Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools

For older discussions see the archive Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Archive 1

Louise-Schroeder-Gymnasium

I have completed this article on the Louise-Schroeder-Gymnasium, translating it from German into English. Feedback welcome WilliamH 20:15, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

School stub in need of your help

School is this week's COTW. Davodd 03:19, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Tonbridge School

The majority of the general information section of this article appears to be a direct copyvio of [1]. Since this isn't the only information on the article page I'm not exactly sure how to handle it. Slapping a copyvio tag on it seems to be overkill, but just removing the information alltogether would leave the article rather short and confused.

I'd appreciate if someone from this project could take a look at it. -- Hirudo 14:43, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

For copyright violations like that, its best to promptly remove all the bad text, regardless of how short it makes the article. --Rob 17:04, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Presbyterian Ladies' College, Perth

Hi. I've just received a message on my talk page about my reinstating some controversial information from to the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Perth, article about a once off incident where students attempted to sell homemade porn. I have now removed the information and placed it on the article's talk page. Could I please have the opinions of some school related editors about whether this information should be included in the article? Blarneytherinosaur 13:20, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

If it's not verifiable, it doesn't belong. -- Usgnus 15:04, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

That depends what you call verifiable. There was some media coverage at the time, but the only source I can find is this which was already in the article. It is a post from Free Republic, an online forum, with a copy of a report from the West Australian newspaper. I'm currently chasing up an opinion about whether this is a reliable source at Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources Blarneytherinosaur 01:44, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Alumni lists - alphabetical or chronological?

I reorganised the bulleted list of alumni of Bootham School into alphabetical order, as this seemed more helpful for those who want to see at a glance whether a particular person is listed. This has now been reverted to chronological order of birthdate by the original creator of the list, who claims that the chronological arrangement is used elsewhere and that this is useful for seeing who attended a school simultaneously. I have indeed found examples of this, but also examples of alpha order (and of random order!). I thought that there might be some guidelines on the Project Page here, but there don't seem to be any. Should there be? And, if so, which arrangement should be favoured? --GuillaumeTell 14:35, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I think such lists are almost always ordered alphabetically (if there's any order at all). I don't see the relevance of the birthdate (which is often not known). --Rob 15:39, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I looked at it, and now I see the reasoning (people who went to school together, go together). I think normally alpha makes more sense though, as its the normal default for list ordering (not specific to alums). --Rob 15:43, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Another option: group by "profession", or by whatever reason the person is notable. For example, at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto, they have:

Notable alumni

• Arts and Drama
  • name...
• Athletics
  • name...
• Political
  • name...

The names within the subsections in this case are ordered alphabetically. Personally, between alphabetic and birthday, I'd much rather go alphabetically, both because as already mentionned birthdays are often not known, but also because it is what people normally expect to find when presented with a list of people.

--Stephane Charette 17:00, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

• I can understand dates of attendance or by year of graduation, but by year of birth makes little sense to me. I prefer alphabetically or by occupation and then alphabetically. -- Usgnus 18:36, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Over at Stuyvesant High School's alumni list, which got so large it was split out to List of Stuyvesant High School people, we started out grouping them by "area" (e.g., "Sciencetists/mathemeticians", "Media") and alpha-sorting by surname and given name within groups. It worked for quite a while, and I liked it a lot. Then Hillman came along and reorganized it to be grouped by profession (e.g. "Physics", "Chemistry", "Entertainment", "Writers") and sorted by class-year, surname, and given name within the groups. His stated reason was just as Necrothesp's - that it is interesting to see who attended with whom, and therefore might have influenced each other. I was lukewarm about it, but I've come to see it as much more useful. Alpha helps you find out if someone's listed (which a browser text-find will tell you too), and what siblings attended the school. Hillman's answer to the sibling point was to include a group of notable siblings (i.e., siblings from the other groups), but Nagle deleted that recently as a non-notable concept. I'm not convinced that Nagle's right, but I'm leaving it be for the moment. RossPatterson 01:05, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Royal Grammar School Worcester

