User talk:Dpbsmith/BEEFSTEW

Some General Discussion

• COMMENT: This is a GREAT tool. I will work on the missing "points".--AAAAA 15:57, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
• I agree. I've been voting on these high schools a lot recently, so this helps me keep my votes more uniform. I'll strongly consider voting "keep" on articles scoring better than 5. Cool Hand Luke 17:37, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Just a suggestion: does the age of a school make it notable enough to warrant an article even if it's only one sentence? I happen to think that Aylesbury Grammar School is fairly notable because it was founded in 1598. Unfortunately I don't happen to know a great deal more about it. It is at least as notable, if not more so than Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe which has just two short paragraphs. The point is both these schools were founded in the 16th century: should age be a BEEFSTEW indicator of notability? Great system by the way. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 12:48, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I like the system! I agree that it would be worth adding a question about age ("Is the school over 100 years old?"), but I also wonder if it'd be worth adding a weighting system? So, F, G and H could all score 2 points. Actually I'd be tempted to split G into three parts: regoinal (1 point), national (2 points), international (4 points). The thinking behind 4 points is that if a school's internationally mentioned it really should have an article! --G Rutter 08:09, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Do you want to explain that? If a school is mentioned on here then it is by proxy internationally mentioned. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 11:40, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I meant mentioned in the international news media (TV, radio, newspaper). --G Rutter 08:08, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

See my notes at User:Dpbsmith/BEEFSTEW for what my intentions were. I'm gratified that people see some value in the scoring system. I don't want to fuss too much about refining or tuning it. I don't want people to take it too seriously. Do note that I'm trying to evaluate the quality of the article, not the notability of the school, and that I'm trying to make a rough-and-ready distinction between bad articles and acceptable (to me!) articles, rather than separating fair, good, and superb articles... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 13:03, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why schools in particular? If we applied the same standards to Lord of the Rings characters or tiny American towns we would radically change what Wikipedia is. Pcb21| Pete 08:08, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well, I can talk about this two ways. One is the explanation I have always given, which is that I use BEEFSTEW as a factor in judging whether borderline articles on schools should be kept. I'm not asserting this as consensus policy, I'm stating a factor that can be used to predict how I will vote on school articles--an elaborate version of the same thing you find on Wikipedia:What's in, what's out.

Second, I've made it fairly clear that I personally am not inclusionist nor deletionist, but I am "mergist" and I am "qualitarian."

The überinclusionist belief system is that the quality of an article should be irrelevant, because if the topic itself has potential for being encyclopedic, the articles will magically grow and improve as the result of, I suppose, vital aetheric vibrations.

My belief is that articles are written by the action of people who volunteer to work on them. Articles that are likely to attract the attention of a large pool of interested editors are likely to grow and improve. Articles on extremely narrow topics of interest to only tiny number of editors are not. Therefore, I take the illogical but commonsense view of factoring in article quality on any article that are borderline in being encyclopedic.

My belief is that we are trying to build an encyclopedia and that an encyclopedia is a big set of books full of good articles in them. It's not clear what policies will best support that goal, but that's the goal.

In other words, a crappy one-line stub on Beethoven is fine with me because it won't stay that way for long. A lovingly written, detailed, interesting, well-referenced, through, scholarly treatment of a Pokemon character, or a non-notable high school is fine with me because it is a good article.

I see—not absolutely no evidence, but very little evidence, that the semi-literate two-line squibs about secondary and middle schools get any systematic attention.

With respect to the Rambot articles, that's a special case. I'm not much of Rambot fan, and I dislike the idea that what should be simple tabular data somehow gains something by being mechanically converted into COBOL-like prose. However, the town articles have the characteristic that they are reasonable comprehensive, complete, and (apparently) get regular maintenance. This does not happen with school articles. Wikipedia is not, and in the foreseeable future will not be a substitute for www.greatschools.net or anything like that.

As for "radically chang[ing] what Wikipedia is," I don't think it would. When I look at the actual voting behavior on school articles what I see is that regardless of stated principle, both inclusionists and deletionists do take article quality into account. Whether or not BEEFSTEW scores are mentioned, high-BEEFSTEW articles usually survive and low-BEEFSTEW articles do not (unless improved during VfD).

But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an experiment in anarchy. The organizational principles that were effective when Wikipedia was starting up and you had a huge population of stubby articles on clearly encyclopedic topics are not sacred.

By the way, no, I do not like the effect BEEFSTEW has had on some articles--when editors deliberately engaged in BEEFSTEW-bloat in order to get an article past VfD. But I don't think the answer to that is to tinker or refine BEEFSTEW. I just meant it as a rough metric to identify semi-objectively what I'd call the "insultingly bad" articles.

Anyway, by all means vote as you think fit on school articles. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:06, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Many thanks for search a detailed response to my query. As you might have guessed I was somewhat motivated by the Robert Frost Middle School deletion debate currently underway. It looks you would keep that article from what you say, and it is a shame that your metric is not being used the way the inventor intended. I guess this all part of my agitation that "non-notability" is more and more an acceptable criterion for deletion. Unlike other deletion rules notability is inherently subjective (or POV to use the wikipedia term). And because deletion votes are binding, if the community has a particular skew then this a copper-bottomed way of introducing systemic bias into the encyclopedia (e.g. we systematically have lots of esoterica on computers but very little on individual small companies). I guess I am just frustrated that I am powerless to stop this - I can't force the neverending torrent of newcomers all to think, "hang on, I am being objective here". Your criteria, to judge the quality of content regardless of subject matter, is definitely something I can identify with. Thanks again, Pcb21| Pete 23:02, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC).

adding criteria?

Can we change this? I'd like to add "how many classrooms (etc) a school has" as being non-notable (excluding any architectural merit). Also, most British grammar schools and public schools I think are inherently notable. Thirdly, there should be some merit for age, this obviously varies from place to place, but say pre-1800 in Europe, pre-1900 in the US and the Commonwealth should be given points. Dunc|☺ 16:07, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Length of Article

Critera C for BEEFSTEW relates to length of article. How can you tell the length of an article? I am unsure. Thanks. — MATHWIZ2020 ^{TALK | CONTRIBS} 23:18, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

How would one find out if the page is at least 2000 bytes? Thanks! Greeves ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:23, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

• Hmmm... I thought the edit box used to display that... I don't know of an _exact_ method that will work for _everyone_. But none of these criteria is exact. I happen to use an offline text editor that displays the number of bytes. Remember, this is a personal tool that _I_ use! You can also eyeball it... if it's too close to 2000 bytes to call, give it half a point or something. Dpbsmith (talk) 02:33, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

shortcut?

{{shortcut|[[WP:BEEFSTEW]]}} — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 17:55, 15 March 2007 (UTC)