Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of schools in the United States

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This page is preserved as an archive of the associated article page's "votes for deletion" debate (the forerunner of articles for deletion). Please do not modify this page, nor delete it as an orphaned talk page.


This page contains discussion surrounding the proposed deletion of a page entitled List of schools in the United States.

non-deletion related comments should be made on the talk page.

Listed twice, after both occasions the page was kept.

First listing[edit]

  • List of schools in the United States. Please can we delete these lists before they spread? RickK 02:34, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete. Evil saltine 02:48, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • I think whether this page is deleted depends on what the rule is for having articles about schools. Perhaps cleaer guidelines are needed on which ones are allowed to be articles. Or is it ok to list all of them? Angela 02:53, Oct 12, 2003 (UTC)
      • There are 128,484 schools in the US alone. I think it would be a waste to list every single one. Evil saltine 03:09, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. BL 02:51, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Why? It would help if you had a reason. Angela 02:53, Oct 12, 2003 (UTC)
      • I've been in seven different schools during my time in the education system. Each of those schools were older than 30 years, more than 10,000 persons know about each one of them. If you check your library, I'll bet that you will find a remarkable wealth of information about your local school(s), least I could. Just because it isn't on Google doesn't mean it doesn't exist kinda. BL 03:42, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete: How many elementary schools pass the 5000 test (or even just 500)? Some of those that do pass the test deserve an article (such as those with famous history or have been on the news); those that do not pass the test: Maybe later. --Menchi 03:04, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Being on the news definitely does not make something or someone worthy of an article. A lot of schools would pass the 5000 test but I still don't think that's enough. Angela 03:19, Oct 12, 2003 (UTC)
    • My suggestion earlier is that only schools that have some special reason for listing and perhaps all (?) colleges/universities should eventually get articles. All others can be named (listed) with their town, and an external link to the school's website provided there. Otherwise we are in the position of providing websites for these very numerous entities (see what Wikipedia is not) - Marshman 03:28, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • I agree with this. Evil saltine 03:30, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • And if students are interested in writing about their schools, let's push them to instead flesh out the article on their town, which is of far greater general interest. I mean, if you have been in one middle school in America, you have seen them all - Marshman
    • Keep, obviously. There is no reason not to have articles on all these schools. Even if we only ever get articles on a small proportion of them, we need the list to keep track of what ones do have articles. -- Oliver P. 06:52, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • Anyone wanting to look up a school will look up the respective town; having info about schools in the town article and redirecting the school to the town is adequate. Evil saltine 07:30, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
        • Having all the information about all of a town's schools in a single article is impractical. (See Gentgeen's comment above.) When the list of US schools becomes too unwieldy, it might make more sense to chop it into separate sections for separate towns, and to put the bits on the town pages, but at the moment the list isn't all that long, so I think for now we might as well have them all in a single master list. -- Oliver P. 10:39, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. Useful category. Martin 12:27, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • The schools deserve articles, but this list is impractical. ++Liberal 16:17, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete. Not everything that is factual belongs in an encyclopedia, even an electronic one. Axlrosen 20:02, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. I don't see the reason to delete the article. It maybe doesn't belong to wikipedia, then redirect or blanking is good enough, no reason to get rid of history. Strive to show the reason to delete the article permanentally not the reason that is not appreciate article. -- Taku
    • Keep. I view a lot of these lists as unpleasant weeds, but this one has some potential I think. It might be useful to restrict it slightly to List of notable schools in the United States. That would, for instance, knock nearly all of the current Arkansas entries out except for Little Rock Central. Notable schools both past and present should continue.Ark30inf 20:19, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • What about Jonesboro? Wiwaxia 00:41, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete. And if someone is actually willilng to work on this for the next few month (years?), at least make it a bunch of much smaller lists... -- BCorr ¤ Брайен 20:48, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep, and also keep reasonably well-written articles on individual schools. It baffles me that people are willing to accept Wikipedia as a place for detailed concordances of esoteric fictional realms (ie. anime) yet get twitchy about a few bytes on lesser-known real-world entities. Sure, most of us have no personal interest in 99.99% of these, but the same can be said for the myriad geographical/demographic entries. As to rolling schools into city entries, I don't see the advantage other than to make the city articles unwieldy. Jgm 12:54, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • Good point.Ark30inf 16:14, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)
      • If most of us have no interest in 99.99% of these things, then I would vote to delete them, including all the things you mentioned. But that's because I think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, not a repository of all human knowledge. A dedicated resource would be able to do much better justice to the list of all public high schools, or every anime character, or every town in the world. Axlrosen 17:17, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. Yes, we'll need a way to indicate article importance levels at some point. JamesDay 09:30, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. We'll need it to keep track of all the articles we'll ever have, and if we decide to include all high schools, we won't have to start from scratch again if we don't delete this list. Wiwaxia 00:41, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep, but as an index to schools about which we have something to say. Also, let's have a standard format for schools as with towns, countries etc giving basic facts, and then any other information of encyclopediac note.2toise 13:36, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC) Also, how is a list of real educational establishments possibly less important the Index of lists of fictional animals and List of fictional elephants?2toise 12:19, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

