Fred Bauder wrote:
There is extensive discussion at
Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy/schools
My thought, which is probably a distinct minority, is that while it is a
good policy to not include articles on high schools, is is good to tolerate
articles made by contributors or groups of contributors who are currently
attending a school.
Fred
This seems to encourage a fair-minded approach. While I do admit that
while most of what might be written about a high school is of very
little general interest or significance, there are pockets of people who
have an interest in these things, and they should be respected. Given
the enormous number of high schools around the world, it's unlikely that
articles would appear about any more than a handful of them.. Most will
be written by people who have or have had a direct connection with the
school. If I were to write about a high school (which is NOT in my
plans) I would be more inclined to write about the brand new one where
my son just started attending, than the one that I graduated from many
years ago. I could even justify this in terms of the study of the
innovative educational policies that were applied in the plans for the
school.
It is extremely frustrating to be perpetually needing to defend articles
about obscure topics that directly affect a limited number of people.
The fact that one of the high schools may have the largest student
population of any school on the US Eastern Seabord does not translate
into a corpus of a whole lot of wikipedians to defend it out of direct
interest. The history of science and technology is an endless series of
ideas that were conceived, published and ignored. That does not imply
anything about the idea; maybe just nobody had the interest or the time
to carry it further so it fell into obscurity. Nobody is suggesting
that we go back and delete all of these dead end articles from the
journals so that the journals may be more compact and fit more easily on
the library shelves.
Among the arguments that may be raised against the death penalty is an
economic one. (Please, this posting is not about the death penalty) It
starts from an estimate of how much it might cost to keep a person in
prison for the rest of his life. It then compares that to the costs of
lawyers, courts and the rest of the justice system to keep the same
person from being executed. If the appeals are successful, the costs of
keeping him in prison will still be there. This can make the pursuit of
capital punishment very expensive.
Dealing with proposed deletions is a severe drain of time on
Wikipedians, because we must spend time defending free speech over
trivial articles we are kept away from contributing at other things
where our time might be better spent. As we defend these articles there
is always the feeling that we need to keep looking over our shoulders to
see where the deletionists may strike next; this makes for a generally
stressful atmosphere. Any article presented with good faith that does
no apparent harm should be retained.
Ec