User:Jh12/School articles and deletion
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This is an essay containing my thoughts about deleting school articles. --Jh12 (talk) 20:24, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Speedy deletion
School articles should never be speedy deleted. The speedy deletion process implies that the article would not survive an Afd and that its deletion is uncontroversial. This is not the case. From my participation at Articles for deletion, non-notable primary schools are often merged/redirected to its school district/locality and secondary/post-secondary schools are frequently kept. I think this is a satisfactory arrangement because it allows school articles that cannot establish Notability to be redirected to content that already exists on Wikipedia.
As a WikiProject Schools member with a possible conflict of interest, so much as any editor always has a conflict of interest in the articles they edit, I first rely on Wikipedia:Verifiability. If the school has been cited in local, national, and international newspapers, magazines, television programs, books, then many of the other policies such as Wikipedia:No Original Research, Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View, and Wikipedia:Notability can fall into place. If there isn't enough reliable information, the content policies are useless. Secondly, I rely on Wikipedia:Consensus. I strongly believe that consensus, decided by the body of editors on Wikipedia, is the most powerful tool available to us. If I believe a school article should be kept and consensus at Afd is against keeping it, I am completely fine with its deletion. The Csd process completely removes the ability to debate and discuss the article, and instead places its fate solely in the interpretation of an administrator.
Burden on the editor
It is difficult for an editor to create a good school article. In my research for Benjamin Franklin High School (New Orleans, Louisiana), I have had to use JSTOR, LexisNexis, and High Beam. I have searched through the complete archives of the local television stations, newspapers and magazines. I have used the academic archives of the regional library, local universities, and health science centers. I have used the university subscription services at the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times archives. I have searched through Google Books, Google News, Yahoo!, Excite, MSN, and many other online search engines. It has taken me years to collect several hundred stories and articles from briefly mentioning to comprehensively covering the school.
How many editors are able to go through this much effort for a U.S. school article? Now consider the articles for foreign schools, where access to such comprehensive archives may not even be possible. Take User:Liz123001. From Special:Contributions/Liz123001, this editor clearly spent time to create Island Children's Montessori School, only to have it quickly redirected in an Afd. It is an action I agree with in many ways because there do not seem to be enough sources to establish notability. But at least it got turned into a redirect. At least any user can still find that work buried in the history. A complete disregard for the time and effort an editor spends to come to Wikipedia and create a page in good faith is to me not in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia.
Don't worry about Jimmy Wales
I'm not sure why Jimmy Wales has changed his attitude over the years. He once wrote "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
He wrote on Nov 7, 2003:
Let me make my point more clear: arguments about what we ought to if someone really starts to abuse wikipedia with thousands and thousands of trivial articles do not prove that we ought to delete any and every article that's too trivial today.
Put another way: if someone wants to write an article about their high school, we should relax and accomodate them, even if we wish they wouldn't do it. And that's true *even if* we should react differently if someone comes in and starts mass-adding articles on every high school in the world.
Let me make this more concrete. Let's say I start writing an article about my high school, Randolph School, of Huntsville, Alabama. I could write a decent 2 page article about it, citing information that can easily be verified by anyone who visits their website.
Then I think people should relax and accomodate me. It isn't hurting anything. It'd be a good article, I'm a good contributor, and so cutting me some slack is a very reasonable thing to do.
That's true *even if* we'd react differently to a ton of one-liners mass-imported saying nothing more than "Randolph School is a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, US" and "Indian Springs is a private school in Birmingham, Alabama, US" and on and on and on, ad nauseum.
The argument "what if someone did this particular thing 100,000 times" is not a valid argument against letting them do it a few times.
Jimbo, Partial solution to rampant deletionism
Yet, when I queried him on Dec. 23, 2008 he wrote "No, I would not agree with what I wrote in 2003. I had no idea what an eternal nightmare the schools issue would become.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)" Similarly, he would actually chose to delete some featured articles. Which version of Jimbo is to be used as guidance? My answer is that at the end of the day, Jimmy Wales is still only one user and he does not create consensus by himself. Although I greatly value his thoughts, it is the Wikipedia community that really makes this site what it is and it is the community's consensus that provides the best guidance.