Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 133

Survey

• Support. I am in favor of keeping and improving articles about accredited, degree awarding secondary schools as long as that information is verifiable through reliable sources. This has been standard practice during my 7-1/2 years of editing. These schools are important institutions within their communities and biographies of notable people often discuss their educational backgrounds including their attendance at secondary schools. An encyclopedia with well over five million articles certainly has room for such articles. If the existence of any given school cannot be verified, then I support deletion of such an article. One of the fundamental principles of Wikipedia is that it "combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers." Providing articles about degrees awarding educational institutions is entirely in line with that goal, in my opinion. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 19:45, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support keeping status quo. Generally, high schools are important enough that there is almost always significant coverage in reliable sources, which may not necessarily be easily found on the Internet. A high school in the developing world could be widely covered in papers that have no online presence, and most AfD participants are Western and native speakers of English who would have difficulty locating those sources, causing systematic bias as US high schools are much easier to defend against deletion even though they are no more notable than their counterparts elsewhere. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 19:46, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Everything should be subject to GNG. GNG exceptions should be narrowly focused if made at all. If there are no reliable sources then there is nothing we can responsibly write about the subject. This is a particular problem with the thousands upon thousands of schools, academies etc in India but can be as bad with US schools as well. These articles are magnets for vandalism, promotionalism and BLP violations. Jbh^Talk 19:51, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Government websites and publications can be a source of reliable information on government-created entities despite not being independent, something which is not true for private organizations. That's why a town with a population of 3 in Wyoming is notable despite perhaps having only trivial mentions in reliable sources (e.g. a list of cities in Wyoming). -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 19:58, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  The problem which arises is with private and for profit educational institutions. At a minimum these should be subject to WP:NORG. For what are considered 'public' schools in the US they can be mentioned in the article about the locality. One of the defining points of Wikipedia is that we are a tertiary source. Making exceptions to this may increase the number of articles we have but it does nothing to help the quality. I do not generally like GEOLAND since I think there is a qualitative difference between an encyclopedia and a gazetteer but geographic places generally do not pose the same problems with NPOV etc that schools do. Jbh^Talk 20:15, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  I would not be opposed to excluding private schools from this criterion. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 20:25, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  This s not quite quite accurate JB. We have G11 and G12 which are rigorously applied to promotional school articles. Other CSD criteria too whenever appropriate. It would be incorrect to say, for example, that all high schools are notable irrespective of any deletion criteria that can be applied. They are not immune from PROD either. I also live in Asia and I can safely say that only a tiny a minority of schools here are for profit, although the situation might possibly be slightly different in the very rich micro-states of Singapore and Hong Kong. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:02, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

  While Verifiability is a core content policy, the GNG is a guideline which does not apply in all cases. The exception that comes immediately to mind is WP:ACADEMIC. We often decide that an an academic is notable based on how often their work is cited by other scholars as opposed to the sort of coverage required for a singer or a fashion designer. Similarly, we keep articles about 19th century state or provincial legislators per WP:POLITICIAN even if the only readily available source is a mention in the legislature's own records. The GNG is important, but not all-important. If it were, it would be a policy rather than a guideline. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 20:27, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  I can see a GNG exception to public i.e. government run secondary schools but not for private/for profit schools. This RfC would allow a GNG exception for what are essentially diploma mills and businesses. I could support something which is more narrowly focused but GNG exceptions need to serve some articulable purpose which is a net benefit to the project. I do not see the net benefit here. Jbh^Talk 20:34, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment Can someone please define "secondary school". Some of the explanation in the RfC opening comments and in the linked AfDs seem to be very US-centric. Eg: UK secondary schools never award degrees. - Sitush (talk) 19:58, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support I am sympathetic to the "GNG or bust" argument here, but I do think that keeping the presumption of notability for high schools is the best way to go here. Simply put: even if this RfC agrees on a consensus that schools must be shown to meet GNG, I have zero hope that this principle will be applied to secondary schools in the Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the United States. There will be arguments over whether or not the extensive local coverage counts, but it will likely be resolved in favour of the high school. The consensus of WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES will likely still be the de facto consensus for schools in these countries. This RfC was largely started because of outcomes of no consensus or delete for schools in South Asia. As has already been pointed out, it is likely that there is already coverage at the level that would be acceptable for secondary schools in any of the countries mentioned, it just isn't easy to find via a Google search. What you often find instead is proof of its existence on a government website, and that website might not even be the education ministry, it could be the agency in charge of elections because the school is a polling site. You also find sources about NGOs using these schools for events to immunize, teach reading, etc. These souces while scare confirm that the schools in question play the same role in their communities as secondary schools in nations where sources are more Googleable play in theirs, but they are hard to find. Making the standard be proof of existence and accreditation makes sense to me in order to prevent systemic bias, which undermine Wikipedia's credibility. I would happily !vote delete for a home school academy high school that has five students or something similar, but if the school is accredited, we should presume that it is notable and that the sources exist to expand it, even if they are not available online. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:06, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Schools in South Asia are generally all for profit institutions and we have to deal with promotionalism, NPOV etc. Making them de jure notable would take away even the limited ability we have now to fight the promotionalism. As for commercial institutions these schools should pass NORG. Jbh^Talk 20:21, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  I would be fine with a higher standard for for-profit schools in general, though I do think the locality matters (if the only school for 100 miles is for-profit, I would presume it notable.) That being said, I think there needs to be a distinction between private secondary schools and for-profit secondary schools. They are really two separate beasts. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:51, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Yes. And once we start getting into locality, we start making too many edge cases, until it no longer serves as a useful guideline. So I think it would be best to require evaluating private schools individually based on GNG. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 20:54, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Agreed that for-profit should be evaluated individually based on GNG, where I think the edge cases would likely go no consensus. Private schools I am fine with a broad exception. I don't really consider a boarding school set up by nuns to be in the same boat as a diploma mill designed to make a proprietor a profit. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:57, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Yes, however the 'boarding school set up by nuns' is not necessarily the typical private institution and making the distinction between what is a private school and what is a diploma mill or business can be difficult - Sister Mary's School for Deserving Wayward Orphans and Puppies may be run by Scammers 'R Us. It is just too hard to tell without independent reliable sources. Aslo, without reliable sources Wikipedia can be and has been used to legitimize such schools. See the whole mess related to WifiOne. Jbh^Talk 21:42, 8 January 2017 (UTC) Last edited: 21:48, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  And if Sister Mary's school can be verified to be a legitimate institution that is what it claims to be, then it should be kept. If it cannot be verified to be this through reliable sources, then it should not be. The question being commented on here is about schools with reliable sources, not schools that lack them. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:59, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  The issue in your statement is "...verified to be a legitimate institution that is what it claims to be." There is a a huge difference between an independent reliable sources that verifies that and the massively low bar of proof of existance which is what this RfC wants to make the standard. You typically need independent RS for the former while we often accept self published sources like school websites for the later. Jbh^Talk 22:05, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  The RfC is specifically addressing if Should secondary schools whose existence is verified by reliable, independent sources be presumed to be notable?. On the discussion about holding this RfC verifiability standards were brought up by at least a few editors, and I'm assuming part of the reason that Cordless Larry suggested this wording was because of that. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:13, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Hopefully I have worded the question neutrally, Jbhunley, and the RfC doesn't want to make anything the standard. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:15, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  @Cordless Larry: I should have said - 'should this RfC be closed in the affirmative' - I have no issue with the neutrality of the wording. Jbh^Talk 22:47, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  If there's a "massively low bar", then that is set by the current WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES essay. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:18, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Having a 'massively low bar' supported by an essay one thing. Promoting that to a formally community endorsed guideline, which this will effectivly do, is something else entirely. It removes flexibility and will codify a huge hole for commercial promotion. Jbh^Talk 22:47, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  I think the essay is treated like a guideline by many editors as it is, and debate about that is part of what led up to this RfC. Anyway, thanks for the clarification above. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:54, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

  Except that it's being used to justify creation of articles on secondary schools, rather than only used to prevent deletion of existing ones. While mechanically the process is the same, it is the case in point that it encourages editors to develop poorly sourced (read: primary, SPS, or locally-sourced only) articles on schools just because we tolerate them. --MASEM (t) 23:02, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Unlike some other items that we presume to be notable, such as senior politicians, there is little reason to believe that secondary schools are normally covered in depth in reliable sources that go beyond routine reporting in local media. The vast majority of such schools are WP:MILL organizations; there are thousands of them, they are distinguished only by such trivia as age or number of pupils, and are generally not of interest to people other than those educated there. Such articles are also often a magnet for WP:BLP problems and vandalism ("Johnny sucks!!!") because many pupils will want to "creatively" edit them; and we do not need another area of additional maintenance overhead with little benefit. Such schools should therefore not be presumed notable. The solution to the systemic bias problem identified by TonyBallioni should be addressed by deleting the many non-notable Western school articles instead of adding more non-notable non-Western school articles.  Sandstein  20:19, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support - Although schools are not covered often, they are important. The information just needs to be verified through reliable sources. RileyBugz^{Yell at me} | _Edits 20:28, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Notability is a valuable guideline "to ensure that editors create articles that comply with major content policies" (WP:WHYN). On what do we base the content of an article if all we have is verification of existence? On what do we base an article if we have only primary sources? We inevitably become a directory of school facts and figures. A whole lot of schools are notable, and we should have articles about them, but there should be no inherent notability based on verifiable existence for any subject. I've seen a distinction made between "inherent notability" and "presumed notability", but they're functionally the same. If everybody goes into a deletion discussion presuming [that there's significant coverage in reliable sources independent of the subject], the burden is shifted from arguing for notability to arguing a negative position -- that such coverage does not exist (an impossible task, when the presumption is that the sources do exist, even if they cannot be identified). Guidelines that provide shortcuts via indications of notability are helpful, but in the end an article needs to go by core content policies (again, effectively outlined in WP:WHYN). To say something is notable is to say it's received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. Otherwise, we don't have anything to base an article on that complies with NPOV, V, RS, NOT, etc. An editor simply saying "it's important; significant coverage in reliable sources doesn't matter" wouldn't fly if we were talking about an internet meme, delicatessen, or philosophical concept, so why is it ok to simply say "they're important; significant coverage in reliable soruces doesn't matter" for this subject? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:36, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The claim that there are always sources for secondary sources omits the fact that the bulk of those will be local, showing little relevance to the broader world. And as a symptom of systematic bias, the only type of coverage that I've seen routinely that's non-local about these sources are in relationship to sports (specifically only American football and basketball), which really is more about the athlete than the school. There are undoubtably notable secondary schools, but we should not be working that these are notable by default for just existing. That said, in most cases, coverage of these schools can at least be mentioned in the readily-accepted city/town article that the school is a part of, and redirects can be used to avoid disruption. --MASEM (t) 20:45, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support Status quo. Going in a different direction now will be just too disruptive (besides which, multiple (every?) high profile biography has link to the subject's upper schools as do some (probably not high profile) locations, so look at it as adjunct (or multiple split) encyclopedic information if nothing else). My rank speculation is this was, back in the mists of time, partly done precisely to get upper students interested in editing, which may are may not be bad, but it is long since done. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:48, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose this is one of these walled garden notability things that has gotten out of hand and are turning some parts of Wikipedia into mere directories. But WP:NOTDIRECTORY. The other thing to keep in mind here is with the privatization of education there are more and more private or public/private charter schools and Wikipedia is (as always) something people abuse for promotional purposes. If a school fails GNG it fails GNG. Jytdog (talk) 22:11, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support current status quo (NOTE this is not actually fully supporting the proposal, since it requires that the schools also be verifiably independently accredited). Now, we need to emphasize that this does not mean that high schools are automatically in as some people seem to think, but instead that it's a case by case basis which actually requires research to determine. ansh666 22:34, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose: That Wikipedia:Existence does not prove notability is the very reason we have notability guidelines in the first place. The most important one of these is WP:GNG, and for the vast majority of topics it is indicative of notability. Some good, carefully crafted, exceptions to GNG apply. But as Jbh points out, they should "serve some articulable purpose which is a net benefit to the project". No accepted exception to GNG sets the bar as low as this proposal would, in a manner which defeates the purpose of notability criteria: if it exists, there can be an article on it. That is the antithesis of notability, the purpose of which is to keep information on Wikipedia from being indiscriminate and in violation of various WP:NOT. We are not an encyclopedia when it comes to most topics but the WP:YELLOWPAGES when it comes to high-schools; we are an encyclopedia all around. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 23:28, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support notability for verified accredited high schools, whether public or private, to avoid bias in favor of US high schools, as opposed to private high schools in developing countries. There is no assumption of notability for unaccredited high schools.secondary schools, such as someone's home schooling operation for their own children. No presumed notability for schools which stop short of the US 12th grade or foreign equivalents, but in some cases one might find sources to satisfy GNG or WP:ORG for schools which stop short of grade 12. I have seen many hours wasted in fights about some county high school, but in the end sourcing could be found. But coverage of major newspapers in some states is limited in online free databases, and it is unreasonable to demand that within a 7 day AFD period editors have to drive to the state a school is in and search the state's major newspapers on microfilm in some college library to find the significant coverage which is inevitably there. And this is in an encyclopedia where projects argue successfully that every dinky railroad station, every tiny section of numbered highway, every person who played professionally in one game of a sport, and every hamlet with 2 families deserves an article. A public high school today typically is a major cultural institution serving a significant population area, at huge expense, and for a long span of years, and has a big formative influence on perhaps generations of students. Edison (talk) 23:39, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support I really see no case for changing the current status quo. This has all been gone into many times before, and the situation on the ground has not changed. -- Alarics (talk) 23:41, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• I beg to differ on your final point, Alarics. A number of recent AfDs have resulted in no consensus, and at least one, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arya Kanya Girls Inter College, Hardoi, was closed as a delete. Cordless Larry (talk) 23:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• It strikes me as rather desperate when the opponents of the status quo point to a single, solitary deletion as "evidence" that the consensus no longer exists. "It's in tatters" as one well-known school deletionist hopefully described it. Er, no! -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:44, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

