Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Archive 3

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Naming conventions for high schools

Can we establish some naming conventions for high schools? Many high schools around the nation have similar names. Most people have been writing Podunk High School (Oregon and Podunk High School (Nebraska), which I think is fine. However, I often run into Podunk High School (Podunk, Nebraska) which I think is a bit excessive. The city's name should only be used if there are two or more high schools with the same name in the same state.

Here's a summary with the three situations:

Thoughts? --Liface 05:46, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

That's pretty much the convention that was suggested it (but apparently rejected) here: Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(schools). It's the one I use too. Metros232 11:58, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
See my comments below under #School disambiguation subproject desperately needed, in the paragraph that starts "To make it easy...". BlankVerse 16:38, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Rural school districts in Washington

I set up a "rural school districts" page for the state of Washington and I was hoping for some feedback before I proceed any further. Are there any issues I should be concerned about with this page? Thank you! — RJH (talk) 16:04, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

No complaints, so I'm going for it. — RJH (talk) 17:13, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
Nice project. It seems like a good solution for much of the rural Midwest and for rural (and formerly rural) schools in California. Are you including schools and districts that are defunct? --Hjal 17:00, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

New WP:SCHOOLS proposal

I've posted a second crack at the School notability proposal; it makes a number of references to this Wikiproject, as you might expect, so input would be appreciated.

Before worrying too much, it's largely without subjective standards of notability or unworkable merge proposals; instead, it counsels keeping any school article with the demonstrated potential to be expanded, and counsels merges, redirects, or referrals to this project for those lacking. It's aimed at discouraging unexpandable stubs while protecting any expandable stub or any proper article. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 15:18, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm betting this won't fly as it's still too exclusive. Schools are more akin to government institutions than to companies. I think the notability guidelines need to take scale into account. — RJH (talk) 19:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
agree. Notability becomes so contested. Sure, there needs to be clear guidelines but these guidelines need to be realistic, acknowledging the nature of the subject. Jpe|ob 04:32, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
WP:SCHOOLS has failed, which is unfortunate because I thought it was a decent set of guidelines for constructing a school article. So I'll just keep on using my personal notability criteria. :-) — RJH (talk) 16:45, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 21:23, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Great Schools

There are a number (522) references to links at http://www.greatschools.net . While there may be justification for using a potentially biased, commercial, source, I feel that this link should not be used if there is an alternative. (If I commenting in the wrong talk page, please direct me to the correct one.) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 18:05, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Do you believe the data provided by this source is inaccurate? Is there reliable information to back that up? — RJH (talk) 16:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't know. It may only contain information submitted by the school, in which case it should not be listed at all if the school has an information site, and considered a Wikipedia:Primary source at best. It may accept information from any "editor", in which case it's of no use to us. Or it may be a WP:RS. There's no WP:RS that it is a WP:RS, though. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 18:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps we need a section on the WikiProject Schools page to cover the topic of suitable exterenal references for school articles? For example, what general internet sources would you consider sufficiently reputable for use on wikipedia school articles? — RJH (talk) 22:57, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know enough to suggest a good source, but that (the topic of suitable external references for school articles) sounds like an excellent topic for a section of the WikiProject Schools page. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 01:08, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

(redent) I've come across the Great Schools site and started adding it to schools right and left, despite the fact that it's apparently supported by advertising. The site has statistics on each school that are taken from state departments of education from each state, apparently because the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that states set up reporting on certain information (I'm not certain if it mandates that the reports be posted on the Web, but the states I've come across do that). These are the advantages I've found in linking to Great Schools Web pages:

  • Unlike individual state reports on each school, the Great Schools web site will likely be up for more than a year, so if links to the individual school reports on the state education Web sites go dead, readers will at least have something.
  • The information isn't quite exactly what Connecticut, for example, puts into its reports. Great Schools will give you, for instance, the percentage of various ethnic groups among the student body not only in a school or school district, but across the state. I don't get the statewide figures in the Connecticut reports. Some of the testing information is different as well (I get the impression states put up on the Web their own school reports, done their way, as well as No Child Left Behind information; Great Schools seems to take the No Child Left Behind information).

I must admit, I haven't looked much beyond the statistics. Unless a better site comes up, or unless I hear that Great Schools is somehow unreliable, I don't want to deny readers a quick link to something useful about their individual schools and districts. Noroton 04:15, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Ernest Bevin College

This was tagged for db-attack. I cleaned it up (i.e. stubbed it) and added sourcing, but based on the edit history, there is a good chance this will devolve into a mess of WP:NFT drivel again. I have virtually no interest in school articles so I'd simply like to suggest that some party interested in these sorts of articles add this to their watchlist to make sure it doesn't get reverted back into the mess it was.--Isotope23 19:04, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

== It looks like a school name in Category:Uncategorized from November 2006 etc. ==

Hi,

Just a feeler to gauge your objections (if any) to whipping thru backlogs such as Category:Uncategorized from November 2006 using AWB and adding your project banner to the talk page of any article that looks like a school's name ("school", "academy", etc.). You might possibly be getting some non-schools this way. It's OK with me if you don't like the idea... Thanks!