second listing[edit]

  • List of schools by country. List of schools. List of schools in the United States. OliverP is out of control. RickK 04:04, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Do you have a reason for wanting these deleted, or shall I just remove this entry now? --Camembert
      • I would not take it kindly if you delete this entry. Yes, I have a reason, the reason that I have for all schools and lists of schools, and I don't think I need to keep repeating it. RickK 04:11, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
        • I'm sorry, but you do need to repeat it because I don't know what the reason is. I cannot imagine any reason why these should be deleted. --Camembert
      • Thank you, Mr. Camembert. :) -- Oliver P. 04:38, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Really, is it that much worse than Wikiproject London's separate page for each London tube station? orthogonal 04:41, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep them all. Useful indexes for most. Jamesday 04:44, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. Didn't we discuss before? -- Taku 02:21, Nov 24, 2003 (UTC)
    • For the last one (and maybe all of them), could it be moved to List of important schools in the United States, List of prominent schools in the United States, List of well-known schools in the United States, or maybe List of famous schools in the United States. Something to discourage people from adding the largely indistinguishable 10's of thousands of schools that there are in the US. Maximus Rex 02:26, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Delete. Impossible to be complete. There is no need for Wikipedia to mirror Census-like data. Let the Feds do that and provide an external link. --mav 06:52, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep - the basic rules of the Wikipedia lists mean that they have to be notable for something. List of people by name is not List of famous or prominent people by name. An actual school is potentially of interest, if an NPOV non stub can be written about a school, then keep it. It's got to be better that the entirely fictitious Unseen University, that refers to a room in it that, even within the fiction, doesn't exits. Of course we don't want stubs on every school, but if a non-stub can be written, let it stand. Please don't delete real information about real educational establishments.207.189.98.44 18:53, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Keep. That way, when we make the final decision on school policy, if we decide not to include most schools we can hunt 'em all down and kill them, which will make Rick happy, having kept track of our school articles. Wiwaxia 06:45, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Further discussion[edit]

Just saw this list. Here's a statistic: there are 119,235 elementary and secondary schools in the United States as of the year 2000. MK 06:03, 7 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

  • Yes, but as of now, there are only a few good articles about high schools and even less about primary schools in Wikipedia. As Wikipedia grows, the quantity of articles for schools will grow, but I doubt it will be more than a small percentage of all articles in Wikipedia. And if it is, all the articles could be moved to a WikiSchools or something like that. We will see then. For now, KEEP.--AAAAA 12:42, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • Considering that Wikipedia should be a part of the resources available to each of those 120,000 schols, it seems only natural that each of them should someday have a blurb about them; small schools could fit a hundred to a page. The real bottleneck is finding people witht the time to contribut basic information about these schools, not finding 'space' for the articles about them in the encyclopedia.+sj+

Third listing[edit]

see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of schools in the United States for long discussion

Results: 16+ for delete; 9+ for keep. Those voting to delete don't see how one could effectively describe the full list of 100k minor schools, or don't think any schools should have information about them in Wikipedia. The original page creators, and contributors to the above discussions, didn't take part in this third discussion.

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