• I've not described it as "in tatters" myself, and admittedly there haven't been many deletions, but there does seem to have been an uptick in the number of no-consensus closes. Cordless Larry (talk) 14:34, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose Existence does not prove notability, Wikipedia is not a directory, and Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of secondary schools many of which have nothing notable about them. I'm sympathetic to the arguments about how this reduces bias against non-Western schools, but I believe that can be better achieved without claiming every school is notable. Further, these pages of schools that are not notable or barely notable are not really of interest to anyone except students and faculty. There will be few page watchers and since they're prone to vandalism, it will likely stay there longer. High schools that are notable for alumni activities, outreach efforts, or superior skill in academic or athletic achievement are far more useful and more likely to be seen and maintained because of the attention they receive because of it (thus satisfying the GNG). We don't need thousands of permanent stubs. Wugapodes [t^hɔk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɻɪbz] 01:52, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. I don't agree with WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES. Every article should be judged on a case-by-case basis, as per the most fundamental notability guideline, WP:GNG. ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 02:06, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per Sandstein. The support crowd seems to think we dare not challenge the status quo lest the braying masses attack us for deleting the article about their high school. That's not an argument for notability but a sad plea for a political carve-out. Let the notable schools pass GNG or NCORP. All the others can go. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:07, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. SCHOOLOUTCOMES has been a thorn in the English Wikipedia's side for too long. It, or at least the common interpretation of it, is wholly out of line with our notability guidelines, namely WP:GNG and WP:ORGSIG, the latter of which says:

  "No company or organization is considered inherently notable. No organization is exempt from this requirement, no matter what kind of organization it is, including schools. If the individual organization has received no or very little notice from independent sources, then it is not notable simply because other individual organizations of its type are commonly notable or merely because it exists."

  Per that guideline, verifiable information about non-notable schools should be included in articles about the municipality or district within which they exist. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:23, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, there's a longstanding precedent (of sorts) against nominating schools at AFD, but this should not be made hard policy. Apparently we're starting to see articles on schools of such profound obscurity that little to nothing beyond mere existence can be verified (and in some cases not even that). If we can't verify anything, then an encyclopedia article on the subject cannot exist. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 08:07, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support I think the current status quo works very well. It sets a very good threshold for assumed notability and it negates any systemic bias inherent in only including schools with strong references. The latter will tend to be biased towards fee-paying institutions which can't afford not to market themselves through the press. State schools generally won't have the luxury of paying someone or some entity to do PR for them, whereas fee-paying institutions will be strongly focussed on it. And it's not just schools where we do that. WP:FOOTY has strong inherent notability rules about football club articles. And they make sense. We also need to remember that school articles are often a first vehicle from young wikipedians. Deleting huge tranches of them as non-notable will only encourage vandalism and conflict in dealing with this future editors. No great reason to change. It's doing fine as is. CalzGuy (talk) 13:13, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I've been considering opening an RfC on this for some time. I find the use of this essay infuriating when presented by itself to argue for keeping articles on which no one can find any reliable sources. It's bizarre to me that we use the circular logic of 'schools are often kept therefore schools should always be kept' in these cases. Either "Secondary schools are always notable" should be enshrined in guideline/policy, or we need to stop using this essay argument at AfD. Sam Walton (talk) 13:14, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - per Jbh, Masem, and Sandstein. (I have to admit that typing that list of names together is a bit surreal...) Ealdgyth - Talk 14:43, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support, with emphasis on the whose existence is verified by reliable, independent sources. Secondary Schools are a special kind of institution, found in every major settlement around the planet, and play a key role in lives of communities and individuals. They can give beginning editors or readers of Wikipedia a familiar topic to read or edit to get the feel of the place. They are special enough to merit their own "notability" rule, so we should codify what has has been de facto pretty much the case until now (editors citing WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, even though that's only an essay). PamD 16:37, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. There are no exceptions for a lack of sourcing. Whether or not you call it the GNG, what we need is better phrased as "whether there is an overabundance of coverage in reliable, secondary sources to cover the topic in depth without resorting to unreliable, affiliated, or primary sources". I've seen very few cases in which high schools are independently notable from their parent grouping (the school district or town article) by way of sourcing. And even if they have coverage, those sources tend to be local papers—not wider interest. The standard for similar subtopics is to merge into the parent (the school district or town): a place where the article can be covered in whatever depth warranted by secondary sources. (And it can always split out summary style if an overabundance of sources on the school upsets the balance of the article.)

As for what this discussion is really about—as I understand it—the precedent of keeping all secondary school articles comes from earlier in WP history where some basic categories of articles were presumed notable just to save some time and nonsense at AfD (a decade ago... when it was a free-for-all of new editors, especially high school boys writing about their high schools). But AfD works differently now, and all AfD discussions are essentially about whether the sourcing exists to support an independent article—apart from some specific topic areas, mostly sports biographies and, e.g., "school outcomes".

This discussion is also about our article quality. When a topic is a valid search term—as all established secondary schools are—we merge its sourced contents to a parent article so that readers can find sourced information on it. But we do little good for our readers by serving secondary school articles absent of the Wikipedia sourcing standards that we apply to the rest of the encyclopedia. Unsourced articles invite cruft (an empirically true broken references theory), and set lower expectations for the standard of acceptable writing on Wikipedia. It's time to extend our universal sourcing standards to secondary schools, and accordingly, to cover more unsourced topics in their parent articles (merging as appropriate).  czar 18:28, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I never understood why schools got a free pass at AFD. GNG and to a lesser extent SNG's work well for other articles and they will be fine in this situation as well. Many school articles I come across are nothing short of promotion as the only source of information comes from their own websites. AIRcorn (talk) 20:35, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• Information that meets policy requirements should be kept. If there's not much, consider merging, but if the amount is too much for the merge target then split. They should only be deleted if nothing is verifiable to our standards. I'm not sure if this is a support or oppose - as articles may be merged whether notable or not. For many of these articles this probably means keeping the article but removing anything that lacks references. Peter James (talk) 00:04, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support until a viable alternative becomes available. The trouble with SCHOOLOUTCOMES as stated is that we're talking about different sorts of secondary schools as if they're all on the same level; some classes of schools, such as American public high schools, will pretty much always be notable as important community institutions, while other classes, such as some of the for-profit schools mentioned above, need to be evaluated on their own merits. Unfortunately, public vs. private isn't quite enough to separate these; in certain parts of America, private schools (and Catholic schools in particular) are held in a similar regard as public schools, while in other parts they aren't, and that's just the situation in one country.

The reason I can't support just getting rid of SCHOOLOUTCOMES without an alternative, though, is it would make a lot of vulnerable articles subject to deletion due to the current situation at AfD. The point of presuming notability for certain topics is to correct an imbalance between what GNG is supposed to mean (multiple, reliable secondary sources) and what it usually turns into at AfD (multiple, reliable secondary sources that will probably only be looked for online, by a handful of people who are probably from North America and Europe, possibly only within Google results unless someone with access to a paywalled database stumbles across the AfD, with a seven-day time limit at best, and subject to people arguing that "multiple" means a higher number than what you found or that local or even regional sources don't count despite that not being part of the GNG). Given how many high schools are in rural areas, making it more likely that archived print sources won't be easily accessible, or in countries that don't have the same internet presence as English-speaking countries in the West, these are particularly relevant concerns, and I'm uncomfortable throwing existing articles on schools into that mess with no precautions to avoid deletion on account of sloppy research. I've pulled too many articles from the brink of deletion on account of nominators, and subsequent !voters, who did a poor job of WP:BEFORE to trust the process to work for these articles, and if AfD gets flooded with school stubs after a change to SCHOOLOUTCOMES there may not be enough editors able to do the research to prove all the notable ones really are notable within a week. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:09, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of your point is that, because AfD has problems, we should ignore the GNG for schools. I'm sympathetic to your point about how this will impact the bias of our coverage, but I don't think we should be going around the GNG just to have thousands of permanent stubs. If anything, that's what the GNG is meant to prevent. It may well be the case that there are thousands of reliable sources on Example High School in Ruraltown, Statesota locked away in my grandmother's attic, but if no one knows that, we can't use the possibility that sources may possibly maybe exist somewhere but we just haven't looked hard enough to justify subverting the GNG. If sources can't be found to satisfy the GNG, it doesn't satisfy the GNG. Full stop. If sources are eventually found, it can be recreated. We shouldn't doom ourselves to eternal searching for sources because maybe we just didn't look hard enough. Wugapodes [t^hɔk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɻɪbz] 03:54, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

In secondary school AfDs, a common argument is that while sources are hard to find online, they must exist offline and at some point, someone with the necessary language skills could find them and use them to expand and improve the article. I'm sympathetic to that argument, but do we actually have any examples of school articles where that has happened? Cordless Larry (talk) 07:26, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

@Cordless Larry: On the Spanish Wikipedia (which lacks Schooloutcomes) I started es:Liceo Mexicano Japonés and got an AFD: es:Wikipedia:Consultas de borrado/Liceo Mexicano Japonés - it took a lot of effort to keep the article. While it was a Spanish-language article, many of the editors could understand English, but several were doubting possible notability until I got someone at University of Southern California to scan parts of a master's degree thesis which talked about the school. One of the other articles was in Japanese but had an English title/abstract. I have been a longtime editor since 2003 and knew the "process" on how to keep articles; a novice I think would have had much more difficulty, even if he/she spoke Spanish. Also, there was one editor who was trying to force a delete even after I presented source after source after source, and I really, really grew to resent that (and I wasn't the only one who felt that way). I think having SCHOOLOUTCOMES prevents these kinds of scenarios from happening. WhisperToMe (talk) 06:32, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose per Sandstein and SamWalton. Merely existing should not make a school presumably notable. Blackmane (talk) 03:43, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Conditional support - I would be in favour if the wording included "government accredited secondary schools". It doesn't matter if they are public or private. A stub with the school's name, location, private/public status, and grades accredited sourced to a government website, and an external link to the school's website if any, should be fine. Any promotional stuff or unsourced information can always be removed. About the academic example above: peer-reviewed journal articles have editorial oversight and also are reviewed by several independent experts, so if many of them cite a professor or researcher, that's a very large number of independent writers who agree that his or her ideas are important. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:50, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

That's a good-faith and plausible suggestion, except that in some countries it is not the government that accredits schools. In the United States there are six regional accrediting commissions which evaluate and accredit schools and colleges. Example: the Western Association of Schools and Colleges is the accrediting agency for schools in California, Hawaii, and Guam, as well as foreign schools. I favor saying "accredited" but not "government accredited". --MelanieN (talk) 01:34, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