Mmm, on second thought.. I was just gonna zip thru and replace {{Uncategorized}} with Category:Schools, but things may be complicated. The first school I looked at, Brookwood School was uncategorized due to rpeated blanking/ vandalism... and when I found what looked like the best version, it has two categories Category:Elementary schools in Massachusetts & Category:Middle schools in Massachusetts. This may not be an AWB project after all; may require individual care for every article.--Ling.Nut 01:52, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Professional help to save Heathside School

This article requires urgent attention to prevent its unecessary deletion but alot of work needs doing to it, please can a professional take a good stab at this article.--Lucy-marie 12:15, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

It appears to have improved somewhat, but it could still use a history and some interesting facts. — RJH (talk) 16:58, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

School Awards

While the various notability criteria are, to say the least, hotly debated, many versions include something about schools that earn an award. I don't immediately see anything in Category:Awards that would be an award for a school. The language for web content is "The website or content has won a well known and independent award, either from a publication or organisation." It then has a footnote giving examples of such awards. Could this Wikiproject tackle a task of clarifying which awards are well known? And if they are significant, how about having articles for those awards, maybe even a subcategory for them? GRBerry 20:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This seems like a good idea.
Actually, the annual story covers 100 schools and there's a list of the top 1000. You must have just seen the first page.--Hjal 17:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I must have seen content in the Google cache. It included the beginning of a discussion of the limitations of the Newsweek list--it's not another source of notable schools.--Hjal 17:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I think that editors working on schools in other nations would have to come up with equivalent sources.--Hjal 17:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Ummm... But the state is California. 10% of US population, 5th or 7th or whatever largest economy in the world, etc. When did something have to be national or international in scope to be notable?--Hjal 17:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Blue Ribbon Schools Program
    • What about National Blue Ribbon Schools named by the United States Department of Education? Shouldn't that be a category?--Jh12 20:35, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
    • According to the article, this award has been handed out over 3000 times in the last 25 years, which means they give one out every three days. I think that makes it a rather weak indicator of a school's notability. --Dgies 16:36, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
      • Hmm...Good point. But the Blue Ribbon Program honors both public and private high schools and elementary schools, and there are close to 100,000 public and 28,000 private in the US according to this: <http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_084.asp?referer=list>. Meaning about 0.1% of schools are honored each year. Feel free to check me on that. --Jh12 17:49, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
--Hjal 07:18, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Another one, for students, rather than schools--perhaps the number of award-winning students should count, especially for National Merit Scholars and similar competitions.
Young Epidemiology Scholars (YES) Competition --Hjal 16:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
As a premise I'd say that, in order to be considered notable, an award must come from a notable source or else be recognized by notable news sources. So that would include the awards from national governments and from large circulation news sources. This would cover the majority of the above links. — RJH (talk) 17:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
How many schools are we looking to have this criteria generate? If you look at the US, Newsweek says there are about 25,000 High schools. So using 10% leaves you with 2,500 which is not a selective citeria. If you use 1% that gets you to about 250 schools a year which is approaching a elective criteria. If you comapre that to the Oscars, this is still a lot easier to get but probably an acceptable number. Vegaswikian 19:15, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm guessing that you will not agree with this, but I think that almost all secondary schools are notable. Depending on the availability of reliable information, they may or may not support a separate article. But every one should appear in an article, either in one for their location (city, township, county) or school district (or equivalent), or in their own.--Hjal 17:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
This is a discusion about what awards would be acceptable. I guess your point is that any award should be used since the goal is to have an article for every secondary school. Vegaswikian 23:56, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Part of the issue here is why we want awards to count. If awards are to be a proxy for the presence of difficult to find, non-trivial reliable sources then how many schools the award contains may not be that relevant. For example, the Blue Ribbon listed above would include many schools but also is often correlated with news coverage. I also don't see any a priori reason to see why 2500 schools would in some way different from 250 (and to continue the Oscar comparison, the inclusion of actors seems to be much more inclusive than just those who have Oscars). The more serious issue is that the Newsweek set is only in the US and I don't see an obvious way of generalizing the criterion to schools outside the US. However, at least for the US I'd have no fundamental issue with using that list. JoshuaZ 14:57, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

UK school articles lacking by-county locations

I've noticed quite a few UK-school-stubs lack by-location categories; I could provide a db-dump-generated list of same, if there's anyone working on categorisation of schools, and it'd be useful to them. Alai 07:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Stablepedia

Beginning cross-post.

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Stablepedia. If you wish to comment, please comment there. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 03:03, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

End cross-post. Please do not comment more in this section.

Template feedback requested

As part of the ongoing discussion at WP:SCHOOLS3, I picked up an idea that had previously been mentioned at WP:SCHOOLS: a template indicating a "merge or expand" request. I have a draft in my userspace at User:Shimeru/Template:Merge-school for now. The basic intent is to create a simple tag that makes such articles easy to watch for (by populating a category) and assess (by dating the tag). A secondary hope is to cut down the number of school AfDs. I took the existing "cleanup-school" as a guide for basic formatting; I don't think this one is redundant, because it's somewhat different in scope.

I'm now soliciting comment on it. Specific questions whose answers would be helpful: Would you find this tag useful? Would there be any actual interest in watching the category and addressing these tags? Could the wording or formatting of the template be improved? Should the category be a subcategory of Category:Schools needing cleanup, or only of Category:Articles to be merged... or something else? Should it just plain not be implemented? Shimeru 01:12, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Help needed -St. Eunan's College

Could someone have a look at this page? It has lots of unremarkable information such as that the school has a library that stocks Time magazine. Presumably this is of interest to the students in the school but not to anyone else. Where is the line drawn for whether information is too trivial to add to a page? Curtains99 15:07, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

The King's School, Ely

Anyone able to help write the history of this school further?