Hi, this article has been put up for peer review here with a few to improve it to FA standard. It recently failed as a FAC, althought he article has been improved since then. I would very much welcome the thoughts of anybody invovled in this Wikiproject. --Wisden17 18:14, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Lynbrook High School

A disambig page was created a few days ago for Lynbrook High School. There's one in New York and one in California. The original Lynbrook article was California's, so that was moved to Lynbrook High School (California) and a disambig listed the links for it and the New York school. However, the New York school does not have a school article, just an article on the town. Now User:Milpitas guy came along and changed the page back to a non-disambig saying "(just add a disambig message, no need for Lynbrook High School (California))" and added a disambig message saying "There is also a Lynbrook High School in Lynbrook, New York."

What would be the best solution here? Keep it the way that Milpitas guy has made it because of the lack of article on the New York school? Change back to a disambig and hope someone makes an article on the NY school? Metros232 23:47, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I think Lynbrook High School should definately be changed back to a disambig page. Otherwise, we're going to have people making accidental links to the wrong school. It doesn't sound like the California school is world famous, which is what it would have to be to justify the unqualified name. --Rob 00:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Clarification of terms

Is there someplace where we can put a brief explanation of school terms for our international community? I've noticed frequent misunderstandings due to words meaning totally different things to Americans than they mean to anyone from the UK or any English-inspired school system:

• "Grammar school"

US: means grades 1-6, same as primary or elementary school

UK: secondary school, grades 7-12 (or "Forms" 1-6, a terminology which also mystifies most Americans)

• "College"

US: means the undergraduate program at a university

UK: secondary school again

My understanding is that in English usage these terms both refer to what Americans might call a Prep (for College Preparatory) School, i.e. a school for students who are university-bound, as opposed to one for those who will enter the working world, but I could be mistaken. I don't know the distinction between the two terms. Most Americans use the term "high school" for grades 9-12 regardless (7-8 are "middle school" or "junior high school").

Maybe somewhere, we could set up a brief explanation of terms, but where? Fan1967 18:06, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

In Australia: generally Kindergarten / Prep is the first "school year" at between 4-6 years age Infants is Kindergarten through 1st, 2nd, 3rd class Primary School is 4th-6th class Most Primary Schools run from Kindergarten - 6th class High School is years 7-10 (junior high?) or 7-12 there are some Colleges which generally are years 11-12 only for a wider community

We also have some Central Schools in smaller communities which typically run from Kindergarten - year 10. Some private schools run from Kindergarten - year 12.

In the past, in Australia, there were Colleges of Advanced Education offereing subjects such as Dip. Nursing, Dip. Education, etc - but these have all dissapeared and teaching & nursing are now full-blown professions requiring a degree from a University. Garrie 03:23, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Nebraska High Schools

A while back ago there was a discussion about how to recrute new editors to wikipedia. I suggested that if we added a bunch of school pages, we would get a lot of test edits from the students at those schools. So I'm trying to do an experiment, by addeding a bunch of Nebraska schools. I've already found the links, but I want to know how much information I need to put in to establish a good stub. Ideas?--Rayc 01:55, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I would highly discourage this based on the guidelines on the project page

Avoid bulk additions. The bulk automated entry of schools is strongly discouraged, as is the bulk adding of schools to the Articles for deletion page. As a general rule of thumb, only add schools that you are willing to do significant research on.

So I don't really think that it's a good idea. Metros232 01:58, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I saw that, but I'm not automating my article creation. Each article will be writen by me- though the general form of the page will look the same. I'm just trying to find out how much information I should add to avoid making it look like an automated job.--Rayc 17:52, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Some guidance needed