In general I do agree that secondary schools should be considered notable - but there has to be a limit; if I, as a certified teacher, tutor three secondary students from the local high school in my home in the evenings, is my home a school which should have an article? I'd say it was more of a small business. Many people home-school their own children. Are they notable? "Accredited" doesn't mean anything if it doesn't say by whom; "with government-recognized accreditation" or some similar phrase would be more specific. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:08, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support, Considering only those schools taking pupils aged 11+ then the current situation seems to be accepted by most editors if one considers the total number of positive edits to such articles over time. As long as suitable references are available and listed correctly in an article then I prefer to maintain the status quo. I would be particularly concerned if the vote goes to the 'oppose' side that we suddenly find a huge number of deletions occurring. I appreciate that others have discussed this but it is still of concern as most editors will not be aware of this discussion. Paste _{Let’s have a chat.} 15:27, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Comment - While I'm normally in favor of WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, there's something that's bothered me for years, and as of now I'm not going to give an opinion on this discussion, I have to let this out of my chest. While it's fairly easy for schools in the United States and other Anglophone countries to receive coverage, the same isn't the case in developing countries. For example, in my country (the Philippines), only schools in the major cities tend to get any form of coverage, reliable or otherwise. In the provinces, maybe outside of Facebook, there may be little-to-no online presence for private or even public schools. I think this tends to be the case for schools in other countries as well. This made me think something like "is WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES too Western-centric as its standards are based on Western educational systems?" Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 16:08, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• The supporters of SCHOOLOUTCOMES often argue that it helps counter that bias, Narutolovehinata5, because it means that schools in developing countries are kept even if few online sources exist. Cordless Larry (talk) 16:31, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose And forbid SCHOOLOUTCOMES from being used in AFD discussions while we are about it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:46, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Support. The current standard is reasonably efficient, and removing it would result in an inordinate amount of time, energy, and resulting rancor as we debate (likely) hundreds if not thousands of resulting AFDs. This is not to say that carefully tailored exceptions could be carved out of the existing standard. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo). Treated like dirt by many administrators since 2006. (talk) 18:10, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Please note that the concerns of massive timesinks of AFD noms is a point I tried to address in the section below, namely that we actually should avoid encouraging mass rushes of AFDs of secondary schools and use other processes. It is a very valid concern but we do have policy via WP:FAITACCOMPLI that would prevent that, and we should have a plan going forward if its removed. --MASEM (t) 18:15, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support as this counters the systematic bias that results in non-English speaking areas or developing countries that don't have online sources that can be read by people here. The sources are still likely to exist, even if they are not easily available. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:09, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• That's ridiculous. If we do that then we may as well abandon GNG entirely for vast parts of the world, and not merely in the schools topic area. That systemic bias exists may be true but we have to accept that some things (most things!) can't be fixed by WP alone. - Sitush (talk) 22:09, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support although to be liguistically correct, my answer to this excellently neutrally made RfC question Should secondary schools whose existence is verified by reliable, independent sources be presumed to be notable? should be Yes. Not only through the already tacit consensus as evidenced by thousands of AfD closures resulting in keep but also based on the arguments above in favour of maintaining the status quo, while pointing out for those providing inaccurate reasons to oppose, that OUTCOMES is neither a policy, nor a guideline, nor technically even an essay or opinion piece - it simply accurately documents a set of clearly evident long-time Wikipedia behaviours, and as such is indeed an acceptable a short cut to the rationale it represents without voters at AfD having to post a list of several hundred or a thousand examples. Not without reason either did the community reach a well established consensus that school articles may not be tagged for deletion per A7, and it was a Wikipedia founder's express opinion that high schools should be considered notable. Naturally G11 and G12 and other criteria remain valid in appropriate cases and should generally be rigorously applied if editing cannot resolve the issues. School articles are not exempt from PROD and where most school articles are made by SPA, deletion by PROD makes AfD unnecessary.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:10, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• I wasn't aware that Jimbo set policy or guidelines, and his opinion is of no more weight than mine or yours. Times change, and that OUTCOMES has become a self-fulfilling essay is all the more reason why we need to revisit it and address the underlying shortcomings that are now apparent and which make it problematic. - Sitush (talk) 22:13, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Thanks for your comment about the "support" versus "yes" wording, Kudpung. I see this as more about yes/no than support/oppose too. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:21, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• It shoudl be noted that Jimmy Wales' comment about schools was in the very early days of the project, after which we have actually developed the notability guidelines that hold us to higher standards, so resting too much on Wales' comment doesn't reflect the changing consensus. Comparing schools to Pokemon characters is definitely apples-to-oranges, but at one point we did have articles for each Pokemon but since have developed a WP:Pokémon test test to follow notability practices. There is no reason we could now do the same with schools. (And I would expect that if SCHOOLOUTCOMES is nixed, that we would have to re-examine CSD criteria for schools) --MASEM (t) 23:42, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose Just like every other institution, a school-article should prove their notability, not their existence. And it should prove it with sources IN the article, not by assuming/gambling that sources exist. Schooloutcomes is one of the many locally (i.e. WikiProjects) invented excuses to circumvent the common rules for notability. The Banner talk 23:54, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support Following Graeme Bartlett line of thinking. I am though uncomfortable with making a definite statement on whether all schools in the 11 to 18 bracket should be considered notable but the alternative is far worse. Firstly, the current obsession with just testing against online sources, skews the debate in favour of a small number of geographic areas, and secondly while my personal POVs against non-state funded 'dame schools', crammers and grooming parlours does not mean that we should exclude coverage. But thirdly, the thought of nights of detailed arguments about whether a vanity funded academy is merely commercial placement or does have some notability.. doesn't bare thinking. --ClemRutter (talk) 01:18, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support I have always supported this tradition for multiple reasons, most of which have been articulated already. It recognizes that high schools and colleges virtually always receive coverage (and if it's purely local, what's wrong with that?). It saves enormous amounts of quibbling over what sources are acceptable and what aren't (if most of the coverage is about the football team, does that count?). It avoids systemic bias, as noted already by many (sure, American schools can always cite online references in English, but how many other countries can say the same?). To me it is like the SPORTS notability guidelines: if a person has played in a fully professional league, they get an article, no quibbling, no agonizing - because such players have virtually always received coverage, and with the guideline it isn't a matter of debate in each and every instance. BTW my understanding is that this guideline applies to "diploma-granting and degree-granting institutions", not just schools for ages 11 and up - thus ruling out middle schools, trade schools, etc. I would support adding "accredited" to the guideline, although it may not always be possible to provide a link to the accrediting agency and I would not require that. --MelanieN (talk) 01:44, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support status quo Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:58, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support If people would really like to double the amount of work at AfD, then a good way of doing it is to remove the practice of treating secondary schools as if they were notable. The practice that we do so is not an attack on the fundamental principle of WP:N or the GNG, but a question of convenience. In that connection, I have to mention the other half of the compromise : not usually treating elementary schools as notable. Before we had the compromise, I and others were quite willing to argue for their inclusion. Some of the arguments were successful, and I have a few hundred US primary schools in mind for which I could realistically try to write articles. The results will, as usual at AfD, depend on who shows up to discuss, as much as on the merits of the article. DGG ( talk ) 05:12, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support. I'm a long-term supporter of this rule for the reasons elucidated here. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:40, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support this seems to be the way the community generally regards the notability of schools so it it is appropriate to confirm the situation. Thincat (talk) 16:11, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose schools shouldn't get an automatic free pass at AFD, and merely being mentioned in secondary sources isn't good enough to warrant an article. Actual depth to coverage in such sources is also a must. We shouldn't ignore any instance were WP:GNG isn't met. In all honesty, this is why the mentioned bit above from WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES is fucking bullshit. I also concur with Sandstein, Masem, The Banner, Jonesey95, and Czar. Snuggums (talk / edits) 20:32, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support with hesitation, because I've sounded off in the past about the lamentable quality of many school articles, which are often the last ones we would pick as models or training grounds for budding new editors. So I'm more bothered about what's in these articles than whether they exist at all. I hear those who are unwilling to make further exceptions to the GNG, but the fact is that with schools that bird has flown, long ago, and I can swallow a special status for schools similar to that for villages or pro footballers. The hope would be that once this special status is recognised and regularised, editors would be more willing to bring the articles up to standard. This means: trim promotion and non-neutral prose, trim excessive, trivial and evanescent detail, look for whatever useful information can be found in independent reliable sources, and watch out for those vandals: Noyster (talk), 01:04, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose any form of "inherent notability" for anything. Notability comes from being noted, no more, no less. Schools are long overdue for a cleanup, and in practice, many of them are not notable. There are certain cases where we really can presume every single example of something to be notable (US presidents, chemical elements), but it doesn't hold true with schools. Some are notable, some not. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 01:42, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support - not wanting to repeat what's already been said: briefly, I think the trade-off here between WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and GNG is acceptable. Eustachiusz (talk) 03:49, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - The GNG would be a much better tool for determining secondary school notability. I really never understood why secondary schools were given a free notability pass to begin with. If they can't meet the GNG, I don't understand how we could hope to write a balanced, encyclopedic article about the school. Wikipedia isn't a simple directory, after all. Kaldari (talk) 07:10, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support maintaining the status quo. We have had a compromise here for years: verified public and sizeable private and parochial high schools are routinely kept, while primary schools are routinely redirected to their school district or city unless solid evidence is provided to warrant keeping a standalone article. This has worked well for years, while saving us from many endless re-debates about the arcane subtleties of Wikipedian terms of art. "Notability" is not a goal in itself but a linguistic device for discussing whether something will improve the encyclopedia. I acknowledge that the boundaries have been tested and stressed by promotional, COI-driven articles about for-profit schools and a more focused discussion about best practices for handling those promotional articles may be in order. The rest are something we should keep and cultivate. The encyclopedia would certainly not be improved by delegitimizing the high school articles we have. This large category of existing articles is a positive not only for the readily-organized information the articles provide to readers and contributors, but also for its developmental benefits to the project: they are a strong component of the deep, worldwide, gazeteer-like coverage that is one of Wikipedia's best features and aspirations, and as PamD noted above they also provide a means of entry and connection to the project for many new editors. --Arxiloxos (talk) 01:06, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support the status quo. In its absence we will be flooded with malicious AfDs, and waste far, far more of editors time. We need more "automatic" notability decisions not less. Every silly fight that can be avoided makes the community look less .... silly. Jacona (talk) 01:12, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support keeping all secondary school articles for now. We might need to figure out a more nuanced solution for certain parts of the world where very limited verifiable information about schools is available. But I would certainly oppose a change to this rule, at least for developed Anglophone countries, where there is usually plenty of verifiable information about schools. I think further discussion about how to handle the different scenarios in different countries, culminating in an agreed subject-specific notability guideline, would be more productive than an all-or-nothing !vote. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:28, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support the status quo - While in theory WP:GNG should be applied to most subjects, User:TheCatalyst31 brings up a great point in how AFDs get difficult. Many people are not so educated, and they may not have time/money to comb through sources all the time. People get grudges if their content is deleted; nobody likes to work hard on something and see their work vanish. Even if the content is not well sourced or not notable, people feel that Wikipedia's not living up to the "Encyclopedia anyone can edit". Of course we shouldn't allow blatant promotionalism (especially from for-profit companies) and some subjects are just not encyclopedic. However as stated on the AFD of the British International School Lagos it often is possible to get info on schools, especially state-run ones. Maybe a better idea is to publish a guide on how to source info for schools in X country, how to find libraries, etc. Make a guide for high school students (the people who we need to recruit as editors, and in fact much of my editing is done for this purpose!) on how to write about their school: How to get sources, what style they should use, etc. I'm happy to start it myself, and for North American students, add how to use boundary maps to determine which communities serve their public schools. WhisperToMe (talk) 09:14, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
• Undecided – Of note is that per WP:FIVEPILLARS, Wikipedia functions in part as a gazetteer, and some gazetteers have historically included content about schools in them, such as in Chinese, Indian and Korean ones, among others (see the Wikipedia gazetteer article for more information and sources). For example, the Gazetteer of the Nellore District published by the Government of Madras in 1942 includes content about secondary schools and middle schools (see Google Books preview example, scroll down on page). The World-wide Encyclopedia and Gazetteer published by the Christian Herald in 1899 contains content about secondary schools (see example, pp. 1042–1043). Another example is the Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer Content Standard (link), which includes schools in its formulation. More examples in addition to these are available in online searches.

Per the five pillars and Wikipedia's partial functionality as a gazetteer, it would be aligned with Wikipedia's core purposes to consider developing a guideline for secondary schools that are verifiable but otherwise not correspondent with notability guidelines to be merged into articles about the school district authorities that manage the schools, or to the city/town/village articles where they are located. Another idea is to merge such articles into lists of schools per geographical region, such as by county. Such recommendation could be added to WP:NSCHOOL if a consensus to do so were to occur. This would serve to improve the encyclopedia, and is also functionally correspondent with WP:ATD-M. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:29, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I am aware that primary and middle schools that don't meet WP:GNG already are supposed to redirect to their school district and/or a daughter article listing schools in that school district (for U.S. and Canada public schools), or to the locality (for schools outside of the U.S. and Canada and private schools) WhisperToMe (talk) 13:05, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

The problem with using the Gazetteer aspect is that this is only being applied to schools, and secondary schools at that. The argument if you want to got the gazeteer route is then we should be doing not only secondary schools, but also primary schools, government buildings (town halls, police + fire departments), parks and other similar areas, and potentially other features like churches. That line of logic gets very hairy very fast, for an encyclopedia. (If we were just indexing places and coordinates, as it what a gazetteer primarily does, this wouldn't be a problem, but we want more content than just name and coordinates). Practically, our implementation of being a gazetteer gets to the resolution of towns and villages and geographical landmarks recognized by an appropriate governing agency; anything more detailed than that falls outside of what we consider to be our gazetteer function. --MASEM (t) 17:28, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

My proposal above is only based upon secondary schools, not all those other topics. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 18:02, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

And my counterpoint is that while the logic works for secondary schools, there are buildings/facilities that are as equally important if not moreso than schools that would also fall under the gazetteer logic that we should track, but we don't. --MASEM (t) 18:30, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose SCHOOLOUTCOMES must die! It may have been usefull way back in the infancy of WP, but the way it is commonly applied these days has several negative consequences:
  • It privileges first-world, and more specifically American, high schools. This is a consequence of the (practically) unique obsession with school sport in American society. The smallest "Anytown High" is practically guaranteed regular coverage in the "Anytown Gazette" reporting on the appointment of the new basketball coach or the progress of the school baseball team in the state championship (even if they are ranked 236 out of 242). Contrast that with the situation in many other countries where even the barest hint of proof of existence can be hard to find - and then often only in the local language in a list on an obscure government website or a mention in a report or policy document. Thus it actually exacerbates the systemic bias of en.WP.
  • It is used as a weapon to summarily shut down anyone daring to question the existence of any high school article, regardless of the quality of the article or the merits of the argument. This is often counter to WP:BITE and WP:RETENTION of editors, particularly the scarce ones from underrepresented countries and demographics.
  • An SNG creates a presumption of notability, not the fact of notability. Any presumption that is not suceptible to testing and consequent possibility of rebuttal is not really a presumption at all. SCHOOLOUTCOMES is often used to basically forbid any testing of the presumption. Countless speedy deletions are rejected and AFDs are summarily closed citing it - a rather bizarre argument from authority. SCHOOLOUTCOMES thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - "high schools are notable because high schools are notable". Educational institutions currently protected by SCHOOLOUTCOMES should actually be subject to the much fairer (and testable) WP:ORG standard. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:38, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