School disambiguation subproject desperately needed

The Wikipedia has numerous school district articles and List of schools articles that use the most common and often very generic names for the schools. That means that several articles might refer to Bryant Elementary School, for just one example. In this case, that article was actually for Bryant Elementary School (Long Beach, California) until I recently moved the school page and then turned Bryant Elementary School into a disambiguation page. The What links here link only showed two links, but a Google search on greatschools.net shows at least a dozen of them. For a more common name, such as Washington Middle School (currently a school in Seattle, Washington), there will be many more schools with the same name.

What I've found interesting is that even for school names that I thought might be unique (for example, see Signal Hill Elementary School), that there will be a few schools with the same or similar names (there are at least five schools named Signal Hill Elementary School, with a few schools with similar names). That means that Wikipedia editors should NEVER assume that a school name is unique without a Google search, plus one or two searches of school info websites such as greatschools.net.

There are three tasks that I think a School disambiguation subproject needs to do:

1) Check absolutely every school article. If the school name is not unique, move the article to a disambiguation name (e.g. Podunk High School moved to Podunk High School (Podunk, Iowa)), and then turn the original article name into a diambiguation page. Then check the What links here links to see if there are any links that need to be disambiguated.

2) Check every school district article and every List of schools article and disambiguate any names that currently go to a disambiguation article.

3) Go through the disambiguation pages and make sure that every school disambiguation page is tagged with {{schooldis}} instead of {{disambig}}.

To make it easy to name the newly disambiguated school articles, I think that the school names should ALWAYS be [[School Name (City, State)]]. I have two reasons to suggest this rule: 1) You never have to check to see if the school's name is unique to a state. 2) It prevents future problems if there is a new school added to a state with the same name.

Another suggestion: Look at the editing that I did for Signal Hill Elementary School. I think that the Schools WikiProject should get together with Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation and create a specific guideline for school disambiguation pages. My personal opinion is that the school disambiguation pages should include both the city the school is in, and the district the school is in. BlankVerse 08:58, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

School article assessments

The School WikiProject needs to start doing article assessments in preparations for WP:1.0. There was a message left above at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools#Project directory, but it seems to have been ignored (Quite frankly, I think that the message didn't really suggest its importance).

What is involved is modifying the {{WPSchools}} talk page project banner so that it can have additional parameters, including the article class (stub, etc.), importance, etc. Then each article needs to be assessed. Many of the WikiProjects are also adding additional parameters, such as unref (unreferenced), imageneeded, mapneeded, and infoboxneeded. You also need to create a number of subpages for the project.

You can find out more about article assessments at WP:WPJGUIDE#Assessment. If you want to see what the bot-generated table of article assessments looks like, here is the page for the California WikiProject: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/California articles by quality statistics. BlankVerse 11:22, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Schools This article is related to WikiProject Schools,an attempt to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. [FAQ]
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating within Schools. Please rate the article.
Current Collaborations: Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools/School Collaboration of the Week


Usage

To add an article to the list, simply add the template to the talk page of the article with the following parameters: 

{{WPSchools
 |class=XX
 |importance=YY
 |needs-infobox=??
}}
  • class: Options are FA, A, GA, B, Start, Stub, Dab, Template, Cat, NA based on this assessment scale. If blank, this will default as Unassessed. NA is "not applicable".
  • importance: Options are Top, High, Mid, Low, NA based on this scale. If blank, this will default as Unknown importance.
  • needs-infobox: Answer yes if the article lacks an infobox, otherwise remove this line.
  • --------------------End proposed template--------------------
  • Sorry if I made a mistake... I'm desperate for time at the moment. --Jh12 20:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
FYI: User:Mike Dillon has a page that can be used for creating the banner at User talk:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner. From what I can tell, every other WikiProject that has implemented the assessments has both the class and importance parameters and so the Schools WikiProject should probably also do so as well. For example, a few of the large school districts (like the Los Angeles Unified School District) should rate as high importance.
I also think that implementing the infoboxneeded parameter would be a useful addition to WPSchools. BlankVerse 16:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Many thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to have to go ahead and disappear until at least December 20, but feel free to make additions, corrections, or suggestions.Jh12 20:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
  • With the great assistance of User:Mike Dillon, the template's been fixed and cleaned up. As indicated, article class and importance have been implemented. There is also a parameter for tagging articles that need infoboxes. I am going to create a subpage for project Collaborations under Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools/School Collaboration of the Week. It will make it easier to change the collaborations without having to fool with the template. A link to the subpage will be added here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools#Collaboration_of_the_week. Right now, the template requests that if someone rate an article, they leave a message at Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools/Assessment. It was my intention that we would have an assessment department like this one. Alternatively, we could simply have the user leave a short description on each article talk page. What do you think? -Jh12 19:25, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm going to go ahead and change the template. If I don't change it now, I won't have time to later. If at any point it needs to be changed back, please go ahead and do a revert. --Jh12 07:22, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Is there any chance that the template could default to needing an infobox? It just seems that the vast majority of the articles need them and only fifty or so have this option tagged. Just a thought Adam McCormick 05:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
  • It kind of already defaults to needing an infobox. The full unassessed tag to place on articles should read: {{WPSchools|class= |importance= |needs-infobox=yes}}. You have to leave the last line out in order for it not to be tagged. I've made that clearer on the assessments page. I could default tag all articles, but then we'd have to turn off the message for any article that already has an infobox and confuse me greatly. Anyway, thanks for pointing this out. --Jh12 10:51, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I have only seen three pages that do that. Almost all pages are just the blank tag. My question was whether the Template itself could default this way; however, the assessment template takes care of it so it's not a problem. Adam McCormick 01:32, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

School newspapers: Reliable sources for drug culture?

