as every day goes by that does not seem to be changing. I would not object to moving the information over there to here, though things might need to be re-worded a bit as this is not a policy proposal, only a general project guidance. Also, content not suitable for a policy proposal recently removed at WP:SCL (ie the background section) could be reintroduced here. Camaron | Chris (talk) 21:30, 29 February 2008 (UTC)