SCHOOLOUTCOMES isn't a policy or guideline. It's a representation of fact. It won't die until the facts change and more editors !vote to delete or merge. CalzGuy (talk) 13:56, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

You're missing the point that it is used to actually prevent such !votes from happening, it has effectively shut down the debate. Like a dictator who was properly elected 20 years ago, who abuses his incumbency to prevent any subsequent elections that may unseat him. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:22, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

An essay has no power to prevent an AfD taking place. In fact, if you want an AfD to take place no one can stop you. What SCHOOLOUTCOMES does is to suggest beforehand that actually it's a pointless exercise. But if you want to plough that pointless furrow, no one here can stop you. But a lot of us may just step in and !vote to keep, and in doing so will sort of prove the point. So how would SCHOOLOUTCOMES "die" in any case? CalzGuy (talk) 15:40, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

You are proving the point about the problem of SCHOOLOUTCOMES with regards to secondary schools. It cannot be used to say "an AFD on a secondary school will be useless" and thus prevent anyone from filing an AFD. It cannot be used in an AFD to say "well, SCHOOLOUTCOMES says we don't delete schools, so this can't be deleted" (which happens all too much). The problem of SCHOOLOUTCOMES is that it is a leftover of pre-notability periods on WP. If it was being used properly, then at AFD on a secondary school, people would !vote keep by showing there are some secondary sources about the school (even if not perfectly at GNG-type levels, enough to give presumption of notability), or otherwise delete/merge/etc. Then, if it was the case that the near majority of such AFDs that "keep" was the most common result, then SCHOOLOUTCOMES would make sense. But that's not how it is developed or used anymore - its the catch-22 self-fulfilling cycle that is getting worse. --MASEM (t) 16:09, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Continuing the above thread: It is trivial to find concrete examples of SCHOOLOUTCOMES being used to shut down discussion. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Benicia High School, for example. SCHOOLOUTCOMES is specifically cited as the reason to keep the nominated article, completely shutting down discussion and effectively preventing secondary schools from being nominated for deletion. That is why this RFC is happening. More examples: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carman-Ainsworth High School, where there are many links to guidelines and policies, and all discussion is preempted by SCHOOLOUTCOMES; another good discussion is at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tenby International School, Penang (2nd nomination). I suggest that regardless of the outcome of this discussion, we should create or change a guideline around notability of secondary schools. The current situation is not tenable. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:18, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

CalzGuy, your first point has it exactly backwards. If we repeal SCHOOLOUTCOMES and return to a pure GNG standard, the systemic bias here will become much worse. As you point out, schools in America and other English-speaking countries do tend to have easily-findable coverage and are thus much more likely to have articles. Schools in less-developed or non-English speaking countries are much less likely to have such coverage and will get deleted or never accepted in the first place. One of the main benefits of SCHOOLOUTCOMES is that it helps to mitigate our bias against material from less developed and non-English speaking countries. (It does not eliminate it entirely because we still need confirmation that the school exists and is a secondary school.) --MelanieN (talk) 19:01, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Except part of that systematic bias is that these secondary school articles often weigh heavily on the use of local sources to support notability, which isn't really in the spirit of notability on a global encyclopedia. Local papers covering local schools lack true independence we want for notability sourcing (these can be used to augment that, however!) If AFDs were done in absence of SCHOOLOUTCOMES and considered the type of coverage these Western schools were getting, most of these would still be deleted because of that local coverage, which is a different way to approach fixing that systematic bias while meeting the notability guidelines we expect for any other topic. We need to bite the bullet and accept this is the case though. --MASEM (t) 19:08, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I intentionally add "local" content to Wikipedia because people care about their hometowns and want to introduce them to the world. It's a motive for editing Wikipedia that can be used to recruit people. WhisperToMe (talk) 20:09, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

While is one very very fragile step away from COI editing. There's a level of resolution we want to keep to avoid extremely localized topic for this reason. Articles on towns are good collectors for such information because that also fits our gazetteer function well. --MASEM (t) 20:17, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

@Masem: I think the public understands the natural desire for one to write about their hometown/what they like. Where COI is worrisome IMO is if it's a for-profit company (especially if they're paying you), or a BLP case, or a case where someone's sole goal is to make a topic look good. We need to give into inclinations of "I like this, so I'll write about it" without allowing it to go too far, or allowing for profit/professional PR motives/BLP issues from becoming a problem. If it's a teenager writing on Wikipedia for the first time just adding info about a hometown he cares about deeply, just give him a heads up on how to write objectively about where he's from, but if it's somebody working for a company doing PR ask them to do edit requests and not touch the article directly. @Masem: WhisperToMe (talk) 20:50, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

@Dodger67: I think that SCHOOLOUTCOMES actually makes it easier to write articles about schools in the developing world. In the U.S. it's easier to find secondary sources about U.S., Canadian, European, etc. high schools, and it's easier to find sources on them in English. If you're writing about a Japanese high school you may encounter a language barrier. If you're writing about an Ivorian high school, you may find evidence that it exists on a government website, or on the AEFE (if a French international school) or ZaF (if a German international school), but it may be harder finding secondary source info directly on the web. SCHOOLOUTCOMES treats all senior high schools equally.

I held a Wikimedia workshop at a Chinese university where I asked students to write about their high schools. I told them "why not check the newspapers for info on them" and they said they didn't think the newspapers had any info on their high schools. In my hometown the Houston Chronicle covers high school info regularly (and I'm not including routine coverage).