There's a discussion at Talk:Taylor Allderdice High School#RFC over whether a school newspaper is a reliable source and how information sourced from it should be represented, if at all, and whether the drug culture in the 1970s in one particular school is notable in any way? Thoughts welcome to build a consensus. Hiding Talk 16:10, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

editors in a hurry to add schools to AfD for deletion

It seems every time I hit articles for deletion page there are plenty of schools in there. And all I ever read is complaints of notibility. Ive tried in the past to get them to define "notibility" usually the be all end all was google. So unless you have some kind of "notable" alumni, location, building, people, etc. If you have a 'normal" school is your article just buying time till deleted then. You'd get the feeling some of these people who sign the articles up for deletion think wiki is made of paper and we are running out. Is there something that can be done to take care of the constant adding schools to the deletion list? --Xiahou 23:55, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Yes, only add school articles if the school is notable. There is no consensus that all schools are notable. Vegaswikian 00:13, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I recommend sourcing your articles (see WP:RS). An article that draws from multiple independent reliable sources will almost never be nominated for deletion. Shimeru 08:25, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Ive heard an admin say that a good test of notability is "whether there would be incoming links to the article from other articles. seems pretty good. Smbarnzy 10:50, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit war on Eltham College of Education

Hi. At the moment I'm having a bit of trouble at the Eltham College of Education article. User:billy-tm and myself are currently having an edit war over two different versions of the article, both individually written. If I can get some help in discussing which version of the article is better it would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to let me know at my talk page or (preferably) on the article talk page. Normy132 08:22, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of national secondary school infoboxes.

I'm planning to propose the deletion these infoboxes; but before I do that, I'm ask permission from you guys first. And since there's too many of them, replacing them will be a long process. --Howard the Duck 09:36, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

What is a national secondary school infobox? Are they different from the ordinary secondary school infoboxes? Individual school infoboxes are useful additions and provide standardised information in a concise format. I see no reason to delete them. Dahliarose 11:05, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
These: Template:Infobox Hong Kong Secondary Schools, Template:Infobox Aust school, Template:Infobox Aust school private, Template:Infobox Education in Canada, Template:Education in Gary, Indiana, Template:Infobox Education in the United States, Template:Infobox English Public School, Template:High School Infobox, Template:Infobox high school, Template:Infobox HighSchool, Template:Infobox NZ school, Template:Infobox Malaysia School, Template:Infobox Singapore School, Template:Infobox International School, etc. They won't be actually deleted; their parameters can be included in Template: Infobox Secondary school, just what was did with Template:Infobox University. --Howard the Duck 12:10, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
That does make sense, though it sounds like a lot of work. It would be much better to have some consistency. The secondary school infobox has been used for most of the secondary schools in Berkshire, England. If you are modifying the template you might like to have a look at some of these boxes and incorporate some of the extras which have been used in the standard template wording in the UK (eg, specialism, LEA, etc) so that there is greater scope in the freeform section. Click on some of the schools in Category:Schools in Berkshire for a few examples. One other point which should also be incorporated is a field for headteacher rather than headmaster which is now the standard term used in the UK. Dahliarose 12:54, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
This'll take some time, but we're not in a hurry anyway. This was mentioned at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 December 16#Template:Infobox Philippine High School and I agree that there should be one universal secondary school infobox. --Howard the Duck 09:35, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Good luck! It looks as though you've set yourself quite a task but it will be well worth it in the long run! Two further items for addition to the template for UK usage are: a field for "headmistress" (I think some UK independent schools still refer to headteachers as headmasters and headmistresses); a field for "ages" (currently there is only a field for "grades" which applies principally to schools in the U.S.). Dahliarose 11:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, sounds fun! I guess this resolves Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 December 16#Template:Infobox Philippine High School. :) { PMGOMEZ } 13:10, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

One recently created template, Template:Infobox Philippine High School has now been depopulated and isn't transcluded in any article. Since the condition at the deletion discussion was to give permission to you guys first before it's deleted, I'm posting this here. --Howard the Duck 03:49, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

