When it comes down to it, if we only use the criteria of "verifiable and NPOV" we end up with the prohibition on original research as being the only real control on what can go into wikipedia after a little tidying up.

research is often taken merely as advice and only used as a rule when there is conflict

Fortunately, Wikipedia's notability policies help keep out much of the trivia your proposal would allow. Unfortunately, these policies are much clearer in the case of articles about individuals than they are in the case of articles about schools.

[[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] is a good place to start.

>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> > >JAY JG said:

That's not what the policy says; perhaps you should read it.

Right. You made a strawman argument and I called you on it.

From: "James D. Forrester" <james(a)jdforrester.org> On Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:43 AM, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: in Sadly for those that protest its many apparent fantastical abilities, only in their minds.

From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> JAY JG said: Don't seem to be applicable to schools, which are in any case used and remembered by far more than "their friends and relatives". We're talking about institutions that (in the case of state public schools at least) have a pretty big footprint in the community.

James, is it only in my mind that [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] states "Wikipedia is not a general knowledge base, that is, it is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information. That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia."? Did I just imagine that it says "Subjects of encyclopedia articles must have a claim to fame besides being fondly remembered by their friends and relatives." and "Biography articles should only be for people with some sort of notoriety or achievement"? What are these and similar statements, if not notability policies?

While there is a continuing debate about the encyclopedic merits of several classes of entries, current consensus is that Wikipedia articles are not: 1. *Lists of Frequently Asked Questions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ>*. Wikipedia articles should not list FAQs. Instead, format the information provided as neutral prose within the appropriate article(s). You may want to consider contributing FAQ lists to Wikibooks <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks>. 2. *Lists or repositories of loosely associated topics* such as quotations, aphorisms or persons. If you want to enter lists of quotations, put them into our sister project Wikiquote <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiquote>. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having lists if their entries are famous /because/ they are associated with or significantly contributed to the list topic. Wikipedia also includes reference tables and tabular information for quick reference. 3. *Travel guides*. An article on Paris <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris> should mention landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower> and the Louvre <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre>, but not the telephone number or street address of your favorite hotel or the price of a /café au lait/ on the Champs-Elysées <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champs-Elys%E9es>. Such details are, however, very welcome at Wikitravel <http://wikitravel.org/> (/http://wikitravel.org//), but note that due to license incompatibility you cannot copy content wholesale unless you are the copyright holder. 4. *Memorials*. It's always sad when people die, but Wikipedia is not the place to honor them. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must have a claim to fame besides being fondly remembered by their friends and relatives. 5. *News reports*. Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories (however, our sister project Wikinews <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinews> does exactly that). Wikipedia does have many /encyclopedia articles/ on topics of historical significance that are currently in the news, and can be significantly more up-to-date than most reference sources since we can incorporate new developments and facts as they are made known. See current events <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_events> for examples. 6. *Genealogical entries*, or *phonebook entries*. Biography articles should only be for people with some sort of notoriety or achievement. One measure of achievement is whether someone has been featured in several external sources (on or off-line). Minor characters may be mentioned within other articles (e.g. Ronald Gay in Persecution of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_gays%2C_lesbians%2C_bisexuals%2C_and_the_transgendered>). See m:Wikipeople <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipeople> for a proposed genealogical/biographical dictionary project. 7. *Directories <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory>, directory entries*, or a *resource for conducting business*. For example, an article on a radio station generally shouldn't list upcoming events, current promotions, phone numbers, etc (although mention of major events or promotions may be acceptable). Furthermore, the Talk pages associated with an article are for talking about the article, not for conducting the business of the topic of the article.

Bryan Derksen (bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca) [050520 02:00]: We did already. [[Wikipedia:Notability]] redirects to [[Wikipedia:Importance]], which notes that a poll of this sort at [[Talk:Fame and importance]] achieved a simple majority but nothing like consensus (oddly enough). I noted this earlier on.