WhisperToMe (talk) 20:09, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Dodger67 - You have managed to get this 100% backwards. Schools in the English-speaking industrial world are virtually 100% guaranteed to pass GNG and articles on them will not be challenged. The effect on the stubby articles dealing with schools in the developing world will be immediate and massive — and guess what: nobody is gonna come to their aid. You have just made the opposite case, you need to either flip your opinion from oppose to support or to get real about what the impact is gonna be. Carrite (talk) 14:42, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Carrite I'm not at all convinced that most English-speaking industrial world high schools could genuinely pass WP:ORG or WP:GNG. The articles about the vast majority of such schools depend on a combination of firstly routine coverage of the "it exists" variety, such as government reports and database-like records such as proof of accreditation, and secondly mere local coverage in the form of local news media reporting on the school's basketball team, new principal, etc. If school articles did not have this "special protection" they have enjoyed over so many years we would have far fewer articles, even about American high schools. Now take the counter-example of Indian villages. Clusters of nearby villages tend to have a shared local authority for various purposes such as a clinic, post office, police station and other government services which may also include a small high school. The cluster of villages would also contain one or more temples. An article about the temple has very little chance of getting created, but if it does get written, it invariably gets deleted fairly quickly as not notable. However the article about the school, which arguably is just as significant to the community as the temple (or clinic), and based on essentially the same sources as the temple article, is permanently exempted from deletion by SCHOOLOUTCOMES. In my country, South Africa (which has a very well developed media sector, as large and active as many "first world" countries) I guesstimate that perhaps only about one hundred schools could genuinely pass WP:CORP or WP:GNG, and IMHO that's perfectly ok, because Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:30, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Pretty sure that WP:INDISCRIMINATE is about what kind of information - and more pointedly, the format thereof - we collect and not about which topics are or are not covered. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:08, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus If all one can properly source about a school is that it exists then the article about it is effectively a "listing", WP:NOTDIRECTORY is a better fit, you are correct. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:43, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support This is a tried-and-true rule of thumb that has worked effectively for the past decade, and works as well as the presumed notability for professional athletes and politicians. Rather than fight these battles one at a time, with the vultures trying to find a weak link to justify deletion of any all such articles, the presumption of notability allows these articles time to grow organically and have the available sources added. Alansohn (talk) 17:50, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
  • This is not true. Athletes and politicians have subject-specific notability guidelines that say if certain aspects are met, there is a strong likelihood that secondary sources can be found and thus we can presume notability via the GNG can eventually be met. That's not what we have with schools. Secondary schools have yet to be proven that if the school is accredited that secondary sources will exist to discuss the school within the scope of the GNG. Some do, some don't, but not with the high frequency that happens with athletes and politicians meeting NSPORTS or BIO. Even those that have been shown to have some type of secondary sources is generally based only on local sources, which begs issues of true independent sourcing (another GNG requirements). --MASEM (t) 17:58, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
    • @Masem: according to Wikipedia:Notability_(sports)#Basic_criteria there is presumed notability if the athlete "participated in a major international amateur or professional competition at the highest level (such as the Olympics)." which is what User:Alansohn is referring to WhisperToMe (talk) 20:11, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
      • Right: the logic behind that is that if someone has played at something like the Olympics, that there will very highly likely be sourcing about that athlete - most likely in the country's regional media - highlighting their career just prior for them leaving to the event. In other words, there's a good chance of getting this secondary sources (required by the GNG) because of this bar. All other subject-specific notability guidelines work on the same principle - they offer means of presuming notability in lieu of having immediate access to the sources that would certainly follow the conditions noted in the subject-specific guideline. This is not the case for secondary schools. --MASEM (t) 20:17, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
        • I think part of the reason why SCHOOLOUTCOMES was decided was that, in editing North American, Australasian, and European senior high schools, it was quite common to find non-routine independent secondary sources about them while less so for primary and junior high schools. As an editor of Houston articles I'd say it's not difficult to find secondary sources about most Houston high schools. The holy trinity of the Houston Chronicle, Houston Business Journal, and the Houston Press have given me info on Houston schools and neighborhoods. It's to the point where I could start articles on Houston schools on the Spanish Wikipedia, which does not have SCHOOLOUTCOMES (and for awhile was quite resistant to school articles). Also note most high schools in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, etc.) are government schools too, so it's not so much of a change. Now that South Asian schools are coming in, Wikipedia's confronted with a different set of rules.
        • One other reason why I like WP:COMMOUTCOMES for schools is that I know newspapers are generally only digitized until the 80s or 90s, and that means lots of articles that could help notability just aren't online.
        • @Masem: WhisperToMe (talk) 21:00, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
          • This is where two key issues exist in this debate:
          • First, we in the west do have these plethra of sources like local papers to cover schools. That level of coverage doesn't exist in many places in Asia, Africa, and South America, which is the systematic bias that we talk about.
          • Second, where there is this type of coverage, a (otherwise reliable for anything else) Houston paper reporting on a Houston school is begging the question if that is truly an independent source required by the GNG. If it were a Dallas paper, or a New York paper, far outside the school's region, that's different and would be sufficiently independent. But at the city level, that's different. Add in that the bulk of such coverage is usually either sports-related (inter-school sports), or related to "news" items like school levies, teacher strikes, or other things that would fail NEVENT, and this type of coverage is not sufficient for an encyclopedia beyond proving the school exists. If we drew that line in the sand as to distinguish notable schools, then we also address the systematic bias issue at the same time (though we'd still likely have more Western secondary schools as notable ones than others, but we'd not be including every secondary school). --MASEM (t) 22:09, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
            • 1. Yes, that's right. The systemic bias issue does affect schools coming from those regions. I think the current COMMONOUTCOMES then is a sort of protection for those schools since it allows those which verifiably exist to be kept despite not having immediate access to reliable secondary sources about the said school in English. A newspaper in Lagos may not be counted on to digitize their stuff like the Houston Chronicle.
            • 2. Usually the newspapers can be counted on being "independent" as the district staff don't own the paper and can't control it. There was a case where Seguin ISD tried to buy a radio station and newspaper which criticized it (and this is in a town way smaller than Houston), and obviously it led to an outcry. Anyway I count "routine" sports events (such as typical games) as routine news, while anything about a "first" (like first head coach, first ever playoff) would not be. Some events such as scheduled elections, "so-and-so was caught with weapons" (with no lasting effect on the school's operations), etc. would be typical news, while a strike that causes people to question whether the district is performing well would not be. For example I would not treat the information on a shooting at North Forest High School as "routine" since when it happened, the school extended the hours of its metal detectors.
              • An example of a "typical" school article with "local" sources I used: Cypress Park High School or Bridgeland High School which talk about the schools' openings and establishments, while Lamar High School (Houston) has a variety of sources and source types and in-depth commentary on demographic changes. Lamar already has a Spanish version, while I hope to establish both Cypress Park and Bridgeland in Spanish soon.
            • 3. I know there are countries with smaller populations than, say, U.S. metro areas like Greater Houston (at 6 million), and one thing I dislike about the French Wikipedia's "only national sources can confer notability" is that it causes a loss of information about communities in larger countries (like the U.S. or China) while smaller countries (like Djibouti, Malta) would get a pass.
            • WhisperToMe (talk) 01:57, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
              • Independence is not always measured by financial motives, although that's the easiest way to identify a dependency problem. To apply this to another type of article, in large cities, restaurants get frequently reviewed by local publications, but we do not consider those as signs of notability for the restaurant, because this is the function of the local paper to cover a local restaurant, thus creating a dependency problem. Same thing with secondary schools. And also why the problem is less an issue with universities and colleges that rarely serve just a single city or town. The Cypress Park is a poor encyclopedic article because it does not establish any notability within the scope of a global encyclopedia that cannot be readily covered in the town's article (details about population or current athletics are absolutely unnecessary , for example), as all the sourcing is local. And unfortunately this is the typical state of most America secondary school articles. That's why this is all a problem. --MASEM (t) 02:25, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
                • While I am aware independence is not always measured by financial motives, being local doesn't necessarily mean that the article cannot be "independent" of the subject. Even though a newspaper is asked to review a restaurant, it doesn't mean it's going to be a good review. Seguin ISD demonstrates that local media can be adversarial and ruckmacking just like their "national"/"global" counterparts. Also, in this AFD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia an editor made it clear that "independent of the subject" means that the people writing a review of an academic book need to be independent of the work/author(s) itself/themselves. I think a better reason why Wikipedia should not cover a "local restaurant" in most metro areas (exception may be a restaurant that gets a variety of reviews/coverage from a large number of sources, which only happens in major metro areas like New York, Tokyo, Paris, etc. - and because of, for example, the Houston area's size, there's momentum to write about "local" that wouldn't have momentum in smaller places) is "lack of non-trivial coverage" as usually the restaurants only get occasional reviews. Remember it's also the job of local newspapers to write what's going on in small incorporated places that automatically get kept as per gazeteer notability processes.
                • See Cypress Park as an example of an article that is just born... something that has the potential to grow as time passes and as things change. Lamar High has been open since the 1930s and the mass number of changes have been well documented. AFAIK it's the rule, not the exception, that inner city schools that have existed for a long time can have detailed, developed information written about them. Massive demographic changes happen to suburban schools as they age: I know Spring ISD (in particular Westfield High School and Spring High School in particular) has had massive changes, and as time passes it will become easier and easier to write well-sourced information on how those changes have affected the schools.
                • One thing I'd like to say is that being able to cover my hometown was one of the reasons why I became heavily involved on Wikipedia. Being able to write about the local cuisine, the culture (ethnic groups, religion, etc.), the neighborhoods (many sourced from the Houston Chronicle), and yes, the schools was something important to me. Once Houston topics became largely exhausted I turned to other metro areas: Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Paris, etc. and built up their local too: schools, ethnic groups, religion, culture, etc. I also created large numbers of international school articles to encourage participation from developing countries. The idea of writing about local is something that can still pull in editors; when I talk to Chinese college students about Wikipedia, I tell them that it's a place where they can write about their hometowns: the local food, the culture, the schools, etc. A new generation of teenagers from China, India, etc. can do what North American, European, and Australasian teens, like myself, did a decade ago.
                • While Wikipedia's goal is to be global, most people really care about their local. To remain vibrant and active, Wikipedia needs to encourage people, within reason, to write about the local, but teach them how to do it right. The local is like a puzzle piece, and all the locals add up to a unified global, the sum of the whole.
                • WhisperToMe (talk) 05:26, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
                • One other thing. Re: "details about population or current athletics are absolutely unnecessary , for example" - I strongly disagree on the first count, and disagree on the second to a degree.
                • 1. As we see from Lamar High School (Houston) and Woodrow Wilson High School (Dallas) demographic changes and information can be of great interest to statewide and national publications. In a day or so I'll add info about Muslim and Arab students to Fordson High School as that topic is covered heavily by RSes.
                • 2. In the United States athletics is a considered to be an important aspect of school, especially in the rural South. There are voices who believe it's too strongly emphasized, but it's a fact of life. However what needs to happen is this: kids should avoid routine coverage and focus on what's not-so-routine. Perhaps milestones in the schools' performances in statewide competitions? Maybe see if newspapers from outside the metro area talk about the sports team.
                • WhisperToMe (talk) 00:26, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
                  • What you are showing above is the issue of the systematic bias of the West, and perhaps more to the US. The US has multi-tier administration over schooling, and everything is being tracked at national and state levels (in part of trends like No Child Left Behind). Schools are important to local communities, and covered heavily in local papers. That situation does not exist anywhere else in the world - you'll get close in places like Europe, Japan, and other highly urbanized areas. Other countries lack any formal system, and where literacy is already poor, there's little coverage of the school. It's great we can document some of these US schools to this level of detail but a lot of it still comes down to local sources and databases (primary sources). If there was clear evidence we could that nearly equally for any secondary school around the world, that would be great, but that simply can't be done, in a manner that would meet WP:V. BIAS suggests not presuming all other schools are notable, but instead not given excessive coverage to those schools where lots of information could be found. Remember: we still have articles on every town and village in the world, and the argument that editors from their towns will be drawn to WP to edit about where they live still holds true with these articles, but its much easier to verify named places rather than specific schools at those places. --MASEM (t) 15:27, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
                    • @Masem: While it may be difficult/impossible for some regions/countries, I think the best way to get around "systemic bias" in this scenario is to ask editors of each language background/region how to find sources on a particular school in their language(s). I got assistance from FRwiki editors in writing Lycee Alfred Nobel (a school in the Paris area serving North African immigrant students), and Chinese sources in particular may have written info on particular high schools (though I don't know to what degree). I got help from editors of various countries to write Liceo Mexicano Japones (a private school in Mexico City serving Mexican students of Japanese heritage and Japanese nationals).
                    • Schools in urban areas of third world countries are more likely to get coverage than say in rural areas: getting info on a school in Nairobi is easier than doing so for one in the sticks. This is especially so if they are "international schools" affiliated with a foreign educational system. Some countries have formal networks/systems: AEFE of France, ZfA (I think) of Germany, and the Japanese Ministry of Education (for Japanese overseas schools). Last summer I wrote a series of "international school" templates and articles as a way of getting around systemic bias. That way every country has schools represented on Wikipedia.
                    • WhisperToMe (talk) 12:38, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
                      • France is not a problem country here; it is sufficiently urbanized to have well documented info on its schools. I'd except the same for North American or Western Europe nation where the degree of urbanization is high. It's places like China, Brazil, and India. And we've had editors from those areas try to find sources and they can't for secondary schools. That's always going to be the rub on schools in that you'll very much unlikely find significant details on schools from these regions, and thus would not be covered on WP. Since we can't make up sources to cover these, WP:BIAS suggests we should be much more discriminate on including other secondary schools. --MASEM (t) 14:51, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
                        • I would be interested in reading the discussions from those cases in China, Brazil, and India. Speaking of that, I found I was able to get sources for Lekki British School from Nigerian newspapers online, but I can imagine it's because the school's in Lagos. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:49, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
• Partial Support There are a small number of secondary schools that quite clearly meet notability requirements due to some unusual aspect of the school, whether that be historical/architectural significance, or just simple prestige. However, most of the secondary schools with articles on Wikipedia are more ordinary. I strongly believe that many of these "ordinary" schools nonetheless deserve an article due to their strong impact on their local communities and surrounding area, and the fact that many of them have enough coverage to write a quality article. This is demonstrated by the article on Amador Valley High School (which is a featured article about a rather run of the mill American high school) as well as by many of the 18 or so good articles on high schools listed at Wikipedia:Good articles/Social sciences and society. While I support the presumption of notability for many secondary schools, I believe that the requirements for assuming notability should be higher than simply proving that a secondary school exists. Preferably, I'd like to see a set of criteria that needs to be met before notability is assumed, sort of like what we do with athletes, songs, actors, films, ect. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 06:45, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support of course. All (okay, maybe 99.95%) of secondary schools in the US have plenty of coverage. I imagine the same is true in most developed nations. The main issue is when we can't find sources in less developed nations. And that provides bias issues and all sorts of other problems. Also, frankly, this is a reasonable thing for Wikipedia to cover. Finally, I really don't want to start hearing arguments that "this is just the kind of coverage any school would get" which I'm sure we'd start to see. Hobit (talk) 04:01, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose any category of articles being automatically notable. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:27, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Could you explain why? Hobit (talk) 15:31, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
    • I'd oppose inherent notability too, which we don't have on Wikipedia. We do have the presumption of notability, which means that for certain classes of articles, we presume them notable once certain standards are met. This can be argued against. As I have said in the past, I would very much argue against what in the US is called a homeschool group or homeschool academy that prepares kids for a high school diploma being considered notable. I'd also argue against many for-profit schools or possibly against some US charter schools depending on the nature of the organization and its role in the community. The presumption of notability just means that those !voting delete would have a heavier burden, and since notability is not a policy, its a guideline, consensus would be able to determine the cases where exceptions to the general norm do exist and where an article should be deleted. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:03, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
      • @TonyBallioni: Some categories of articles do have "presumed notability" - for example if they are legally recognized, "Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable, even if their population is very low." Wikipedia:Notability_(geographic_features) - Under current SCHOOLOUTCOMES you can still argue against, say, homeschooling groups (say "typical public high schools are protected by SCHOOLOUTCOMES but...) WhisperToMe (talk) 12:47, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
        • There is a critical difference between "inherited notability" and "presumed notability". The latter means that we are going to work on the presumption that the topic is notable enough for a standalone article but that can be challenged in the future if there is a reasonable case put forward that our presumption was wrong (in that no sourcing actually exists); this means someone would have to demonstrate their case along the lines of doing the legwork discussed in WP:BEFORE to show the presumption wrong. Inherited notability simply means that we would accept the notability of a topic due to its connection to a different topic, and that inherited notability thus can't be challenged. We don't do that at all, every topic has to stand up in its own. --MASEM (t) 14:48, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
          • I'm not sure I understand. We don't use inherited notability for secondary schools do we? I think Masem misread "inherent" as "inherited". EyeTripleE (talk) 21:23, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. One of the problems with "presumed notability" is that people here on Wikipedia attach different meanings to the term. To some, it means "automatic" or "inherent" notability, for which the general notability guidelines do not come into play. To others, it is simply shorthand for "it is reasonable to presume that the subject has received substantial coverage in multiple reliable sources, even if no one here on Wikipedia has uncovered them yet". As I look through the many opinions that precede mine in this discussion, I see that most of them reflect one or the other of these two very different notions. As for me, I'm inclined to view this question from a more practical perspective. Consider this listing from a reliable government source here. Does this single web page really provide the basis for 260 separate stand-alone articles, each of them consisting of the single sentence "{NAME OF SCHOOL] is a higher secondary school in the Malappuram district of Kerala, India" ? And that page is merely a subpage on the site shown here. Looking through the lists for each of the districts in Kerala (scroll down the page for the lists), you'll find that there are more than 2,000 such schools in Kerala, all of them source-able to this one site. Do all 2,000 get stand-alone articles? And considering that Kerala has about one-fortieth of India's population, are we prepared for 80,000 such articles? And considering that India has about one-sixth of the world's population, are we willing to have something on the order of half a million such articles? To me, that's just too large a number, hence my "Oppose" recommendation. NewYorkActuary (talk) 00:49, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Eh, that's probably less than the number of towns in the world () and those are all notable... Hobit (talk) 04:57, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
• Comment. I have just arrived here, and this is a lengthy discussion. Before I peruse it, I want to jot down a few initial thoughts. On the one hand, WP:ORG is exceedingly clear that No company or organization is considered inherently notable. No organization is exempt from this requirement, no matter what kind of organization it is, including schools. On the other hand, I have encountered AfDs where the participants almost blindly write "keep" comments about secondary schools, seemingly as if they were inherently notable. At some point, I remember making such !votes myself. I understand the argument that secondary schools are significant in their local communities and produce coverage that way, and I understand that this coverage can be especially difficult to find when the school is located in non-English-speaking countries (Wikipedia:Systemic bias). Nevertheless, I have tended to wish that there was more focus on evidence of coverage at these kinds of deletion discussions, rather than a blanket presumption that secondary schools are generally notable. Mz7 (talk) 05:37, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose -- Per Masem and just about every other opposition above. Additionally, we are not here to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS--notably, that of systemic bias of coverage of topics not in English. (That is not to say that we should not work to decrease it, but that it is not our purpose, which is to write an encyclopedia in English of topics which are notable.) --Izno (talk) 13:13, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose- There is not any such thing as inherent notability. It's not enough to merely verify that something exists, there has to be enough coverage to actually fill an article. Otherwise, we end up with an endless profusion of contentless microstubs. Reyk _YO! 14:08, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support Schools in English-speaking countries such as the UK are subject to independent inspection and testing. This provides a good body of source material and so we may safely presume that there's an adequate basis for coverage here. Andrew D. (talk) 13:28, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I don't knoe what's situation like in the West, but here in India, I'd say 90% of all secondary schools are not notable. In fact, even Wikipedia:Points to note while debating in WikiProject India related AFDs notes that Most of Indian schools fail to satisfy the WP:ORG and WP:GNG criteria.. 103.6.159.75 (talk) 14:44, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Partly per Sandstein and partly per those who say some version of no inherent (or presumption of) notability.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:05, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose along with some history: In many countries, such as the United States, almost all schools that have the "highest grade" of secondary education would easily meet WP:Notability if only someone would bother to do the research. It's ridiculous to delete such articles simply because those who would have the time or interest to update the article happen to miss the AFD. However, that is not true for all schools. Some special-purpose schools, such as "special discipline" high schools or "alternative education/self-paced" high schools in the United States typically lack sports teams, bands, and other things that generate the coverage needed to meet WP:Notability. If I see an article about such a school and I can't find enough in a Google search to show that it meets WP:N, I may send it to AfD and recommend it be merged into the parent-school-district article. I would expect such an AfD to succeed. Likewise, in countries where typical "high schools" do NOT receive enough press coverage to meet WP:N, they should not have stand-alone articles. The bottom line: If a school is likely to meet WP:N due to the type of school it is (e.g. academy, comprehensive, etc.) and treatment of that type of school by the press (e.g. extensive coverage of sports teams, etc.), then it should be presumed notable until proven otherwise. If there is no special reason to think it is likely to meet WP:N (e.g. it is a type of school where schools get scant attention from the local press), then the absence of proof along with a small amount of research by an editor seeking its deletion should be grounds to not presume it is notable. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 17:56, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support - This is the consensus that has emerged and been observed for years. Overturning it will lead to an absolute onslaught of challenges by bored deletionists that will sink the AfD process beneath hundreds of lost hours fighting over sourcing to no good end. In a lot of ways I'm past giving a fuck about AfD already; it's a massive time sink. But, one more time, here is the rationale behind our wise WP:OUTCOMES on schools. High schools are centers of their local communities and should be viewed as inherently notable just like occupied places, rivers, highways, and professional athletes. The reason for this is because all of these have published histories of their construction, sports teams that are covered in the press are the site of extracurricular activities covered in the press, etc. The flip side of this is that elementary schools are presumed NON notable unless truly exceptional specimens, since there are many more of them, they are less central to their communities, and do not have the same impact in terms of published coverage of teams and events. The OUTCOMES consensus is a workable compromise between inclusionists and deletionists that has expedited AfD for YEARS. Carrite (talk) 14:37, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
  • I want to stress on the "sink the AFD process" that the section below, we would absolutely need some type of grandfathering process and moratorium on AFDs of schools should SCHOOLOUTCOMES be nixed. In other words, the fears that AFD would be flooded by school AFDs is something that can be readily managed and thus should not be reason to keep SCHOOLOUTCOMES. --MASEM (t) 14:45, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