Summonmaster13 (talk · contribs) is creating a great many stubs for high schools. Many of the stubs are only one line long. I'm tempted to {{prod}} them, as these sub-stubs aren't really any more helpful than redlinks. However, I'm not interested in fighting AfDs over them, so I thought I would let you see what you can do with this user first. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 16:06, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd say leave a note on his talk page asking him to stop citing the rules on the project page that discourage the addition of mass amounts of stub length school articles. See if that'll make the user stop, then at least there won't be more created and we can work with the ones s/he already created. Metros232 16:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Somebody did back in April, and I just asked him to at least put stub templates on them. I'll post the rule as you suggest. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 16:17, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Yeah I just saw the note from April. Maybe explaining it with the rules would help better. I just hope it doesn't discourage the user from doing work related to schools because a lot of what s/he is doing is a lot of the minor work that needs to be done: labeling articles as stubs as necessary and slotting them in the right "Schools in..." categories. Metros232 16:28, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I pointed the editor to your project page, and I've added stub templates to some recent creations, but I haven't gone very far back (he did seem to be stubbing articles for schools in other states, it's Florida schools that I had to fix). I'm not into school articles (although I have List of high schools in Florida on my watch list), so I just wanted to alert you all to this, to do with it what you want. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 17:55, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Infoboxes need to be standardized

We have way too many infoboxes for different types of schools. We should select one of the school infoboxes, improve it to include all possible school information, convert articles using the other infoboxes to use our one template, and nominate the unused templates for deletion. I don't know how to program templates, but I cosider the whole "free tag" thing to be bad design. We should add many categories that dissapear if not used. If we get a single template that we all agree on, I would help convert articles using the other templates to our standard template. --Phantom784 18:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Can we not set up a poll for the best looking ones? --Tanner65 02:03, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

No single infobox is comprehensive. Even if we do select a best infobox, it'll need to be expanded to include fields that the other infoboxes offer but it doesn't. I used {{Infobox School2}} for my school's page (Greensburg Central Catholic) because it seemed like the best, but that is missing fields good for private schools, like tuition. Prehaps, however, we should have two infoboxes, one for schools and one for school districts. --Phantom784 19:07, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Archiving

There was stuff on here going back to 2004 so I archived... I was having trouble contributing to the talk sections. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Archive 1 Sorry that I'm not a regular at this project but it needed doing.Garrie 03:32, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

High School notability

I apologize if the message I posted regarding the AfD for Kent-Meridian High School was perceived as spam by anybody. I thought it would be of particular interest to members of this community, and the AfD process is badly in need of some notability guidelines for High Schools and others. Anyway I started keeping track of the AfDs on my User:RJHall/High Schools sub-page so I can track the discussion, as well as attempting to formulate my thoughts on the matter. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have, particularly if you could clarify the notability concept for High Schools. Thank you! :-) — RJH (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

The problem lies in that to many people (myself included) a lot of these articles don't express a notability. It is not enough to many people that having the word "high school" makes it inherently notable. The quality of our stubs is what is creating the questioning of the notability. What makes Christian Heritage School (Connecticut) from Christian Heritage School (Georgia) is the question people ask. Yes, I'm aware that I've wikified a lot of high school articles into stubs like that (the Connecticut school stub is one of my works from the wikification drive).

What we need to do is formulate a plan that brings stubs from the few lines that simply list location, size, and sports teams. Perhaps each couple of weeks we select a state and say "Okay, this week we're going to try to bring this article up to a decent article." I just stumbled upon User:Dpbsmith's BEEFSTEW User:Dpbsmith/BEEFSTEW. I think that's a pretty good standard for us to try to meet with each article.

What does everyone think of this? A project to destub these articles into something decent that expresses notability? Metros232 17:06, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay so the problem I have with that is in the "expression of notability" part. Geographic features of a certain scale are widely accepted as inherently notable. They don't need to prove their notability. The majority of those who post recommendations on the school articles appear to agree to that viewpoint because they are nearly all kept. The only exceptions have been badly formed articles; non-existent high schools, or deletion by administrator fiat (going against the majority viewpoint). So your "many" to me is a minority viewpoint. (No offense intended.)

I'm sorry but I'm just not able to adopt the viewpoint that high schools need to prove their notability, as I tried to indicate on the linked page. But unfortunately this discussion has become almost a religious war and I'm not sure how it can be resolved properly.