On the contrary, Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Infobox_Philippine_High_School. Further, it doesn't solve the problem of the OTHER NATIONAL templates. { PMGOMEZ } 02:42, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
On the contrary to the contrary, you, the creator of Infobox Philippine High School has been readding your template to the different schools and editing your template instead of using Infobox Secondary schools and editing that template for omissions. --Howard the Duck 04:38, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Then catch up. Note that it's tremendously STUPID to add the following to Infobox Secondary Schools:
  • Barangay
  • NEAT MPG
  • NSAT MPG
  • NEAT MPS
  • NSAT MPS
  • NAT Ranking
as these are only true for the Philippines. { PMGOMEZ } 06:56, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
And are those fields really "necessary"? Do you even know the MPG/MPS/Rankings of the schools you're adding the template with? --Mithril Cloud 07:03, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, to both questions. { PMGOMEZ } 03:49, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I think those are necessary. Other countries have equivalents too, those ought to be renamed. As isn't the NEAT for grade (elementary/primary) schools? So it doesn't fit "secondary school." I'll be removing that. --Howard the Duck 07:08, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
That wasn't directed to you though. I found the NEAT/etc. fields ridiculous unless the actual data is filled in. And unless actual data is added, it'll just look like a random addition only to make IPHS "unique". --Mithril Cloud 07:13, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regional_Science_High_School_for_Region_1&action=edit&oldid=96667855

{ PMGOMEZ } 03:52, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Now if you'll tell me directly what the problems are, instead of throwing back the question at me, it will be solved. So far, the "problems" you have told us haven't been solved since you haven't told us what to change. --Howard the Duck 04:05, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually, the U.S. has SATs, so it's not only the Philippines that has a national achievement test. And oh, don't forget about these, too. Perhaps a "Standardized test" would fit. --Howard the Duck 07:04, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Taking SATs is not required, unlike NEAT/NSAT. { PMGOMEZ } 03:49, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I didn't take the NSAT. So much for being required. --Howard the Duck 04:05, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Refer to DepEd Memo 66 and NETRC. { PMGOMEZ } 04:27, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Faculty lists

An anonymous user has been repeatedly adding a faculty list to Bishop Timon - St. Jude High School. I removed it, as it doesn't really add anything to the article, but the anonymous user keeps putting it back. Is there a guideline on faculty lists? Hut 8.5 16:37, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

high school awards section

Catalina Foothills High School has some entries in its awards section that look like self-promotion. Is there a guideline for what belongs in the "awards" section of a high school article? Thanks. -- Ben (talk) 00:05, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 23:00, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Collaboration of the week

I've removed the four schools which were listed as they all seem to have been there for some time. I've moved up three from the list of suggestions. However, the template which appears on the talk pages for some schools (eg, Reading School doesn't seem to get updated at the same time. How do we update the templates? Do these collaborations actually achieve anything? Dahliarose 00:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

help

I keep coming across school articles that are tagged for speedy deletion. What should I do with these? Delete them, or not? Is there any kind of organized procedure or policy (de jure or de facto) with dealing with the many school stubs that come up at WP:CSD? Herostratus 08:15, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

No school notability guideline has been passed for schools so removing a stub or better should be left to prod or AfD unless it is a one liner as that falls under WP:NOT but this is just how I feel. BJTalk 09:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Article needing attention

Piner-Olivet Charter School had been {{prod}} tagged [1] as it had become a repository for student commentary, etc. It has been {{tone}} tagged. I attempted some cleanup and left a note on the talk page (WP:Verify and WP:NOT). However, I think this page bears watching by those interested in school articles. — ERcheck (talk) 01:27, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Need another editor to chime in on article

Roseburg High School is a good faith effort, but right now is simply a list of things and very little content. For example I want to remove the bell schedule as being unencyclopedic, but it would be nice if another editor did this so the main editor doesn't feel picked on. I've left a few messages on the talk page of the article and the user, but if someone else could encourage the editor to add content that would be great. Thanks! Katr67 02:42, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh god, this page needs work. /Gets to work. BJTalk 02:51, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism and maintenance

I only watch about 200 school articles, but they count for a disproportionate amount of the vandalism that I repair. Vandalism is noticably greater in articles on middle and lower schools. Much of the vandalism is directed towards individuals, almost always derogatory.

While I agree with the general concept that schools of all types, size, and levels of fame are important to their students and communities, I also feel that Wikipedia has a problem with maintaining so many frequently vandalized articles, and that a vandalized article may be worse than none at all.