It seems obvious to me that such an assurance would need to be in the original RFC proposition for contributors to take account of it. They don't seem willing to accept post-haste assurances that it won't happen. With all due respect to the original proposer, I wonder if the proposition itself is somewhat flawed, in that it doesn't provide alternative actions in case of opposition. CalzGuy (talk) 15:33, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

The lack of that consideration of process is why I started the section below. It really should go hand-in-hand. And even if it was the case that we didn't have process, the AFD issue would be something covered under WP:FAITACCOMPLI, that flooding AFD with school articles would absolutely not be appropriate. It would just be better to have an explicit process statement to know how we'd go forward if SCHOOLOUTCOMES is removed. --MASEM (t) 15:42, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Apologies for not including that in the question, CalzGuy, but that question was a result of discussion at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Need for an RfC on schools' notability and nobody suggested it there. I also think there's merit in keeping the question simple, and dealing with the consequences separately once consensus has emerged. Cordless Larry (talk) 07:59, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Don't apologise. I don't think it would have been an obvious thing to do. However, I do think that once this discussion is closed as "No consensus", as it undoubtedly will, we will then need to have another discussion on where to go next, as I think there is a consensus for some change. It's just a matter of figuring out what. CalzGuy (talk) 09:22, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Echoing Cordless Larry here that from the discussion about having the RfC, the question of process was not an obvious one at the time. As I have expressed below, I am of the view that anything short of a close in the affirmative here will require more work on drafting a process and then probably another discussion on where to go. I think the advantage in separating the discussions and keeping it simple is that it allows people to comment on the question of notability itself, which has never really been answered by a guideline, just SCHOOLOUTCOMES. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:32, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose - Sandstein says it well, and plenty of others have added other relevant points. Consensus is not carved in stone and this project as a whole needs to improve upon the practices of its early days. - Sitush (talk) 01:11, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support - We keep high schools for very good reasons; not only do they influence the lives of thousands of people but they also play a significant part in their communities. To consider deleting articles on such significant institutions is, frankly, bizarre. Just Chilling (talk) 04:25, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Just Chilling We routinely delete churches, temples, town halls, post offices, hospitals, and many other institutions that also play a significant role in communities - high schools are the only "category" of such institutions that are specially protected. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:01, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Im just reminding you Dodger67 (and anyone else reading this, including the eventual closer) , that the RfC question is: Should secondary schools whose existence is verified by reliable, independent sources be presumed to be notable? OUTCOMES is not metioned and is therefore not the subject of this RfC. You can't ban its use. To do so would be to invite a list of several thousand AfD closures being posted on each new AfD as the documentary evidence that has produced the precedent. That said, 'churches, temples, town halls, post offices, hospitals, and many other institutions' are not, unlike schools' exempt from CSD-A7. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:55, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, I can't see a pressing need to allow articles about schools in Wikipedia that do not pass WP:GNG. Private schools, for example, are businesses, and why should a business that happens to be a school be exempt from the usual requirements? Also, school articles are often a liability, attracting BLP issues like "teh sports teacher mr smith is a pedofile he likes little girls lol" in more or less eloquent forms. —Kusma (t·c) 09:53, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. I've been following discussion for several days now. I agree with the arguments put forth by many others. If there are insufficient sources to satisfy the already extremely low bar of GNG, what basis is there for an encyclopedic article. older ≠ wiser 12:02, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose We should leave this to the GNG. Some high school will be notable, some won't, but there is no justification for presuming that they will. The corollary is that we shouldn't presume that primary schools are non-notable. Ultimately what matter are the sources and whether they enable us to write a good quality article. Neljack (talk) 10:44, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

And how do we do that? One at a time at AfD. Hope to see you there, wasting 5 minutes per debate or more checking sources as we wade through the flood of new articles on elementary schools... Carrite (talk) 15:09, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. For me, WP:NPOV is the crucial policy. There are plenty of schools and degree awarding institutions - some of which are even accredited - that are of dubious quality. Without robust sourcing, we cannot maintain neutral articles. A school whose article is supported only by namechecks or reports in local media, may be completely out of line with the tone of the reports - and that could work in either direction. Multiple reliable independent sources is the only way to ensure we meet our core policies. Guy (Help!) 12:56, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support - the GNG argument is that secondary schools are presumed to be notable if there is evidence of their existence, because that condition has held up time and time again in many deletion discussions. Pick a school that exists, and there are very nearly always reliable sources about it somewhere. In a disproportionately large number of cases with secondary schools (versus other topics) these reliable sources are local or regional newspapers which do not maintain an online archive or have an online presence at all, but they can nearly always be located if someone is around to look. So it is reasonable to assume that all accredited secondary-level schools will pass GNG. Furthermore there's little harm in allowing these articles to exist: there's little cause for concern about undue promotion as the vast majority of these schools will be public, which is typically why articles on commercial organizations are subject to additional scrutiny, and other concerns can be dealt with through routine patrols just like every other topic. Requiring that sources be located for these articles will cause the school articles that are left to be biased toward WP:RECENTISM. (Of course we should prefer that sources demonstrating notability be included, but it is reasonable to assume that they exist; that's what all the supplementary notability guidelines are about.) Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:33, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Ivanvector, can you please provide links to AFD discussions that demonstrate your assertion above? (Pick a school that exists, and there are very nearly always reliable sources about it somewhere.) I have provided links above that show the opposite, that SCHOOLOUTCOMES is used as a self-fulfilling prophecy to shut down discussion despite strong arguments that point to real guidelines. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:55, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support - the understanding that secondary schools should be considered notable came about because experience shows that, with enough research, sources can be found for most such schools that meet WP:ORG. The alternative is to have a large series of AFDs to try to weed out the very few that don't; hardly a good use of anyone's time. One issue seems to be schools on the Indian sub-continent that tend to be poorly sourced. Google is a poor tool for finding sources on schools in non-English speaking countries. Very few schools on the Indian sub-continent, for example, have much of an Internet presence. We need to avoid systemic bias and allow time for local hard-copy and local language sources to be investigated in such cases. The Whispering Wind (talk) 17:18, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

• Rubbish. We're not primarily a social experiment and all this carping about systemic bias, using it as a way to avoid our encyclopaedic requirements, is just bleeding heart stuff. How much time should we allow? Do you have any idea how many false statements are made on articles concerning the Indian sub-continent? - Sitush (talk) 21:54, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support - as a veteran of the old days, let me tell you, we don't want to go back. As someone who participated in school AfD's back in 2004-05, pre WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, I can say unequivocally the status quo serves the project well. 1) I believe that it is an appropriate gazetteer use of wikipedia. Wikipedia is more useful for it. 2) It is a very useful training ground for young editors. 3) It is also a useful show-of-force deterrence for young vandals, who find their predictable nonsense knocked down surprisingly quickly, despite what their teachers tell them about wikipedia's unreliability. 4) It protects wikipedia from bias, both actual and apparent. It would be great if all WP:GNG decisions could be so objective. Going back to the old days will result in lots of American schools with lots of local WP:RS coverage staying in, with lots of Indian or other schools getting removed. This would be an accident of timing, plus a reflection of the different roles of these schools in different cultures. It would put well-meaning editors in the line of fire of accusations of prejudice. No one wants to spend their time here that way. 5) School deletion discussions never die. Again, this was the prior experience: when a school is deleted, its alums and students re-appear consistently to re-add it. Even if legitimately re-added, another AfD frequently re-starts. Again, we have better places to burn our calories. 6) The hope of deleting Western schools to limit bias is unrealistic. Secondary schools receive different coverage in different cultures. And our view/visibility of what is a WP:RS is skewed by internet access as well. This is just a bug in the practicality of WP:GNG. If we subjected counties and towns to WP:GNG, we would see the same bias between, say, U.S. and Indian towns; this is an ideal use of an objective, non-GNG inclusion criterion. Chris vLS (talk) 02:44, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I do not find SCHOOLOUTCOMES useful, in that it documents what has happened in the past, but seems to be picked up and used as an argument for the future or used in an AfD as an argument for keeping a school with no notability; because we generally keep schools is not an argument for keeping schools ~ that's circularity of argument, surely. In general, several people above ~ Sandstein, Reyk, Finnusertop, Wugapodes, Beeblebrox and others ~ have said it more clearly than i, but schools should have to prove notability to have an article, or we'll be making nothing more than a directory (OK, not "nothing more", but we'll be making WP more directory-like). Happy days, Lindsay^Hello 11:02, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose as it seems to me to be addressing a secondary issue while not addressing a more important one, as the RfC here seems to be considering only the aspect of notability, which is not necessarily the only criterion involved. There is also the matter of whether there really is sufficient encyclopedic content for an article, which is being ignored in this question, and is probably the more important factor involved here. I have no doubt virtually every junior high school, middle school, and high school can have a good deal of somewhat crufty material added, and I myself know from current experience of looking through an old 1970's Who's Who of Religion that in that work there are a frightening number of bios listing (generally priests or nuns) as administrators or teachers at such schools. There is also the question not addressed here regarding how to structure articles on school districts. I've also seen a lot of bios indicating someone is the head of, for instance, a Catholic diocesan school committee. Coming up with a clear MOS regarding all organizations involved in secondary schools would probably be preferable. Such an MOS would also be able to deal with matters like school districts, diocesan school offices, etc., and I suppose regarding primary schools and their managing organizations (I've seen a lot of bios listing people as teaching in primary schools in the Who's Who too). John Carter (talk) 19:54, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support if for no other the reason than that the planning, building, and opening of a high school is such a significant undertaking and use of public or private funds, that there is bound to be coverage. Whether or not we can find that coverage is irrelevant. I also believe that WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES saves us all a lot of time and effort at AFD that would be far better spent elsewhere. The existence of these articles also furthers our purpose as topic valid for inclusion in an almanac. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 20:59, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

• Your rationale does not necessarily apply outside the developed countries, nor does it satisfy even WP:V, which needs multiple independent sources and not, for example, town council minutes. - Sitush (talk) 15:53, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

• Strong Support in keeping secondary schools notable - SCHOOLOUTCOMES eliminates having 30 high schools in the US with 1 in India. Schools cited by independent sources should be considered notable and my point of view is that even primary schools verified by 5+ sources should be kept and protected by SCHOOLOUTCOMES. SCHOOLOUTCOMES is a longstanding policy and as stated above around a decade old. The reasons outlined in the above 'Oppose' comments do not convince me. Voting 'support' on this Rfc is not about stating that all secondary schools should be considered notable but stating that all secondary schools that are verified by sources independent of the subject should be considered notable. Overall as per my statements above I support status quo with possible slight changes in favour of more schools to be considered as notable. J947 01:52, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
• Support as long-term editor, I agree with others: let us keep the status quo, which has served us well. --David Tornheim (talk) 05:55, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose per the arguments given above by other users. The simple fact that a school exists does not make it notable. The notability of some subject must be proved by multiple reliable sources, and most of schools will certainly fail this. The current situation when schools are considered by default notable is illogical, and some users are 'abusing' WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES by creating some kind of articles (e.g. about schools with some 100 students) which are inadmissible in an encyclopedia, IMO. Wikipedia is not a directory. XXN, 18:34, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

• Informal Support for African Secondary schools, Oppose for other territories: Secondary schools are essentially not news-worthy in many climes. They also lack competitive drive due to thier non-profit nature, as least from my side of the world. Most of what makes other institutions get reguslar coverage in relaible sources doesn't really apply to secondary schools. I'm not saying all educational topics must have this special treatment on wiki but I am of the opinion that an exception should be created for universities and secondary schools, which are part of the standardized mechanism in formulating the educational being of any individual. We don't expect to find multiple significant coverage for Nigerian secondary schools before accomodating them here.

