[WikiEN-l] Sysop abuses?

Fri Nov 28 20:28:13 UTC 2003

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