User:Thesteve/Schools

On Schools

I have decided that schools deserve to be included in wikipedia.

Why Include Schools?

Community

A school is a community consisting of the teachers and students who go there. In order for there to be a school, there must be enough people to fill it, usually somewhere between 400 and 2000. The fact that the community is continually changing only means that the impact of the school is greater. There are also peripheral members of this community including the parents, the boy scouts who meet in the gym every week, and the local sports team that uses the soccer field on weekends. Students usually spend 4 years going to a high school for 6 hours every weekday, and the lasting effect on their lives in undeniable. Consensus is that all places merit inclusion, and it is a very small stretch to add schools, which are comparable in population to a small town.

Place

Schools also tend to include property and a building or two. The older the building, the more interesting it becomes. Some have unique architectural features. Almost all of them are of significant enough size to be landmarks, and are included on local maps.

History

Most schools have been around for some time and so interesting events, news stories, famous alumni, controversies, shootings and lawsuits that happened there tend to accumulate. Obviously, the older the school is, the more significant this becomes.

Each of these reasons may not be enough, in and of itself, to merit inclusion, but taken together, they almost certainly do.

The Solution

The solution is really very simple. Make articles about each school district and redirect all the school articles there. Then you can have a section on each school in the district and add all kinds of extra goodies about the school board and how much they're paid/not paid to make life miserable for parents and students alike. I think about 90% of both "deletionists" and "inclusionists" would agree to this. I know User:RickK would, because he said so, and he's nominated more schools for deletion that I've voted Keep on.

Why is this not done? The reason is very simple - it requires work.

The natural thing for users, especially beginning users, to do is type their current school/alma mater in by name. They find nothing, so they create it. Because wikipedia is a community project, the intuitive name is the one that will usually be created. The "inclusionists" think this is just fine and want to keep it. The "deletionists" don't want the schools included at all, so everyone concerned is pretty happy arguing about it on Vfd, with the result that some get kept and others don't.

The Solution^TM would require a fair amount of work to maintain. Whenever a maintainer found a school, he or she would have to move all the information to the correct district, which might have to be created, and make the school name into a redirect. In addition, because it is an unnatural sort of division, new users would continue to create articles under school names, so some dedication is needed. Also, most beginning school articles would have to be cleaned up significantly. Most people are aware of the name of the school, but far fewer know (or even care about) the board or district names which would have to be researched. That is why there is no Toronto district school board article but there is Heart Lake Secondary School, even though the former would be considered much more encyclopedic than the latter.

I have recently noticed that Niteowlneils is working on a similar solution, which I fully support.