One of my projects in my second coming on Wikipedia was to increase the number of notable and popular secondary schools on Wiki. I noticed that out of about 10,000 sec schools in Lagos/Ogun axis, where I'm based, there were only about ten with wiki articles. This isn't too surprising when you note that less than 100 of this 10k can boast of an existing website. The way these schools operate and are structured, there will always be limited coverage. Nonetheless, I started creating articles on the most popular and notable, especially the public ones. I have created Lagos State Model College Badore,Federal Government Girls College, Ipetumodu, Lagos State Model College Kankon, Lagos State Junior Model College Kankon, Lagos State Model College Igbonla, Lagos State Model College Badore, Landmark University Secondary School, Lagos State Junior Model College Badore, Covenant University Secondary School, etc. One of my secondary school schools even got speedied twice and a COI tag wrongly placed on it. It was funny to me because the school in question is one that all Nigerians are familiar with, because it was used to act a national series of immense popularity some decades ago. You can verify my statement yourself, if you know any Nigerian who's less than 40 years, just ask him/her if he has heard of Binta International School, I'm 98% sure that his response will be yes. Or better-still, ask any Nigerian editor on Wikipedia, the response will be the same. I really got angry by the COI tag that was placed on the article. I think we need to be soft on African secondary schools as long as the information is verifiable.

I went through many of the oppose votes and I think the fear is that they don't want Wikipedia to get clumped up with thousands of poorly written articles, which is an understandable position. This is why I will only support for African articles, because I know that will never be the case for them. The Nigerian secondary schools with minimal online coverage are essentially notable enough for inclusion on Wikipedia. I'm voting for this to be an informal policy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Darreg (talk • contribs) 14:01, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose – Nothing has inherent notability, as it says in the WP:N guideline, and there is no good reason why secondary schools should be excepted from the usual practice. RGloucester — ☎ 19:01, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
• Support in the sense that the default should be to keep if the sourcing is thin but otherwise valid and that the proper response to a stub-like article on a high school should be to search for ways to improve the article before assuming that the subject is non-notable. My reasoning is that rival online encyclopedias, such as the Norwegian SNL has articles on the various high schools in Norway. Hence at least one competing encyclopedia considers this class of subject worthy of comprehensive coverage, and we should strive to be at least as comprehensive as that. Of course, if the sourcing is nonexistent and directory type-information is all that's verifiable, then an independent article would be too short to be useful. The school's existence would be better covered in the article on the town that the school is in. Sjakkalle (Check!) 20:59, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
• Conditional support I am generally a supporter of SCHOOLOUTCOMES. The problem with SCHOOLOUTCOMES in my opinion is that editors at an AFD simply quote it with a rational such as Keep per SCHOOLOUTCOMES. or Keep due to longstanding consensus that secondary schools are notable. This is actually incorrect because schooloutcomes says that an article about a school is generally kept if 1. It is an independently accredited degree-awarding institution and 2. at least one independent source has been found to show that the school actually exists. Both these are important and the burden of proof (that the school exists and is accredited) lies on the editors arguing keep. Yet somehow this is often ignored at AFDs, which ultimately creates resentment. I personally am fine with SCHOOLOUTCOMES as I think that unlike companies, schools do not send out press releases and get them published in some churnalistic media. It is also one of the first articles often edited by students (and often serves as the defacto sandbox) and I would rather have them editing these school articles, than going around messing with other articles. Many secondary schools also have alumni associations and it is helpful to keep a list of notable people who have graduated from the school. As schools can also be considered a building with cultural significance, they may be notable if we apply WP:GEOFEAT. As such, I am in favour of the criteria in SCHOOLOUTCOMES, provided it is strictly followed. (The burden of proof needs to be on the editors arguing keep). --Lemongirl942 (talk) 06:54, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, and tighten the restriction to exclude reporting on school athletics as indicators of notability. Why? Because it fails WP:INDY. Due to the popularity of schools sports (especially in the US but also some other places), local newspapers have a very strong fiduciary interest in a thick stream of coverage of school sports for local entertianment purposes, and this coverage tell us precisely nothing about why the school, as an institution, might be notable in some way. Also exclude local reportage on faculty changes as indicators of notability of the institution or the faculty member. Maybe even just exclude local coverage, period. Very, very few high schools are actually notable; when they are it is usually for something incidental (a particular tragedy or scandal that happened there), not because of anything intrinsic about the institution. The vast majority of the articles on these things should be pruned to the essentials and merged into the parent articles about their school districts, just like we do with junior high and middle schools, and elementary schools.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:59, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Support First, the collective wisdom of many years of WP editors, along with long-standing common practice, supports turning this into a policy or established practice. Second, in the real world, secondary schools in the U.S. are no more notable than those in Nigeria, Syria, India, or Egypt. Some flexibility is needed here in order to deal with the reality on the ground. First Light (talk) 08:10, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Support We don't need gray areas. There is a certain crowd here who gets a thrill our of exploiting any weakness (usually an inexperienced editor) and in the darkness of AfD, fecklessly remove content that affects a lot of ordinary readers. If there is a source reporting the existence of a secondary school; then the discussion should end. I will also put in a reminder of WP:BEFORE. If there are no sources and it doesn't google, then have at it. Trackinfo (talk) 08:38, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

• I Support that schools which are at least secondary and senior secondary should have at least one mention in some third party reliable website. If such school has no mention anywhere then, it must be recognised by the government of that country and must be 25 years old. Nowadays school articles which have no third party independent sources and established in less than 4 years ago are kept as WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES. However dance schools, play schools, day schools, kindergarten schools, cooking schools, handicrafts schools, martial arts schools, should pass WP:GNG, if they are not established by the government. Marvellous Spider-Man 11:17, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose per WP:EXISTENCE, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, WP:NOTDIRECTORY and WP:GNG. This has been a sore subject with me for a while. There are far too many schools that would never pass notability that have stub articles we can't get rid of because of this idiocy. My experience has failed to provide any evidence that secondary schools all have enough RS coverage to justify an automatic presumption of WP:N. The one and only support I have read above that does carry some weight is DGG's which is essentially an IAR argument based on convenience. I concede that if we scrap the presumptive notability there will be an uptick at AfD which already suffers from chronic lack of participation. However, a lot of the articles I am thinking of could be dispatched via CSD A7, though we would have to remove the prohibition on educational institutions from the template. Further I strongly support prohibiting WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES from being cited in school related AfD's. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Per Ad Orientem, who pretty much said everything I was thinking. JudgeRM (talk to me) 19:48, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
• Comment. I've already registered my opposition above; I'm now simply looking to share two observations. First, I was curious as to how our opinions on this issue have evolved over the years. The earliest extant survey of community opinion appears to be the old "What's in; what's out" page. Prior to early 2006, this page collected comments on secondary schools and, immediately before being removed in May 2006, it had collected comments from 36 editors (as seen here). 16 of those editors called for the inclusion of all secondary schools, most by simply stating "In", but with a few who gave rationales that we today would recognize as assertions of "inherent notability". As for the other 20 editors, a few simply said "Out", but the majority were more nuanced. Their responses took the form of either "In, but only if ... " or "Out, unless ... ". The conditions specified by these nuanced comments sometimes were objective, but more often were not. The general notability guidelines did not yet exist back then, so nobody was citing them. But most of the nuanced votes were setting conditions that were consistent with WP:GNG, with some making arguments that today would be recognized as falling under WP:ROUTINE or WP:STANDALONE. To me, the most striking aspect of this old survey is that, after more than ten years of debate, we remain divided -- roughly 50/50 -- on the question.

I also looked at the evolution of the Outcomes page itself. After some minor adjustments in wording, the initial statement regarding schools was the one found here. This was expanded a bit in late 2007, to give detail regarding different types of schools (i.e., primary vs. secondary), as shown here. The big change took place in May 2009, with its changing of "in most cases being kept" to "being kept". The edit that made this change is here. Its edit summary cited this sparsely-attended discussion as the basis for making the change. That discussion was not the subject of an RfC and I could find no evidence that it was publicized anywhere other than on that Talk page. In early 2011, there was a brief attempt to declare "per se notability" for high schools, but there was an immediate objection and, in that day's flurry of edits (see here), something looking quite like the current version came into being.

These two observations show that there has never been a consensus on the treatment of secondary schools. At the very least, the Outcomes essay should be amended to reflect this fact. NewYorkActuary (talk) 20:17, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. The standard should be the demonstrated existence of sources showing the subject meets WP:GNG. No sources = no notability = no article. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 05:03, 6 February 2017 (UTC).

• Enough – this survey makes it very clear that support and oppose are not very different in number, and that there is no consensus. Close the survey and change modes to collecting ideas for how to move forward, if at all. Dicklyon (talk) 05:39, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

See WP:NOTAVOTE. Looking over this discussion it is abundantly clear that the Oppose arguments are heavily based on policy and guidelines while the Supports are largely silent on that subject. The reviewing Admin is going to have to weigh the respective arguments and determine if the various retentionist arguments outweigh our guidelines and policy. -Ad Orientem (talk) 15:25, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

• Support, because the alternatives are far worse. Secondary schools are the backbone of many smaller cities, and thus primarily generate interest in their local community. They are unique among local organizations in that they receive far more coverage locally than any neighborhood shop or municipal governmental department, yet they rarely receive regional or national coverage. If we repeal the existing guidelines for school notability, I predict that editors favoring deletion will use WP:AUD to bar all the local sources from consideration and use WP:ORGDEPTH to discredit any of the national coverage, since any national coverage is likely only in response to a transient event. Proving the notability of a secondary school will become absurdly difficult. Given that our readers have a clear interest in secondary school articles, I do not support the massive timesink that will be needed to defend these articles from deletion. Altamel (talk) 18:39, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose for many reasons all listed above in previous Opposes. I see no reason to override normal notability standards for schools. MB 19:16, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, pretty much entirely because of WP:EXIST. Enterprisey (talk!) 22:09, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose There's no reason why WP:ORG shouldn't apply to schools. The argument that secondary schools are automatically notable seems to be advanced largely by people from countries such as the US where those schools are typically very large. In other countries, such as Australia, the size varies a lot and many high schools (such as the one I attended) aren't even well known in their own city much less the subject of significant coverage in reliable sources. Nick-D (talk) 10:39, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
• Support our policies and guidelines, oppose changes to our policies and guidelines based on this RfC  This is not a clear RfC.  Is this supposed to be a massive rebellion of GNG-centrism, or is this an intent to require two sources rather than one for OUTCOMES?  GNG is in such disrepute that an admin looking at a list of ninety references recently said that those were not enough to pass GNG.  DRV routinely protects "not notable", meaning "I don't like it", as a valid policy argument.  Unscintillating (talk) 00:02, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
• oppose and confusing wording Secondary schools should be deemed non-notable unless notability is proven by GNG and other ways. Merely proving that the school exists is not enough. Otherwise, we could be having a school that was closed a century ago and never very notable when it was around claim a WP article. Don't laugh, some 400 year old British members of Parliament who never did anything documented have WP articles. Automatic notability should not be around. If something is very important, it will be notable. Lakeshook (talk) 20:23, 14 February 2017 (UTC) Striking blocked sock !vote. Gluons12 ^☢|☕ 20:11, 15 February 2017 (UTC).
• Oppose. Sources should be reviewed and evaluated for notability. Systemic bias concerns can be alleviated either through an amended process specific to regions of concern (if that's actually necessary), or simply within a proper reasoned discussion of the article at hand. As per many above, I see no compelling arguments for exemptions for schools that are not process related. Scribolt (talk) 10:16, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
• Support status quo per Cullen. High schools are regular magnets of media coverage no matter where you go. And from the sense of providing an almanac, high schools are obvious community centers of interest. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 15:41, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
• Support, as better than the alternative. High schools are a great magnet for attracting new editors, and that's a good (Wikipedia-public) policy reason to support retaining the status quo. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 16:57, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Process to consider

Working on the presumption that this may close in opposition, there is clearly a concern about the status quo of school articles. As part of the consideration here, I would suggest that if this does close this way, that all existing secondary school articles should at least be kept and there should not be a rush of mass deletions per WP:FAITACCOMPLI to remove them. However, fair AFD challenges can be held, recognizing that OUTCOMES no longer is supported here. Where possible, editors should be encouraged to merge info about secondary schools into articles on the notable city/town/school system and redirects left behind, avoiding the AFD process and keeping past contributions. This avoids any aggressive, disruptive approach if this should as suggested and alleviate fears that thousands of articles will suddenly be sent to the void. It will take a case-by-case review of each to determine what should be done, in such cases, and that will take many man-months of evaluation. --MASEM (t) 17:51, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Given that the current 'vote' is 13:11 in favour of oppose, I would have to say I would hope that would be closed as "No consensus" rather than oppose, if it was closed just now. Having said that, I do agree that any change to consensus here, should not result in mass deletions. Rather, it should result in the development of a guideline, which may or may not result in deletions. CalzGuy (talk) 18:21, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not saying it will close "oppose", but I think we do need to broadly address the concerns of those !voting "support" that worry what would become of the articles that already exist. I think it is necessary to address what should or should not happen should "oppose" be the result as to alleviate some of those "support" concerns. By no means am I saying this RFC is done and over with. --MASEM (t) 18:38, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Masem: I'm wiling to start a guide on how to improve high school students to ensure that those that already exist can be developed as well as they can be. I've written many high school articles, mostly in North America but some also for international private and state-operated schools around the world. I actually encouraged Chinese university students in a workshop to start writing about their high schools, and this is a way to get Wikipedia to grow. WhisperToMe (talk) 09:16, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