I'm surprised that school article vandalism doesn't seem to be an issue on this talk page. Don't other users see it as a problem? -Will Beback · † · 06:39, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Quite frankly, I agree with Will. Schools make up less than a tenth of my over 3,000 article watchlist, but take up roughly 1/3rd of my time doing reversions of vandalism. I'm getting very, very tired of it. Instead of giving up on vandalism and spam completely (both of which have greatly increased lately), I have been giving serious consideration to taking all schools off of my watchlist (except my alma maters). For at least half of the schools that I watch, I'm sure that I'm the only one actively watching them, which means that if the Vandalbots, Counter-Vandalism Unit, and Recent changes patrol don't catch the vandalism (they're not catching more than 1/2 of the vandalism on the schools that I watch), then it'll just stay there until some anon Wikipedia visitor comes along and cleans it up, or adds more vandalism to the article (more likely the latter). BlankVerse 07:06, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I think that school articles (if not all articles) should be protected from edits by anonymous IPs. I, too, spend more time that I would like reverting vandalism at school articles (not that Robin Williams ans Anton LaVey don't get their share). Most of it is anonymous. I mentioned vandalism as a counterpoint to my own argument in favor of school articles and was accused of putting up at straw man, since vandalism, evidently, is an impermissible rationale for deletion, even to the deletionist community.--Hjal 08:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Longterm protection of articles has never been popular on Wikipedia, but this appears to be a good use of it. The only other solution I can see is "prodding" articles that get a lot of vandalism. -Will Beback · † · 18:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I think you'll have trouble getting that to fly... and it's true, vandalism isn't, and has never been, an accepted rationale for deletion. I think this discussion is interesting, though, because one of the arguments commonly used to include schools despite notability questions is "School articles help bring new editors to Wikipedia." New editors, of course, often do not create an account for their first few edits, so permanent semiprotection of school pages would prevent this purported benefit, weakening the overall case for inclusion of at least some schools. Personally, I agree that many of the new editors these articles bring are vandals, and I wouldn't lose a moment of sleep over semiprotection, but as someone opposed to blanket inclusion of all high schools, I feel failing to point this out would be intellectually dishonest. In addition, I think, given Wikipedia's mission, it's the responsibility of those who would see an article included to monitor it for vandalism of this type. If it's taking such a large amount of time and attention, perhaps we should ask how the article benefits Wikipedia and whether that outweighs the necessity of constant maintenance. (Perhaps that's self-serving of me -- but I've reverted my share of school-article vandalism, too.) One possible solution, where the article lacks independent sources or other evidence of notability, would be to merge and redirect the school article to the article about its town or school district -- I'm honestly not sure whether that would prevent vandalism or merely redirect it, too, but it might be worth a shot. I'm not sure there is, ultimately, any solution; even outright deletion wouldn't prevent recreation, since the articles are rather unlikely to be salted. Shimeru 20:19, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Very, very few school articles have any outside sources. That alone is cause for deletion. Even using the school webiste, in most cases all we would be able to source are details like the school colors, the enrollment, and the names of the administrators. Yes, those could be handled as well by a table in a school district article. I agree that it is the responsibility of those who want the articles to maintain them, and that's why I brought up the issue here. If this project sets the standard for inclusion so low that virtually every school is included, but if project members are unable to maintain the articles they insist must be kept, then there is a problem. We need to find a better balance betwen inclusion and maintainability. I agree that semi-protecting hundreds of school articles wouldn't be acceptable to the general community. That leaves deletion/merging. PRODding articles is one way of finding out if anyone watchs or cares about them. -Will Beback · † · 21:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
What has surprised me about many of the official school websites that I've looked at is that you can plenty of info on what the school cafeteria has scheduled, but often you can't find any info on the school colors or mascot. BlankVerse 13:12, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Importance assessments

Now that the links have been included to make it easier to find the categories of assessed articles it is an interesting exercise to compare the importance ratings of the various assessed schools. The assessments are obviously somewhat subjective but it seems to me that there is a distinct pro-American bias in the assessments and that American schools or schools with an American association are considered more important than other schools. What criteria are used to make these judgements? It makes no sense to me that for instance Kamehameha Schools, which educate only native Hawaiians, are judged to be of top importance whereas Reading School, founded in 1125 and one of the oldest schools in England with many notable alumni and four Grade II listed buildings, is judged to be of low importance. If we are going to have importance ratings could we please have clear guidelines which apply to all countries. Alternatively perhaps schools should be assessed purely on their importance within their own country. All the American schools which are currently listed as having a degree of "importance" are not known outside the US and are only "important" to American readers of Wikipedia. Schools in most other countries are probably also only of importance to readers from the countries concerned. We need to find some way of establishing comparative criteria so that importance is assessed equally for all countries. Alternatively the whole idea should be abandoned.Dahliarose 12:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Great Entry??

Augusta Independent Schools and Augusta High School (Kentucky) have been nominated for deletion because the school board doesn't want the information online. These articles seem to be some of the best school articles I have came across, although the requirements for Wikipedia require the school to be notable in some way, many are not notable but decently written and not to be speedy. I honestly believe 1/2-2/3 of school articles could be speedy under non-notable criteria of schools, yet as long as the entry is not trying to promote a group, person, or agenda, I've tried to improve it and let it go. These entries are well written with great pictures yet the history of the school is objectionable to the school board. Im simply asking for unbiased, educated glances. Thanks, 02:54, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

That reason's never been accepted -- if it's true that the school board doesn't want the articles included, that's too bad for the school board, in all likelihood. I say "if" because there's a suggestion at those discussions that the articles are copyvios, and the proposed reason for deletion a means of retracting the infringement without having to admit to it. This may, of course, not be the case. But even if it is, there's clearly a history here, so I see the articles being either kept and stubbified, or deleted (to eliminate the copyvio) and recreated as stubs. Shimeru 06:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the article should not be deleted just because the school board wants it so, but how about removing 95% of the text just because there are no cites, and never have been? This looks like someone's private research project, which is fine if they provide verifiable citations. I'm going to flag it for cites and if the primary editors want to keep it then they will add supporting references. I doubt this will happen since one of the editors requesting page deletion is the guy that started the article and is its primary contributor. On the other hand, if any of the editors that are arguing against deletion want to stick to their principles, then they can start adding cites.
—  Jim Dunning  talk  : 13:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Sports reports

