Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/High schools in Connecticut

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was delete. Delete 9 / Keep 5 -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:36, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

High schools in Connecticut

I think the need is better served by the Category:High schools in the United States and subcategories of that, although they of course won't list schools we don't have an article about. There are a number of similar articles, see High schools in the United States, which was also listed for speedy. No vote.-gadfium 03:34, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Keep. Categories are insufficient at this time to handle all our schools, especially in light of recent events where valuable school articles have been deleted on grounds of not being "noteworthy enough". GRider\^talk 19:26, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Perhaps you would care to elaborate on how two sentence articles that essential say X school is in Y city and the principal is named Bob are in any way valuable even if it were true that all schools deserve articles. Or had you forgotten that wikipedia is not a yellowpages? Indrian 19:09, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
Delete. The only reason that categories are inadequate is if the aim is to have high schools listed that are insufficiently notable to have articles in the Wikipedia. There are numerous problems with such lists:

There are aproximately 17,000 high schools in the United States. How are all these high schools going to be entered on the lists?
Some large states have between 500 and 1000 high schools; the state-level lists for these states will be extremely unwieldy.
Who is going to verify that additions to the lists are correct and accurate? Are you volunteering? There will be numerous omissions and inaccuracies, misspellings, and format differences from one state-level list to another. There are only a handful of states now, and the state-level lists are already inconsistent with one another. A major problem will be non-existent "fantasy" high schools added by people, named after themselves, high schools from novels, etc. It will be a very tall order for editors to keep these lists clean.
Don't forget that someone is also going to need to delete high schools that have closed. High schools close all the time. (Mine did, not long after I graduated from it.) Who are the editors who are going to remove high schools as they close?
What is the point? So that every American high school can have its name in lights in the Wikipedia? Being on a list of 17000 high schools isn't exactly "name in lights", anyway. What reasonable reader goal do these lists serve? Who is interested in a list of the names of high schools and the towns where they are located, and why?

In short, the lists will inevitably be more low-quality crap in the Wikipedia. This is not the sort of thing that can be done well by a wiki. It is for all these reasons that Wikipedia is not a general information base, and in particular is not the Directory of American High Schools. --BM 19:58, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

delete categories work fine. Schools without articles can be listed on pages about educational provision in their local region. Schools which require articles can be listed on the requested articles pages. Mozzerati 22:43, 2005 Feb 2 (UTC)
Delete. This is what catagories should be used for. humblefool ® 23:38, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Keep Philip 02:21, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Keep. Saying this is a job for Cats seems to assume there should be separate articles for every single cookie-cutter high school in the world. I'd rather have all the info collected on group pages like this, in a table like I've created (since it's 80k and overwidth, I obviously need to do some cleanup, but I don't want to work any more on it if it might get deleted) using annually updated public domain US govt data, that's easily downloaded in an easily convertible CSV file, and which is as likely to be accurate as anything else on Wikipedia. Or the better one I created at Rhode Island schools. Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District is a good example about how alumni info, etc. can be incorporated into the tables. I've created around a dozen of these tables (you can see most of them at San_Jose,_California#Primary_and_secondary_education), and I'm still experimenting a bit with the exact presentation, but for the most part they're a fairly standard fmt. I was going to say my alternative vote would be to redir to the Cat, so people can get to the info (casual visitors are NOT going to know to look for Category:High schools in Connecticut), but, hey, look. It doesn't exist, even tho' we have at least five articles on high schools in Connecticut. Also, no one seems to be complaining about things like List of Friends Schools and List of Ottawa, Ontario schools. Niteowlneils 05:10, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- hey, look. It doesn't exist Then click on that little red link, and hey, your problems are over. Updating a nearly 300-item table list: easy; creating a single category: difficult. --Calton 11:48, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Delete. What is the value to Wikipedia of this list? If the source is easy enough to add, well, why not just direct people to the source to begin with? --Calton 11:48, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Where would we direct them from, exactly? If this article is deleted, how do we point people typing "high schools in connecticut" to [1]?
Well, it's easy after you've done a few, and if you know exactly what info you're looking for. The tables I've created have taken a bit less than a dozen clicks for the simple ones, way more than a dozen clicks for the more detailed ones.
'Far too long if complete' seems like a spurious argument--like any article that gets too long, it can be subdivided, in this case either by county or school district (in the case of California, probably both). Niteowlneils 20:13, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Delete. Worthless unless complete; far too long if complete. —Korath (Talk) 13:43, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)
Keep. List are good for stuff not that notable by their own. bbx 17:27, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Delete these unmaintainable lists. We have categories for a reason, and this is it. Jayjg ^(talk) 23:02, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Delete. Unwieldly and far better acheived with categories. Also, there seems to be a contradiction here. If all schools are inherently notable and deserve their own articles as some claim, then why do we need a list containing those high schools which are not notable enough to have their own articles as claimed above? Indrian 19:09, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
- Because the high school inclusionists are dissatisfied with the fact that occasionally they "lose" a VfD vote, even though they "win" in the majority of cases. They want a way to slip those "unfairly" suppressed high schools in somehow. What anyone finds interesting or useful about a list of high school names is totally beyond me. --BM 21:19, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Delete. Use a category. Wile E. Heresiarch 08:34, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Individual schools are not inherently notable, and once the academic boosterism and outright padding is winnowed away, most articles about them say little more than "{{placename}} School is a school in {{subst:placename}} managed by {{subst:headteacher}} with {{subst:number}} pupils". Alas! It is, unfortunately, exactly that sort of article that lists of redlinks encourage. Overwikified lists are perennial sources of articles on non-notable subjects, as people "helpfully" recolour the redlinks with non-articles padded with chaff. This despite the admonition that Wikipedia is not a repository of links (neither external nor internal).
However, these articles do not redlink the individual schools, avoiding that trap. (And, of course, there is nothing to stop a bluelink being made after a rare notable school has had an article of its own created.) Moreover, articles in this form can collect all of the individual "{{placename}} School is a school in {{subst:placename}} managed by {{subst:headteacher}} with {{subst:number}} pupils" non-articles into tabular form, adding enough information by dint of being an organized collection, where summary and overview information can be added as footnotes, to raise the article level with the notability bar. They are also far more maintainable than 17000 such individual articles would be.
The remaining arguments against such articles are arguments against having the data at all, either in single-list-article form or in 17000-individual-articles form: Wikipedia is not a general knowledge base and Wikipedia is not a directory. These are the arguments that winnow the all-too-often-added padding (telephone numbers, teacher lists, forthcoming school plays and sports competitions, and so forth) from the school articles yielding the bare single-sentence descriptions, of course. However, as long as these "list of" articles meet the purpose of lists by providing more information than the raw data do alone, by dint of collating and summarizing those data and providing general information; and since these "list of" articles are appropriate topics for lists, I vote Move to the correct List of high schools in X form, Keep with the cautions that Wikipedia is not a repository of links and Wikipedia is not a directory, and send to Cleanup for all but one of the articles which do not meet the standard of ("List of") High schools in Connecticut and simply do not contain enough data to meet the purpose of lists. Uncle G 13:39, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
Delete, agree completely with BM. RadicalSubversiv E 23:39, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.