The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.‎

The result was no consensus. Both the keeps and deletes sides have some valid and invalid comments in this debate. WP:OUTCOMES is just an essay, these school districts need to meet GNG or something similar in order to have a separate article on the project and consensus can change. It is true however that school districts are rarely deleted as sources are usually found for them, as this AFD has shown with the expansion or claims of notability of some of the articles listed here. Fram mentioned a few of these districts had issues WP:V. It is a perfectly valid concern if we are talking about each of them in a seperate AFD, but not hundreds of them bunched into one. To keep it simple, mass nominations of huge proportions such as this is nearly impossible to find consensus one way or another, and some of the more problematic articles should be listed or redirected on a case by case basis. Secret ^account 05:42, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hartselle City School District (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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I'm nominating this and all of the other empty unsourced school district articles which this editor User:TMLutas has created based on WP:NOTDIRECTORY. The editor has confessed "My time is taken up with the database project" despite concerns raised to him that we're not a database but an encyclopedia. Despite concerns from multiple editors advising him not the create these, he's continued to ignore us and create these articles which I don't consider appropriate for wikipedia and would be better off put in a list. I have real concerns that they will ever be expanded or can be improved to the extent that they're of encyclopedic value. I strongly suggest a merge into a tabled List of school districts by county at least until somebody can bother to write a half decent article on them. I think the sensible thing would be to put in a list and if somebody can write a sourced meaty stub or starter article which is remotely encyclopedic like Carlisle School District (Arkansas) then great. I normally endorse editors who venture out into new topics but I consider these entries database-like dumps which really have little chance of flourishing, not to mention basic problems like no sources or punctuation. Articles like List of school districts in Alabama should be put in table format like List of museums in Alabama and if anybody can say anything about them they can do so in the summary box. If somebody has a lot to say then it might be appropriate to create the article like Carlisle School District (Arkansas) as an initial entry.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 10:14, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also up for deletion are with the exclusion of Carlisle School District (Arkansas):

• Delete all per the discussion with the creator on his and my own talk page. Badly created substandard stubs. Kudos to the Doctor for talking the trouble of tracing all of them and bringing them to AfD. --Randykitty (talk) 10:24, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry you still feel that way after I added content to the stubs. Did you check the later ones or are you just responding to Blofeld's notice on your talk page without seeing if things have changed since you last examined them a few days ago? TMLutas (talk) 11:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You really have trouble with WP:AGF, isn't it? I checked some and found similar things as Fram did below. --Randykitty (talk) 11:47, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all or merge. No indication of notability, and a lack of any information (many of them even seem to have a non-working website listed at the time of creation, so the source seems to be outdated). In other cases the article title and subject don't exactly match (e.g. Bouse Elementary School District). Fram (talk) 10:34, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

US governments are automatically notable. There are 12,879 US school districts the census department says are governments. I'm only stubbing those. By my count 11,894 have websites, some of which I got via the Census and others I hunted down myself via Google. I might have made an error here or there but 'many'? Let me know where they are and I'll be happy to hunt them down and improve the relevant article. As for the discrepancies in names, that actually is an oddity that there is no easy fix for since official opinion seems to be mixed. Some districts have a popular name and an official name and it's not exactly clear which is correct for the listing. I've temporized by mostly adopting whatever was in the state list of school districts. Should I list the federal government opinion or the local government? Sometimes the local government refers to itself via multiple names. That's a nice thing to debate over but hardly a reason for a mass delete. TMLutas (talk) 11:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