From: "Tony Sidaway" &lt;minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com&gt; JAY JG said: Non-notability has been rejected as a criterion for deletion.

Inappropriate biographical entries can be rejected on grounds of vanity.

Humans tend to be a lot less intrinsically encyclopedic, as individuals, than institutions or even cultural manifestations such as the infamous Pokemon.

Empirically this can be defined as "having a calculable likelihood, as a class of subjects, to sustain an article that wouldn't end up being deleted if listed on VfD." In general it seems to be pretty difficult to get consensus to delete a school article, of instance, even one about a little-known high school about which nothing much is known, whereas if I wrote an article about a random human, my friend's brother say, when listed on VfD it would die a mercifully quick death.

From: David Gerard &lt;fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au&gt; JAY JG (jayjg(a)hotmail.com) [050520 03:47]: "Schoolwatch" every I only use cut-and-paste comments myself in response to cut-and-paste nominations.

single unverifiable I look at every article I vote on first. Are you saying I, or these hypothetical conspirators, in fact don't?

question. Indeed, but that applies to the people flooding VFD with school articles, and indeed to *any* so-called "consensus" formed only of VFD habitues, so you're not actually saying something very specific.

From: "Tony Sidaway" &lt;minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com&gt; JAY JG said: Haven't we all?

Well that's a very serious charge. You're accusing some unnamed people of making bogus votes on VfD--copy-pasted and without looking at the article in question. Do you have some evidence to support this?

"Very serious charge"? Get real, this is a Wikipedia mail-list.

As for evidence, here's one example of an editor who took some valuable time out of editing Pokemon related articles to make 17 identical keep votes on schools in 9 minutes, and soon after another 10 identical keep votes in 4 minutes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=…] Several times she was able to get in 3 keep votes a minute. I envy her her internet connection; I couldn't have even gotten to all those VfD pages in that time, much less read the related article, edited, voted, saved, and returned.

If you think that all the people who are making boilerplate "keep" votes in incredibly short periods of time are not actually just mindlessly and sequentially voting "keep", but rather are people who read the articles, consider them carefully, then like to line up all the votes in many different tabs so that the votes all show up on the Contributions list in as short a period of time as possible, then no.

Where did she find all those schools? Don't you think it was from the Schoolwatch pages, set up and maintained by school inclusionists?

I suppose, but that would still make it an example of unthinking school inclusionist voting, wouldn't it?

From: David Gerard &lt;fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au&gt; in in assumption What, that someone edits VFD like I do?

I suspect the root of your assertion is that you can't really believe anyone would vote "keep" sincerely on almost all school articles. So when you see someone do so, you immediately assume bad faith editing on their part; and you won't be swayed from this explanation for what you see.

Me, I vote 'keep' on almost all of them because they're NPOV and verifiable (though in most cases they don't have an independent reference listed; as per my proposal on [[Wikiedpa:Schools]], I certainly wouldn't object to that as a very strong guideline). I really don't see that a 'keep' vote requires any greater justification, whatever someone's edit pattern.

From: David Gerard &lt;fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au&gt; Yeah, that I'd attribute to exasperation. Apparently-spammed nominations leading to apparently-spammed kep votes.

Of course, they might actually think it was a stub with a future. Are any of them working on the school stubs?

Rather than impugning their edits here, you could ask them nicely and see what they say. Might be interesting.

and in particular, when I see someone voting "keep, good stub" etc. on a completely useless stub.

I understand your position; I've never objected to your votes, or your voting pattern.

Your apologetics are interesting examples of rationalization, but the bottom line remains that a group of school inclusionists, organized via a school inclusionist page, were robotically voting identical "keep" votes on large sets of school deletions.

>And are you asserting this is regular practice? Or did people issue lots of >"keep" votes in response to an unreasonable flood of nominations? Are the >words "unclean hands" applicable to this protest?

As you well know, the history of organized school inclusionism long precedes this particular and very recent set of school VfDs, and even stooped to the level of sockpuppet voting.

