User talk:Nhallisey

St Benedict's School

Thank you for the comments left on my User talk page. Let me respond to some of your comments:

1) The page is outdated: I take a slightly different perspective. There is, in my view, far too much currently included about the minutiae of very recent sporting activity, which is essentially ephemeral. I suspect that you are, perhaps, a current pupil of the school for whom current and recent activity looms large. However, my concern is that, with over a hundred years of history, there is a serious lack of content about the past at the expense of the current. As regards sport, the school has long enjoyed success. One could equally pick on the rugby exploits of the 1970s, when Keith Tomlins was dominant ("by far the outstanding cricketer the school has ever produced", as The Priorian of the day stated) in rugby and cricket. However, although this is my era (I am as you might guess an Old Priorian) I would not mention it except in passing in an encyclopedia. Results in sport are here today and forgotten tomorrow and need to be kept in context.

2) Mission Statement: The fact that articles on other Benedictine schools include unreferenced material of this nature is not an argument for including it here. I can't police every page on Wikipedia, only those I choose to follow, but I certainly do not regard other pages which flout the principles of Wikipedia as providing a precedent. The fundamental principle is that content should be objective, factual and neutral and be supported by verifiable and independent sources. The school website fails this test and all content which currently relies solely on that source should, strictly, be removed. As regards the "mission statement", it is by its nature close to marketing puff, as evidenced by its absurdity. Let us examine part of it. "St Benedict's is proud of its uniqueness." Firstly, schools and institutions can't feel pride, only people can; secondly, in what sense is it unique? It is not unique as a Catholic school, a Benedictine school or a school that accepts people of other faiths (a fact driven more by economics than tolerance!). As an OP, I feel a sense of disappointment that my school is resorting to this sort of corporate drivel.

3) David Pearce. The offences arose out of the respective positions of headmaster and pupil; the fact that Pearce chose to conduct his business off-site is an irrelevance that does not in any way diminish the connection with the school. In fact, I have policed this section more rigorously than any other, as every so often someone escalates it into the usual sort of tabloid style, anti-Catholic rant. What I do is reduce the statement to the purely factual, expressed in neutral language. I believe that what we now have is proportionate and expressed in appropriate language. There is also a separate mention on the Ealing Abbey page of Pearce, but that rightly focusses on the role of Ealing Abbey as trustee of the school and the failings in that respect found by the charity commission investigation. It is right that the facts are separately recorded in each article in a differrent way that is relevant to the subject matter of each article.

I hope you find my comments helpful. It would be good to see you helping to flesh out the history. It's on my agenda when I can find the time. I can recommend Renee Kollar's book, The Return of the Benedictines to Ealing, as a source for the early years.

--The Sage of Stamford (talk) 22:22, 3 February 2011 (UTC)