US governments are automatically notable? Why? Names: is it San Ysidro Elementary School District (article title), "San Ysidro Elem Sch Dist" (first line and infobox), or "San Ysidro School District" (website)? Considering that this is about one third of the info (the other being the address and the website), this is quite a good reason for a mass delete. If you create microstubs, at least the tiny bits of info in them might be correct. Otherwise, what is there worth keeping in them? This is a common problem, the next article I looked at, San Luis Obispo County Office of Education, has the exact same problems. The next one, San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District has a non-working website. Ross Valley Elementary School District (Elementary?) has the wrong website, the right one seems to be [1] instead. Rohnerville School District also has the wrong website, [2] is the right one. This is from checking 9 articles (and one redirect); nearly all had title problems, and three have website problems. For me, this is more than sufficient to delete them all and start again with decent articles from scratch. Fram (talk) 11:34, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lutas, claiming that they're all notable because they're government-run is sort of like claiming every post box or post office in the UK is notable in its own right because it's run by the Royal Mail, a notable central institution. I don't think any of us are debating that any of the articles could probably be expanded with half encyclopedic sourced material, we are more concerned about the errors and appropriateness of the short stubs and that the sheer number of them with errors and the time needed to correct them and expand every article makes deleting or redirecting them a legitimate solution. We'd be better off converting the lists to tables, you can put the address of the districts (which is all the articles have) in them until you or somebody wants to produce a proper article on one.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 12:10, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have repeatedly pointed out that the Census Bureau puts out a list of governments every five years and every single one of those pages is on them. I am not claiming that they are notable because they are government run. I'm claiming they are governments (and therefore notable) because they have independent taxing and spending powers and are categorized as governments by the US Census. If you have a beef with the Census Bureau's definition of what is a government, I cannot help you. You've gone far beyond the rules at that point. TMLutas (talk) 13:50, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Census Bureau's list is used without edit at the moment. Whatever the Wikipedia source is for the name, I left that alone too unless the Census had a government and the list did not have a school district that matched. Sometimes the two lists did not match and going to the website showed the local district using *both* names. In other words, it's a mess, but not a mess that originated with me, or even Wikipedia. NCES, which I was told was a good source, has another naming system which sometimes kind of matches but the frequency of non-matches is so common that the infobox instructions say do not correct it, just use the NCES name in parallel in the infobox, which may agree with one source or another or not with anything else. So, yes, things are not consistent in the stubs. That's not a legitimate reason to delete because they're not consistent in reality. The time needed to fix them via replacement with better autotext is actually not that large. I just create better autotext and figure out how to poke that into the pages, which was my original plan. Several editors have suggested improvements and I've largely followed their suggestions, which means the front end of these (I'm going alphabetical) are different than the back end and I was going to do them all over at the end of the process with the latest and greatest of the text. Ideally, I'd be able to detect articles that had somebody contribute and put the new stuff on the article's talk page and a notice on the user's talk page. TMLutas (talk) 15:46, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the article which was expanded you could pretty much convey all of that information in a tabled list, something like what I've done to List of school districts in Alabama. That list now has the potential to be several hundred times more valuable than any one of the stubs. That's how I think this should be done, and if anybody wants to write a fuller articles beyond data (if it is actually possible without bloat) then create a proper article.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 13:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You can also convey all that information in narrative form, like a customized form letter. Make up your mind as to how you'd like it in order for you to be happy and I'll put the information in to satisfy your objections. I've repeatedly asked for you to do this because I've been burned by people who won't say what they want and make me go through iteration after iteration until they're satisfied. It's reasonable for you to get a byte at the apple of my time and for me to accommodate reasonable objections. Instead, you've chosen to do an AfD on a long list of articles that can easily be mended because I 1)know where to stick amended text, and 2) can automate the process fairly painlessly. If these are little used pages that almost never get attention (a previous complaint of yours), this isn't a high impact area that must be fixed immediately lest people be horrified or led astray. TMLutas (talk) 13:48, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're missing the point. I'm arguing, errors aside, that it is inappropriate to have hundreds of articles on school districts with no data when you can fill such a table crammed full of data on one page. And if you are up on coding you should be able to utilize something which can extract data and turn our lists by state into useful tables which convey information. You're not going to expand them all beyond sub stub status, even if you correct the errors are you? It would take years for you to do so and if you were going to code something to produce something useful you'd have coded a bot and asked permission to generate articles using it. I guarantee that in 5 years time most of the ones you started will still contain nothing but a fact or two which would be in the table anyway.This is how one of your stubs might look in the year 2020. In my opinion it is still of dubious encyclopedic quality which is more suited to a list.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 13:54, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'm up to coding. I simply don't have time to add your method to my schedule at present. I'm trying to be reasonable. You are making estimates of time needed for which you have no actual data. I need to just figure out how to write a script to update the stubs and it's pretty much all automated from there and should take a number of hours. I won't have to do all 12k schools. A large number of these already have articles. I would estimate that it's reasonable to expect an update to take less than 10 seconds so let's budget for 10 seconds, 6 per minute, 360 per hour, and I estimate that I would have to do fewer than 6k stubs in toto so let's budget for 6k which would make the whole thing around two overnights of work for each round of improvements (under 17 hours). That's hardly years, and that's doing things deliberately slowly via Applescript and the ordinary UI interface. I'm reasonably sure that Wikipedia has some fancy API for doing it better but I don't have time to learn that either. Running the updates as a batch process while I'm sleeping is fine.

