4 ms·

There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States. Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work.

by shagie 3y ago

There are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States. Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work. The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource their content.

rurp 3y ago
But his son already did the work to add his school! I don't see why adding one random middle school requires that all 13,000 be added and kept up to date. Wikipedia has all sorts of inconsistencies in what is covered, because it is so driven by volunteers and what they want to invest time into. I don't see how people adding public institutions that they are interested in adding goes against the spirit or practical realities of Wikipedia.
- jl6 3y ago
  They have to draw a line somewhere or the project gets spammed with self-promotional articles. Requiring notability does a decent job of keeping the spam out.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    I'd believe this if it wasn't for the thousands upon thousands of pages about the most absurdly obscure Star Trek and Star Wars shit. If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space western series but not for a real-life school, we have a problem.
    - jl6 3y ago
      A lot of those articles should probably be merged or deleted, but a lot of them probably do pass the notability standard, because despite being absurdly fancrufty, the subjects still get covered in independent sources, in a way that schools don’t.
- shagie 3y ago
  It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism on content that gets few views. Things like names of teachers or sizes of current classes - those temporal things (which are correct now) become broken windows of "someone needs to update it" in the future. And if one says "Ok, this one is acceptable" - then how much more maintenance and curation of pages are the core group of volunteers expected to take up? If the answer to that question is "none" - who is doing it? or is it going to become a repository of outdated information? Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the first place. It might be better served as a part of a larger page that covers the school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_School_District_schools#Middle_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... which are a name and optionally a note. Other districts don't even have notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... ). If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then consider reformatting the school district page (which may well exist) to include the information rather than creating a new one.
  - vasco 3y ago
    > It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism on content that gets few views. If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not pretend that each page needs the same level of attention. A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal at all and can be fixed, and if it's not fixed - it has few views anyway. Wikipedia already acknowledges this and certain pages are much harder to edit than others. You could even have a computer class where kids from the school would update their school's wiki page as a way to learn how to contribute to wikipedia. Might actually be the easiest type of page in the whole wiki to keep fresh now that I think about it, while creating a whole generation of interested editors. It's like they think they run a paper version of a encyclopedia with these rules about what is notable or not.
jowea 3y ago
> The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that, but I think it also has to do with the existence of reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.
- shagie 3y ago
  The extreme inclusionist position (and I've got a straw man there) ends up with sites that are full of outdated information that few people want to maintain. Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with a 40 hour week. And looking, I'm slightly off on the number of schools. > During the 2020-2021 school year, there were 13,187 public school districts. These school districts enrolled 47,755,349 students across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_States) https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State... ) Many school districts have multiple schools (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_School_District_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... ) How much time are you willing to spend maintaining individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the schools and a little bit about each one. The list page takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page as an individual one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They tend to have sufficient information about them (though the high school that I went to doesn't have a page). Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to the difficult to maintain realm. Another example of a school district and note the lack of middle school distinct pages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_Distr...
  - karencarits 3y ago
    But as long you can get hold of the data, it can be updated in batch. See https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_projects https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_pro...

by shagie 3y ago

rurp 3y ago

But his son already did the work to add his school! I don't see why adding one random middle school requires that all 13,000 be added and kept up to date. Wikipedia has all sorts of inconsistencies in what is covered, because it is so driven by volunteers and what they want to invest time into. I don't see how people adding public institutions that they are interested in adding goes against the spirit or practical realities of Wikipedia.

jl6 3y ago
They have to draw a line somewhere or the project gets spammed with self-promotional articles. Requiring notability does a decent job of keeping the spam out.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  I'd believe this if it wasn't for the thousands upon thousands of pages about the most absurdly obscure Star Trek and Star Wars shit. If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space western series but not for a real-life school, we have a problem.
  - jl6 3y ago
    A lot of those articles should probably be merged or deleted, but a lot of them probably do pass the notability standard, because despite being absurdly fancrufty, the subjects still get covered in independent sources, in a way that schools don’t.
shagie 3y ago
It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism on content that gets few views. Things like names of teachers or sizes of current classes - those temporal things (which are correct now) become broken windows of "someone needs to update it" in the future. And if one says "Ok, this one is acceptable" - then how much more maintenance and curation of pages are the core group of volunteers expected to take up? If the answer to that question is "none" - who is doing it? or is it going to become a repository of outdated information? Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the first place. It might be better served as a part of a larger page that covers the school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_School_District_schools#Middle_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... which are a name and optionally a note. Other districts don't even have notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... ). If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then consider reformatting the school district page (which may well exist) to include the information rather than creating a new one.
- vasco 3y ago
  > It's not the work now that's at issue but the work of the future to fix "Mr. Smith is a poopy head" vandalism on content that gets few views. If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not pretend that each page needs the same level of attention. A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal at all and can be fixed, and if it's not fixed - it has few views anyway. Wikipedia already acknowledges this and certain pages are much harder to edit than others. You could even have a computer class where kids from the school would update their school's wiki page as a way to learn how to contribute to wikipedia. Might actually be the easiest type of page in the whole wiki to keep fresh now that I think about it, while creating a whole generation of interested editors. It's like they think they run a paper version of a encyclopedia with these rules about what is notable or not.

jowea 3y ago

> The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that, but I think it also has to do with the existence of reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.

shagie 3y ago
The extreme inclusionist position (and I've got a straw man there) ends up with sites that are full of outdated information that few people want to maintain. Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with a 40 hour week. And looking, I'm slightly off on the number of schools. > During the 2020-2021 school year, there were 13,187 public school districts. These school districts enrolled 47,755,349 students across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_States) https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State... ) Many school districts have multiple schools (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_School_District_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... ) How much time are you willing to spend maintaining individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the schools and a little bit about each one. The list page takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page as an individual one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They tend to have sufficient information about them (though the high school that I went to doesn't have a page). Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to the difficult to maintain realm. Another example of a school district and note the lack of middle school distinct pages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_Distr...
- karencarits 3y ago
  But as long you can get hold of the data, it can be updated in batch. See https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_projects https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_pro...