• Echoing CalzGuy on it currently trending "no consensus". Regardless of how this RfC closes, even if it closes as support, I think SCHOOLOUTCOMES is no longer workable, and there will need to be further discussion on how exactly to implement the consensus here, or in the case of a no consensus close, to try to arrive at a guideline for schools that can achieve broad community support. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:27, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• I agree that there will probably have to be further discussion about where to go next, whichever way the RfC closes, but it's still early days - I can see this one running for a while. Cordless Larry (talk) 18:32, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
• ? If this is voted down, it will just be another proposal not included in the guidelines. One does not make a consensus by people not voting for something, they make a consensus getting people to vote in favor of something. It will be as it always has been, the edge cases will sometimes get fought about, and the schooloutcomes out so that fights don't have to happen over and over again will be generally followed for the rest. The schooloutcomes thoughts and what gave rise to it are not going to magically disappear. The reasonable improvement from present would be to have a school sng: eg. 25 years, 500 students, acreditation, reference in such and such sources, etc., etc. but obviously that depends on someone really working on it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:45, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
  • The way this is being presented, if it passes with Support, then what is at SCHOOLOUTCOMES should be codified better at WP:NORG ("All verified-existing secondary schools are presumed notable"), removing the language at SCHOOLOUTCOMES as duplicative at least with respect to secondary schools. If this passes with Oppose, then the language at SCHOOLOUTCOMES should be changed to reflect that secondary schools are not presumed notable just by sheer existence. --MASEM (t) 19:00, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  I would go farther and say if this is no consensus SCHOOLOUTCOMES as something that can be referenced in AfD is in shambles, and there would probably need to be more work done on crafting a guideline that could get community consensus on schools. SCHOOLOUTCOMES has the somewhat weird place in AfD because the idea is that it represents a longstanding community consensus on schools. Anything short of a support close here would be a rejection of that idea. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:09, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  This RfC has already attracted far more comments than the average school AfD, so if consensus either way is reached here, then I would argue that it is more representative of the community's views than any assessment of AfD closes would be. Cordless Larry (talk) 19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  No. Schooloutcomes is, as the name says, about outcomes, the only way to change that is actually have mass deletions at afd. (and really, no matter how many comment, you don't get a backdoor consensus by finding no consensus or opposition on specific wording of a new guideline, no one has ever proposed before, and never bothered to refine.) -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:17, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  Key is that SCHOOLOUTCOMES is an essay, and it has been used (or misused, depending on one's POV) at AFD to keep articles on schools as the sole argument. It's working on a catch-22 approach: "keep this article on a school because school articles are routinely kept", and allowing those AFDs to close without any attempt to show actual notability or additional sourcing. This RFC seems to be stating do we actually bite the bullet and say that secondary schools should be presumed notable and eliminate the catch-22 , or do we say they are not and eliminate the catch-22 the other way. And as Tony points out above, even a "no consensus" should lead to discussion about what to do about the catch-22 problem. --MASEM (t) 20:32, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  That's not a Catch-22, even if that word was not overly dramatic, it is another beloved bugbear of Wikipedia, 'consistency', and sure we generally really want to be consistent - to treat like, like - because that is a basis for being neutral and fair (until we are not). You do get a chance to discuss it every-time at Afd, but Afd like every process looks for both a consistent application, and the reduction of transaction costs (eg., don't have lengthy fights about the same thing, again and again). Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:47, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  But that creates the problem emphasized by the two linked AFDs: resting the argument against the deletion on an essay that describes a practice as to maintain that practice is a self-fulfilling cycle. The closures of the AFDs and the subsequent discussion show it is time to either cement that practice in notability guidelines or get rid of it as to break the cycle. --MASEM (t) 21:17, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

  SCHOOLOUTCOMES has a bunch of other uses, including suppressing the addition/supporting the deletion-or-merge of numerous primary/elementary school articles. We need to ensure that this continues to be the case, whatever the outcome here. CalzGuy (talk) 20:16, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Good luck with that. The grand compromise between deletionism and inclusioniam would be flushed, the SCHOOLOUTCOMES essay reduced to nothing. Deletionists might think they're "upholding standards" and eliminating a bunch of really terrible articles about high schools from India, but what they are actually doing is opening up the floodgates for about 100,000 American and English elementary schools to have vapid fluff pieces with news about Mrs. Finley the principal and what is served for lunch on Fridays. You think I joke. Carrite (talk) 15:15, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

If SCHOOLOUTCOMES were to be eliminated, notability of schools would default to WP:NORG, and key in there is WP:AUD "On the other hand, attention solely from local media, or media of limited interest and circulation, is not an indication of notability; at least one regional, statewide, provincial, national, or international source is necessary." Now, we'd have to be careful ("This school is acredited by the state's board, so there's your one statewide source!"), the implication is that this should be a secondary source, not primary. But we have the language in place to prevent a flood of primary schools from being created because of that. --MASEM (t) 15:18, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment: We can't get hung up on degree/diploma awarding as it is uncommon in many countries for secondary schools (attended by pupils aged 12-18 or some subset) to award documents like those. Stifle (talk) 14:38, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment: Supporting SCHOOLOUTCOMES only because we're scared of the amount of work that would suddenly pop up if it is abolished doesn't make sense. Setting up a separate stream for such deletion discussions, so as not to block up the "normal" AFD stream is trivially easy. It will do no harm if we take months, or even a year or longer, to clear out school pages that might no longer qualify for inclusion. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:21, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Spoken like somebody that doesn't spend a lot of time at AfD. Carrite (talk) 15:18, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment About two years ago, the notability requirements for planets was readjusted, which resulted in hundreds if not thousands of planet articles being nominated for deletion. I was working at AfD at the time, and can attest that going through all of these deletions was a bloody nightmare. However, the majority of the planet articles were non-controversial redirects since they lacked any coverage in reliable sources (or at least beyond a few trivial mentions that confirmed the existence of the planets). This meant that non-admins such as myself were able to substantially help with the workload. With secondary schools, I highly doubt this will occur. At least in the United States, high schools get tons of coverage at the city, township and county level. However, most also receive at least some coverage (of debatable worth) from sources at the state and federal level. There are going to be very few non-controversial AfDs, and the burden of closing them will fall on the admins. WP: AfD will likely be completely and utterly clogged for the foreseeable future if this discussion does not reaffirm the current consensus regarding secondary schools. (I’m not exaggerating here- we have articles on over one-hundred public high schools in the state of Iowa alone, which is roughly the twentieth least populated state in the US). Given this, I believe that some concrete steps need to be taken to keep wp:AfD functional. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 00:18, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the AfD process would probably be flooded with AfDs should this not close as support initially, but I also think Masem has a point that WP:FAITACCOMPLI does exist. The issue is how to deal with editors who would likely make WP:POINTy nominations afterwards (I have no one in particular in mind here, just a gut feeling.) I'm not sure what the best practical way to prevent that is if the RfC closes NC or oppose, but I also feel that the sheer volume of work that it would take for people to nominate a ton of schools would keep people at bay for a while, especially since I doubt this will close as outright oppose at this time (but who knows, I could be wrong and we have plenty of time left in the RfC.) TonyBallioni (talk) 00:43, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

As I said above, to my eyes, the primary issue regarding a lot of primary and secondary schools is probably not so much their notability as such, but whether there is really enough encyclopedic content to merit a separate article. In cases like this one, I think that there actually are probably quite a few relevant reference works relating to the topic, and they would, I think, probably be the best indicators of how we should proceed here. The primary question there being what content to have in articles on specific institutions, and what content to have in school districts, or similar bodies, and how much really encyclopedic content that leaves over for separate articles on specific schools in those bodies. Now, I myself wouldn't necessarily have any real objections to, for instance, articles on schools of any level, primary or higher, which seem to be one of the few or only schools (either at that level or higher) operated by a specific entity, like a church. But how to deal with content on specific schools as opposed to their governing bodies, where such include several similar schools, is another matter entirely. John Carter (talk) 21:11, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Personally, I would like to see some alternative policy to schooloutcomes created. I know for a fact that there are many secondary schools that there is a lot of encyclopedic things to say about, but that would probably end up at AfD is no replacement policy existed. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 07:03, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment about closing - We're still a ways from the 30-day mark, but when the time comes what do people think about requesting a team of three uninvolved editors/admins to work together on the close, as is done from time to time on highly contentious matters. This is something that's come up so many times, and so often, and with so much history that it may be useful. Numerically, at time of writing, it's just about even between support and oppose, which may mean no consensus, but there are nuances, qualifications, interpretations, etc. that suggest something may come out of it. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:43, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Seconding. The notability of secondary schools has been a highly debated topic on Wikipedia, and there is a lot of nuance within the discussion that needs to be accounted for. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 21:05, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I'd also support that. SCHOOLOUTCOMES is aprox. a decade old, and anything that would change it in one way or the other would have a huge impact. Having a team of uninvolved closers seems ideal. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:13, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

I'd support that approach too. Cordless Larry (talk) 17:34, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Done. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:42, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

• Comment As I suggested earlier, I don't think there should be any outcome from this RFC other than a Nc close, as I think that, with all due respect to the OP, it asked the wrong question. We need an RFC that asks the right question, actually a positive change from observational essay to an agreed policy or guideline. The oppose camp see SCHOOLOUTCOMES as a pseudo-guideline being used to prop up non-notable additions to the project, while supporters see it as a description of the actualité of AFD. It would be much better to define what SHOULD happen at AFD rather than describe what HAS happened previously CalzGuy (talk) 07:14, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

That's what this RFC was intended to do, by posing the question if secondary schools were notable, which was what the various no consensus AfDs seemed to be disagreeing on. The argument from the keeps traditionally being that SCHOOLOUTCOMES has long established that schools were notable and the deletes being that proof of meeting GNG or WP:ORG was required in the moment. This RfC was intended to resolve that by asking the most basic neutral question possible. If it closes NC or oppose, I agree that more work will need to be done on a new guideline, but I think the reasoning behind this RfC was sound and that it was the right question to ask. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:24, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

The RFC is a single question to do with notability of secondary schools. There is much more required to be covered, and agreed, if a guideline (policy is probably OTT) is to come into play. For instance, there be nuances of geography, or of age of pupils, or of age of schools. Is a school notable if the building in which it is housed is notable? What about elementary/primary schools? What about all-through schools. This RFC is only about a single aspect of the whole. The discussion needs to be widened. CalzGuy (talk) 16:20, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

If the RfC does close anyway other than the affirmative, then yes, you are right. The point is that it wasn't entirely clear before this started that something more than a "yes or no" was needed here. All the advice provided was for a narrowly construed RfC which is why it was framed this way. If this is closed in a way other than "support" the closing statement and this RfC will be able to serve as a starting point for a future discussion and will allow those of us who want to take part in drafting it to consider points that I don't think would have been considered if this RfC did exist. Personally, I think a wider RfC would have been even more likely to lead to a NC close than this one if there was not a more narrowly construed comment period first. tl;dr: You're right moving forward if this doesn't close support, but I still think this was the right starting point. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:31, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

A 'No consensus' close will leave the status quo as is. It will be no different from a Support close because that's where we are just now. CalzGuy (talk) 06:33, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

We normally determine no consensus based on whether or not there is consensus,regardless of where it may happen to lead. Ay way, I think there is very clear consensus, far outreaching the result here--essentially no high school afd where the school clearly had real existence and was clearly a high school has closed as delete for lack of notability in the last 5 or 6 years. The argument that we must have sourcing for verifiability is of course valid as far as the verification of the facts in the article is concerned, but that's irrelevant, for meeting WP:V is a good deal less than the specific types of sourcing that shows notability. DGG ( talk ) 00:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Except that a point that is absent or underemphasized but core to this is how does WP:NORG's Audience guidance fit into secondary school notability. Many examples of "kept" secondary schools presented during this violate WP:AUD by using strictly local sources (that otherwise meet V/RS), but this point is never really brought up during AFD because you have a lot of people shouts "SCHOOLOUTCOMES". We need to get rid of SCHOOLOUTCOMES regardless of which way consensus falls, either by explicitly writing the allowance for secondary schools into NORG, or otherwise not given secondary schools that free pass at notability. I agree that this RFC doesn't answer that question but we now know better how to word it, including stipulation that if the "no free pass" is the agreed option, we are going to grandfather all existing school articles to avoid flooding AFD. --MASEM (t) 15:14, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

• Assuming the closer has read this far, this RfC is as long as it is short, is as broad as it is narrow, and as skewed as it is straight - on two major points:

1. Schools don't 'not exist'. School articles are generally written about schools that exist. As coord of the WP:WPSCH for years (and genuinely active at it to boot), I've rarely come acrosrs a school being invented for the purpose of hoax. School articles may often sound somewhat promotional, but they ae mainly written by the children that attend them - or alumni and let's face it, most people are proud of their schools and without them they wouldn't be able to read or write or know that the world is not flat - let alone edit Wikipedia. Practically everyone on the planet goes to a secondary school with the exception of some remote developing regions. It's therefore fair to say that schools have an impact on society. On the other hand Not everyone has eaten in a small Mitchelin starred restaurant in the Netherlands that gets an article without so much as a nod, and doing so would not make them nutritional scientists, heart surgeons or astrophysicists. What's missing in this debate is rather a large portion of common sense - an expression we're not supposed to use on Wikipedia.
2. None of the opposers have any respect for the sensitivities of the dedicated editors and admins who have the burden the workload presented a) by new page patrollers who without a clue are allowed to tag articles and send them down various sewers of deletion or conversely let the clearly non notable or spammy for-profit high street cram school through. To oppose this motion would open the flood gates to the likes of those who with alarming regularity over the years now and again decide to send a bunch of school articles to AfD because between meals in their 'notable' restaurants, they have noting else better to do. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:22, 12 February 2017 (UTC)