I've run into a problem with an editor whose baby is Stillwater Area High School. I've had to remove a long and detailed timetable of theatrical events, including details of auditions & rehearsals, and now he's resisting the removal of an even longer set of sections giving full school-magazine/yearbook-style reports on all of the school's sports teams for the past four or five years. Assuming that I'm right on this, as the project page seems to indicate, could experts on school articles come to the Talk page and offer him some advice on what he should be doing on the article, and how best to do it? Thanks in advance. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 20:35, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

A third (and fourth, fith, etc.) pair of eyes would be very helpful please. He refuses to give up adding the detailed accounts of the performance of sports teams, despite my pointing him towards the guidelines at this Project. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 22:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Categorisation of specialist schools in England

It would appear that a new category has recently been created for the various English specialists schools Category:Specialist schools in England. It seems like an excellent idea but the category lists are incomplete and the existing categories need populating. Could people possibly add their schools to the appropriate categories. Is there some sort of bot program that can add schools to the appropriate categories in bulk? Dahliarose 15:58, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I would appreciate to rename the category into Specialist schools in UK or at least creating one for each part of the UK. Btw. I know a scottish one... --Lazer erazer 01:28, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Experiment re "All Schools are notable"

I just created the article Sausalito Marin City School District using only information from one page at the National Center for Education Statistics as an experiment. The assumption being tested is that a reasonable stub or start-class article can be created using this single reliable source. The hope is that districts and high schools (at least) could be added automatically using this database, just as all Census designated places were added at once. The next step is to improve the article using only the District's official website. The final step (for me) is to improve it to Good Article quality using online sources only. I hope that a better infobox template can be created specifically for the information available from NCES, but I'm not up to that, yet.

Please feel free to discuss both the article and the experiment on the article's talk page or here.--Hjal 10:00, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

"All schools" might be notable (I certainly don't think they are). But all school districts? They can be pretty arbitrary areas, and all the information could be put on pages about the geographical areas and regions that the school district covers. Many of the schools in any district will not have won any awards, or been the subject of any press outside a very small area. Certainly many of the districts won't. Why should schol districts be included in Wikipedia if they haven't achieved national recognition for some reason, or if multiple non-trivial works have been written about them? Can't all the content at Sausalito Marin City School District be included in some way at Sausalito, California? As I see it, the only point at which the article stands a good chance of not being deleted in an AfD is after oher non-trivial online sources (newspaper articles, books etc.) are found about the district itself, and this will not happen for all school districts in the U.S. ConDemTalk 11:31, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Experiment re NCES data, phase II

I have loaded all of the NCES data on the three schools in the Sausalito Marin City School District into the District article. It looks klunky, in part becasue I am limiting this edition to what's in the NCES database, and in part becasue I'm setting up the page to break the indivudal schools out into separate articles after searching the district's own website for more information. As a result, the page looks overloaded with infoboxes and geolinks, plus I ended up with coordinates for the two different campuses overlaying each other at the top of the page. I'm sure that some of the NCES information would look better in tabular form, but I don't have much experience with making tables yet, and I don't know what a bot could be capable of, so I'm keeping it simple. I left a couple of terms from NCES in, even though they aren't well known—I plan to add some discussions of terminology at the NCES article, so the redlinks will go away. I left in the NCES and California ID numbers for the District and its schools, but I'm not sure that they will be useful here. One thing that is obvious, is that this article would not fit into a typical locality article—it's already too long for that in its plain vanilla format. Besides, it would have to go into two articles—Sausalito and Marin City. With a district article like this set up, I can put a paragraph about education in each of the town articles with a link to the District article or the appropriate schoo articles.

Please review and comment, here or at the article or at Schools.--Hjal 07:42, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

My only real concern there is the vandalism problem. I agree that schools get more vandalism than the average article. Perhaps the articles could be created restricted so that they can only be modified by registered users.
Many schools aren't notable, but it does seem useful to have a consistent framework to frame the schools that *are* notable - naming, basic data, basic article structure, et cetera. Even the basic data will be interesting to some modest number of people.
Jordan Brown 04:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Conifer High School

I just wrote the article, I would love some feedback, and the article obviously needs improvment. I know I need to get the sources, but at the moment I am unable to, but hopefully over the next few days I can add more info including more about the sports, a picture or two, and of course the citations. EnsRedShirt 11:42, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Infobox template proliferation

It sure looks like there are a lot of redundant infobox templates - five generic school templates, three high school templates, public, private, US, two UK templates, and so on.

Is there any effort underway to consolidate these all into a handful, preferably into Template:Infobox School? Would it be useful, for instance, to start walking down the "what links here list" for Infobox School3 updating the articles to use Template:Infobox School?

Of course, any consolidation would have to involve updating the common template to support whatever custom features the variants have added.

