Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools

New template

A new editor, User:JohKerin, has created this template, and has been adding it to every school article in Michigan. I'm wondering if we need this level of test score data in high school articles (and who will maintain the yearly data). Magnolia677 (talk) 23:41, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

It does seem like an unnecessary level of information, especially for stats that will change for each article every year; we can't even keep the decennial census information up to date on a large number of city articles, it seems unrealistic to expect information that changes yearly to be kept up to date. - Aoidh (talk) 23:49, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Agreed - what makes this relevant? Unnecessary detail, and it will not be mainteined. RickH86 (talk) 14:58, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Using possible maintenance shortfall as an excuse to remove specific content is the least you want, considering that many school articles contain outdated enrollment and demographic data. JohKerin (talk) 12:45, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

That articles are already filled with outdated information isn't a good selling point to add more, and the issue is that it seems like an unnecessary level of detail. - Aoidh (talk) 16:09, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

There is going to be information needs yearly updates. One downside is often the difficulty to maintain/update that information. Keeping that in mind, the information can be valuable enough to include it in articles. For example, number of students or school ranking are important. However, extensive details about standarized exams seems to me to be a lot less important, and therefore unnecessary. TheGEICOgecko (talk) 17:40, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Fort Bend Independent School District

Would someone from WP:SCHOOLS take a look at Fort Bend Independent School District? It's been tagged with {{More citations needed}} since July 2021, but maybe that should be reassessed. I'm also wondering about all the images being used in the article, and whether an image of each school is needed. -- Marchjuly (talk) 06:23, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I removed the {{More citations needed}} tag. All those images for middle and elementary schools should go. I'm neutral about the images for high schools. Donald Albury 12:54, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree, but would also delete HS pictures and the table. In general, our articles about school districts include simple lists of the schools in the district, with links to high school articles, but not with tables or pictures. Simple listings of the elementary and middle schools are appropriate; this district serves 87 schools, and the elaboration of the table and picture are unnecessary clutter in my opinion. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 14:49, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

A link to the first of 6 pages of NCES listings could suffice. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 16:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree with this. RickH86 (talk) 16:21, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

 Done — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 18:48, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:52, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Intro at Lake Highland Preparatory School

I think this article has undue weight of it's past history and establishment in the intro. I'm not suggesting removing facts from the history, but immediately highlighting the racist history of the school in the second sentence of the intro seems very undue to me. Quite a number of schools, including most of the universities in the U.S., were established as whites-only institutions. We don't start off their articles with this fact. Some other eyes/opinions please? --Hammersoft (talk) 02:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Same thing is happening at Bulloch Academy. Crickets? Is that our response? --Hammersoft (talk) 17:41, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Hammersoft, you could try making a suggestion at the Lake Highland talk page and linking the discussion here. There has been a lot of edit warring recently, so discussion is probably better than a bold edit.

I have removed some WP:COPYVIO text from Bulloch Academy. TSventon (talk) 13:04, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a wider problem than a single article. I'm noting two. It's elsewhere. I was hoping for input on people's thoughts on the overarching issue of whether it's undue weight or not. That's not article specific. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:25, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

The fact that these schools were founded as whites-only institutions in response to the integration of public schools is a significant part of the identity of these schools, and should be included in the lead of these articles. However, information that represents the current status of the school should take precedence over historical values. For example, if the lead has two paragraphs, the information about its founding as a segregation academy fits better within the second paragraph. I think the Lake Highland prep article's lead as it is currently written handles this topic appropriately. Stedil (talk) 00:13, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

William Adams High School

William Adams High School in Texas is completely unsourced. I have located a few sources which support only that the school existed, but little else. The school appears to have been replaced by Alice High School. Should they be merged? Redirected? Perhaps others have sources to improve the article. Thanks. Magnolia677 (talk) 11:06, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

• It looks like the history content from William Adams High School is almost identical to that of Alice High School, but with a little extra about the period of time when AHS was named WAHS, and what happened to the old WAHS building. (That similar content looks like a potential copy-vio from Alice, TX on the Handbook of Texas Online. At a quick glance, it also looks like much of that similar information is on Alice, Texas, but has been paraphrased without sourcing.) My quick, gut recommendation is to redirect William Adams High School to Alice High School, and add the additional history/name and alumni information from the WAHS article to the AHS article. Next steps could be to clean up/improve the AHS article, possibly along with the articles for Alice Independent School District and Alice, Texas. --Hebisddave (talk) 14:39, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  Looks to me like a good plan. Pinging the original creator in 2008 of WAHS Jgrz, who has not contributed since early 2016, so unlikely to weigh in. Since we do not typically have middle school articles, perhaps their intent was to include the details of the William Adams Middle School's history, but they created they created the AHS article first in 2007, so who knows?

  Good catch on the potential copy-vio. I suggest merging appropriately phrased content from the WAHS article into the school history of Alice High School, and then asking an admin for help creating a redirect without the WAHS history to solve the copyvio issues. I don't believe a PROD or AfD are timely enough solutions.

  Let me know if you need help finding resources on newspapers.com, EBSCO or ProQuest. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 19:18, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  Is there anything in the history that you need to access before the merge. If not, I can revdel the copyvio. Donald Albury 20:08, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  I ran copyvio detector and stored a copy of the WAHS history section on my laptop, so can work from that. Is a REVDEL necessary if you move the article to a Redirect without the history? Thanks for your help. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 21:40, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  We have to maintain a record of contributions to the article, even if part of the content is revdeled. See Wikipedia:Merge and delete for more information. Donald Albury 22:04, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  Update: there are two significant copyvio sections of Alice High School that may need REVDEL. I'm deleting them now; will check to see how far back they go. There may be significant article history that will be lost. Drat. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 22:00, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  I've deleted the worst of the Alice High School copyvios, but there's more: the school songs are printed verbatim, but the earwig report points to a source from the Wayback Machine, originally from the site at alicecoyote.com, which has apparently since been purchased by a Japanese dental company... too weird for a Tuesday. There's no way to ascertain the copyright status of the original source, but to be safe I will delete those texts too. Thanks for your help with REVDEL. I'll wait a day to do more revisions and additions. — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 23:48, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

  Per Wikipedia:Public domain, anything published after January 1, 1928, may still be under copyright and I assume that school alma maters and fight songs, unless very old, are still under copyright, unless proven otherwise. Web sites come and go. I am constantly having to recover links from the Internet Archive. Donald Albury 00:27, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Yorktown Education#Requested move 9 May 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Yorktown Education#Requested move 9 May 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Favonian (talk) 20:56, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Reports of book banning

I am starting to see reports of book banning in Florida schools being added to articles: [1], [2]. There will potentially be multiple books banned in all public schools in Florida. How should this be handled in articles about schools, school boards, and related articles? Donald Albury 13:31, 25 May 2023 (UTC)