That said, I'm wary of letting the list bog down in interminable debates, as it so often does, and in any event I don't particularly enjoy being so publically at odds with people that I respect. Perhaps you can respond with a summation/last word, and then we can take this to private e-mail.

Some data points to get along with. Two users that I looked at, at random today: User: Dozenist First edit January, not many edits before this week when he started editing some dentistry articles in earnest. Came to VfD on 13th (last Friday) when he made a pertinent comment about the VfD for "Waterfluoridation quotes". First ever school VfD votes: today. User: No Account First ever edit on Wikipedia 16th, this Monday. Around 70 article edits, edited every day except Wednesday. First schools VfD vote today. 33 votes in less than 25 minutes. Without looking at Wikipedia, can you tell which one of them consistently votes keep and which one of them consistently voted delete?

Assuming she edits like me (load a pile of tabs, read and vote) I'd expect to see just that result.

From: "Tony Sidaway" &lt;minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com&gt; Well that's Ketsy, bless her socks. I first bumped into her the other day when I happened to revert one of her edits on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexuality and she went to talk. Nobody's roboposter. Funny thing is, Ketsy's *first* Vfd vote against a schools listing was just two days ago, and she has been editing since February and participating occasionally on VfD since early March. So I don't think you can class her as one of these "organized inclusionists".

From: "Tony Sidaway" &lt;minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com&gt; Try again.

The reason it is hard to delete school articles is two-fold; 1) Wikipedia deletion rules are stacked in favour of inclusion; at least two-thirds of voters (and often more) must vote to delete for it to happen, and votes to re-direct are interpreted as "keep", though the obvious intent is that the article should not stand on its own.

2) School inclusionists are now organized, and have set up a "Schoolwatch" page to ensure that all schools are kept. These people vote to keep every single school, usually with cut and paste comments. Thus a group of a dozen or so inclusionists can easily force Wikipedia to keep every single school article, no matter how silly, uninformative, trivial or unverifiable they are. And, in fact, that's exactly what they do. However, whether these dozen people represent the consensus of Wikipedia is another question.

From: Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; 'No original research' is a useful idea but it's not a crowing achievement like NPOV, we'd be fools to follow it blindly, and I'm glad to see that we do not. Often the cost of finding a citation (if indeed one is available) for a particular point which is obvious to anyone who has studied the references, is just too great.

On 5/18/05, JAY JG &lt;jayjg(a)hotmail.com&gt; wrote:

> In my experience, it is far more often ignored because an editor wants to > draw some original conclusions about something, and is unaware of the > policy, unable to comprehend it, or simply doesn't care. Currently the risk > that Wikipedia will be damaged by "blindly following" the NOR policy is far > less than the risk that it will be damaged by *not* following it.

We have entire areas of study which would be exceptionally difficult to document if we were strictly adhering to a no original research policy. For example our articles on Free Software related subject often contain information sourced from mailing lists and form the editors experience, sources which would not normally be acceptable under the normal application of the original research standard.

Deciding what may be accepted as research is as difficult a problem as determine what is notable.

From: Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; On 5/18/05, JAY JG &lt;jayjg(a)hotmail.com&gt; wrote: to risk far We have entire areas of study which would be exceptionally difficult to document if we were strictly adhering to a no original research policy. For example our articles on Free Software related subject often contain information sourced from mailing lists and form the editors experience, sources which would not normally be acceptable under the normal application of the original research standard. Deciding what may be accepted as research is as difficult a problem as determine what is notable.

Unlike NPOV I don't consider no-original-research to be a core (thus non-negotiable) principal of the project, rather it's just a useful rule.

Often the cost of finding a citation (if indeed one is available) for a particular point which is obvious to anyone who has studied the references, is just too great. As time goes on we will find more and more things where the material in the various wikiprojects is some of the highest quality material available, and we would have to ask ourselves, must we cite inferior information because of a silly policy when no one disputes what we would like to provide?