Jordan Brown 04:25, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be helpful, I think. Looking at the category of school-related templates is somewhat bewildering -- there's no clear indication of which to use, at times. Consolidation would be a plus. Shimeru 18:58, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
OK... I'll attack Template:Infobox School4 - few references, no significant additional features. Jordan Brown 19:37, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Done. Only gaps I noticed were that Template:Infobox School4 has a "headmaster" field (which it displays as "Principal") and "city", "state", and "country" fields (which it uses to assemble a "city, country"). It does seem appropriate to have a mechanism to show the right title for the leader; the "head_name" strategy in Template:Infobox School3 seems appropriate. It *might* be appropriate to have the address/location broken down to allow the individual parts to be processed separately, perhaps to automatically add [[Category:Schools in {{country}}]] or something like that... shrug. I turned "headmaster" into "principal" (displays the same) and merged all of the location information into "location". Comments? Jordan Brown 20:22, March 5, 2007 (UTC)

I've been using Template:Infobox Education in the United States, which covers most possibilities, including the option of unique titles. (Note the full listing of fields at the bottom of the article.) I'm not sure that it would be feasible to have a single info box that worked for all English-speaking countries, but we should be able to come up with one infobox like this that could handle almost all options for each major system. It would be nice if the field with an address could generate the geohack template automatically. It would also be nice to have another version of the geohack thing that didn't put the coordinates in the upper right corner, so you could use the template more than once in the same article. I've used this template for my own high school, Tam, and for my experiment, Sausalito Marin City School District (which was fraudulently prodded today by a clumsy newbie or a deletionist sockpuppet). I had to remove multiple geohacks from the second article because of the conflict, but that leaves me with no easy way to do the geolinks for multiple campuses in a district article.--Hjal 05:41, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Without doing any real review of it, that sounds plausible. The name is a bit verbose, though. Perhaps we can merge its features into Template:Infobox School. (Note that Template:Infobox School has over a thousand links.) For now, I'm going to attack Template:Infobox US school, which seems both unnecessarily specialized and relatively poorly formatted. Jordan Brown 06:17, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Reaching consensus on criteria for school articles

There is currently a complete lack of consistency with the treatment of school articles. The assessors are making excellent progress at Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools/Assessment but the process has thrown up a number of anomalies. We now have included in the Schools Project articles on, for example, Cleeve School and Derby Grammar which are nothing more than basic stubs with no attempt to define their notability in line with Wikipedia:Notability. On the other hand if one looks at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Schools there is a constant parade of school articles which are recommended for deletion, many of which have far more substantial and noteworthy content than that of some of the existing articles which are already in the scope of the Schools Project. In the deletion debates some users such as Noroton argue repetitively that "all high schools are inherently notable" whereas others insist that schools must have a degree of notability. The whole deletion process seems to be very time-consuming and more often than not results in a merger rather than a deletion. However, in the absence of a workable guideline a lot of time is wasted in repetitive arguments. The schools guideline at Wikipedia:Schools is currently bogged down with conflicting views on the protocol of the various Wikipedia policies. User Shimeru has produced a most useful summary of the current status, based on a survey of the archives (see Wikipedia talk:Schools). Is there any chance that we can use his findings to reach a consensus and form the basis of a workable guideline? Dahliarose 00:07, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Somebody Stop me, Please.

I need to know:

Are any of the 500 (my estimate) articles in Category:Elementary schools in the United States notable? If so, which ones? Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 22:49, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Those that have survived a AfD? Those that offer something unique? Vegaswikian 23:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

About Diocesan Boys' School HK

With respect to the comments, this entry is edited and necessary footnotes are added. I think it can be evaluated again. Thanks for the attention.

Caulfield Grammar School FAR

Caulfield Grammar School has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. LuciferMorgan 02:53, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Notability of student-government orgs

Any guidelines for having separate pages about them? While contemplating the newly created Union of Students of the University of Alaska Anchorage page, I found we have a handful of such student-govt pages (Category:Student governments in the United States). Most don't assert + cite much in the way of notability per WP criteria (WP:ORG is the closest active guideline I can find), but some are officially-sanctioned representative bodies vs "just another student club". I think? Anyway, what's the WP:SCH thought about all this? DMacks 20:56, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism Concerns

I have found that the one secondary school page I edit and monitor is frequently becoming a target of vandalism by unidentified users. I assume these persons are neither registered members or editors on Wikipedia. Is it possible to request restrictions on these pages which would only permit a registered member of Wikipedia to alter articles on US secondary schools? I am not sure if that policy is utilized for other entries, but can it be considered? Mphamilton 17:33, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

English Medium

What is wrong with indicating the fact that a school is English Medium? Eog1916 20:22, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

What is an English Medium school? I've never heard of such a thing. Perhaps you could point us in the direction of the article concerned to give us the context. The term will need explaining for an international readership. Dahliarose 22:42, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
The term refers to a school where English is the language of instruction. However, the specific meaning is normally that its students have another language as their first language, and that they are learning English as well as their other course work. Such schools are usually found in former British colonies where English is not the main official language. --Eastmain 00:05, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Battlefield High School (PWCS, VA)

Hello! I figured it's about time I stuck my head in here, as my primary area of Wikiparticipation is at the article for Battlefield High School, trying to keep it up-to-date, provide the very latest statistical information, provide for or encourage others to contribute the information that brings the article into conformity with high standards established here and in other quality discussions, and of course, fight inevitable vandalism.

I consulted the standards, looked at the Battlefield article in comparison to others in the project, and it seems worthy of an "A" quality rating, though I cannot rationalize anything higher than "Mid" for importance, as it's mostly information relation and doesn't exactly break any new ground.

I'm looking for some independent confirmation of my assessments, and to see if anyone has anything to suggest that might continue to improve the article. Thanks!

Bhs itrt 13:56, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

new member requesting help

I could use some help working on all the schools in the Plano Independent School District. Please help me if you would like. PLZ H3LPZORS! Rockinbuddy 01:35, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

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