If at all possible I would like to see a consensus guideline on the notability of schools. But that doesn't seem possible. :-) — RJH (talk) 15:26, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

But wouldn't you agree that if we actually DID prove notability within the articles, we wouldn't have these arguments? We have these wars every so often over whether simply the words "high school" makes something notable. Well if we proved notability within simply needing those two words, wouldn't we be preventing arguments?

If you also notice, in the AfD on Kent-Meridian, a lot of people, myself included, changed from delete to keep after the article was expanded. If we expand all these minor stubs, we'll have less people complaining about the notability of high schools. I feel like our Wikiproject is sometimes considered just one to crusade for the rights of school articles, and not one that works to build school articles. Perhaps if we focus on the latter we can reduce the number of AfDs and PRODs on school articles. Metros232 15:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I would agree that a school article would have a higher level of importance if some notable attributes were added. I also agree that a one-line stub article on a school could reasonably be merged into a school district article, rather than spending a lot of time going through the AfD process where it would just get expanded anyway. :-) — RJH (talk) 16:46, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

School In Need of Expansion

Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory School

Would appreciate it very much if more known of this school. Please no Vandalism.--ThanosMadTitan23 03:46, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

School vanity?

Yesterday someone has spent a lot of effort adding names of staff and prefects to the article on their school King Edward VI Aston. Is there any guidance on what should be included regarding current staff and students? Perhaps an article that could be pointed to when trying to discourage it, or a template to include (eg. ".... please do not include deteils of people unless they are already notable outside the school ....")? I am sure this must be a common occurrence. Am I over-reacting? As a contributor to the article I am not sure I can make an un-biased decision to boldly wield the eraser. Is there someone with experience in this who can tactfully sort this out (if it needs sorting)? It seems a shame to remove all that work. Thanks. Oosoom 09:06, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

There's a discussion about this in the archive Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools/Archive_1#Lists_of_staff. It's pretty much the same principles of notable alumni. Administration (headmaster/principal) type positions can be named, but otherwise, follow the same conventions as adding alumni. Metros232 11:07, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that reference. It's a shame there isn't a short statement in an article, or a template to warn against the listing of non-notable people that will always occur in school articles. It must be very common. Oosoom ^{Talk to me} 12:26, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

You know, I haven't found it all that common with articles I've dealt with. The only ones I have are the kids who add themselves. "Jason Duntz, coolest kid in the world, class of 2006!" That kind of thing. Metros232 12:37, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

High School PRODs

• Spring Lake High School

This page has been PROD'd as having too little content. It lacks even the "3 or more full and complete sentences of verifiable, factual information" that was in the WP:SCHOOLS proposal. I didn't find much of interest about it on the web. There doesn't appear to be much information of interest on the net regarding this institution. I'm not sure this article has the potential to ever be more than a stub, so perhaps it should be deleted or merged? What do you think? — RJH (talk) 15:35, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I did a little searching and came up with a bit of information that I added to the article. If anyone thinks that's enough, they can deprod it, if not, keep expanding it. Metros232 16:04, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

The school also has pretty good test scores compared to the state average, but I'm having difficulties finding a source from the MI DOE. So far the best I've got is the Great Schools profile [2]. Is this a good enough source, or should I keep trying to find a DOE official report? Metros232 16:14, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

• • Thanks for the link. I added a little more content and removed the PROD, since the reason was satisfied. — RJH (talk)

More PRODs

• Warren Woods Tower High School - 2006-07-14; Article now up for AfD. The usual trite witicisms can be found here.
• The Leelanau School - 2006-07-14: Article expanded and PROD removed.
• South Luton High School - 2006-07-15: References added and PROD removed.

Ohio High Schools

Are Allen East and Allen East High School the same? CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 15:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

• It looks that way. They're in the same vicinity and both mention building a new HS. — RJH (talk) 16:35, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

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:

• Schools with no competing pages: Podunk High School
• Schools with one or more competing pages: Podunk High School (Oregon) and Podunk High School (Nebraska)
• Schools with one or more competing pages in the same state: Podunk High School (Podunk, Oregon) and Podunk High School (Portland, Oregon)

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)