4 ms·

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. Wikip

by 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 or is it going to become a repository of outdated information?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.
  - shagie 3y ago
    > 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. This type of effort often creates a disproportionate amount of work for the volunteers maintaining Wikipedia. If you feel that that would be a good thing to do, the school should stand up its own wiki about itself that students could update and maintain. That also avoids possible conflict with the rules of Wikipedia. I recall a school that attempted to do "ask a question on Stack Overflow" and all the students in the class asked the same question - nearly word for word - about their current assignment... that all then got closed as duplicates of each other. If the goal is to introduce someone to the application platform, it is likely better to have them work in a private instance where the mentor to new user ratio is much higher and things like "you need to make sure that you are using proper and correct English with capitalization and punctuation," are not "revert and leave an impersonal comment on their talk page about the expected quality of their contributions."
  - falserum 3y ago
    devilish advocate here. One such article - small problem. But what if such low-view, and now outdated/vandalized articles start approaching 50% of wikipedia content? That might reflect badly on credibility of whole wiki. It is nontrivial problem of striking balance between content quality level vs content quantity/contributor freedom. (Open source software projects deal with same problem, just not on such scale)

by rurp 3y ago

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.
- shagie 3y ago
  > 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. This type of effort often creates a disproportionate amount of work for the volunteers maintaining Wikipedia. If you feel that that would be a good thing to do, the school should stand up its own wiki about itself that students could update and maintain. That also avoids possible conflict with the rules of Wikipedia. I recall a school that attempted to do "ask a question on Stack Overflow" and all the students in the class asked the same question - nearly word for word - about their current assignment... that all then got closed as duplicates of each other. If the goal is to introduce someone to the application platform, it is likely better to have them work in a private instance where the mentor to new user ratio is much higher and things like "you need to make sure that you are using proper and correct English with capitalization and punctuation," are not "revert and leave an impersonal comment on their talk page about the expected quality of their contributions."
- falserum 3y ago
  devilish advocate here. One such article - small problem. But what if such low-view, and now outdated/vandalized articles start approaching 50% of wikipedia content? That might reflect badly on credibility of whole wiki. It is nontrivial problem of striking balance between content quality level vs content quantity/contributor freedom. (Open source software projects deal with same problem, just not on such scale)