Really, I do see where you're coming from with the idea that it's unreasonable to have these stubs hanging around for years. I would agree that having them hang around for years is unreasonable. What I am asserting is that your time estimates to update are grossly off and much too high, that the NCES data (much less other available data we haven't even discussed yet) is actually fairly extensive and would not fit in a normal width table but could be made into a form letter type article, and that it is possible and reasonable for these pieces of information to come in over time via regular, iterative, improvements. I've started that process and there's a lot of underbrush of inconsistency out there internal to the US school district Wikipedia lists. This first round was intended to clear out the underbrush. But instead you're introducing more of it by putting in this new table structure. Are you going to go through all 50 states? Are you going to leave things inconsistent between state lists? Are you going to check for links going to individual schools instead of district pages? What are you going to do with them? And probably most importantly, why are you asserting notability issues in an AfD when you never, to my knowledge, inserted a notability tag or any of the other tags that would have been appropriate to signal your concerns prior to launching an AfD. TMLutas (talk) 15:46, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Alabama-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:17, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:17, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:19, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep It's trivial to add content. We often have the problem that district articles are not here when we need something to redirect a school to, and this is a valid approach to making them. I do think I need to remind the creator that mass creations of this sort always run into questions, and are generally not a good idea. it is more responsible, and more satisfactory in the end, to proceed slowly. DGG ( talk ) 16:21, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • In what way is it on the one hand trivial to add content, but on the other hand hard to create it when something is needed to redirect a school to? Considering that schools can just as well be redirected to their community instead of their school district, proactively creating (or keeping) school districts as a possible far future redirect target seems a bit far-fetched. While this may technically be a valid approach (though riddled with problems), turning them into larger lists is also a valid editing approach which doesn't lose any value, but which would ruin them as redirect targets anyway (double redirects). Fram (talk) 16:41, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Trivial to add content? Who is going to a] correct the errors b] add facts c] start writing prose into articles rather than a database entry for several hundred articles. Expand one into a proper article, sure that can be done easily, but correcting several hundred and expanding them all up to a half decent standard is certainly no trivial task.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 17:56, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all as the notability standard requires that sources are available, not that every article starts at B-class with images and an infobox. There is no deadline for the completion of these articles and no benefit to mass-deleting them. It is far easier for editors to expand existing articles than to create new ones and these can be the structure on which much better article are developed. Mass deletion without due consideration of each article (they're mostly not even linked from here!) is ill-advised and does nothing to benefit the readers of this encyclopedia. - Dravecky (talk) 17:34, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The reality is that nobody is expanding the stubs and they remain virtually untouched. Short stubs on school districts do nothing to benefit the readers of this encyclopedia especially when they have errors.Deadline or not, the fact is Sierra-Plumas Joint Unified School District is of no benefit to the reader and is problematic. The creator is obviously interested in doing something to try to get facts on the districts onto here which I agree with, but would be best displayed in lists like List of school districts in Alabama at least until somebody can write prose and write an article.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 17:52, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is simply not true. I am expanding the stubs because I am expanding template that created them in the first place and will be revisiting them on a regular basis as soon as I nail down how to detect when others are expanding the stubs so as not to overwrite other editors work. If you actually look at the stubs generated (looking at my contributions list) an early stub is not the same as a later stub. Those early stubs, if somebody else doesn't expand them, will be expanded by me. Direct mail people have been creating fairly decent customized form letters for decades. This is not difficult technology to implement. What is difficult is to make any broad use of this tech in Wikipedia without ending up in an AfD. Repeatedly you have asserted that I will not update but you have not, and I suspect cannot provide any evidence to that effect because your assertion rests on my willingness to follow through on stated intentions, something you cannot know. TMLutas (talk) 18:00, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all - There is a broad consensus — not reflected in the actual guidelines, but very broadly accepted and enforced by closing administrators in AfD debates — that secondary schools are presumed notable if existence can be demonstrated (akin to the way towns, rivers, highways, etc. are treated) while primary schools are presumed non-notable outside of extraordinary circumstances. The latter are redirected to the school district or, failing that opportunity, to the town in which they are located. This compromise between those favoring a tight, narrowly focused encyclopedia and those favoring a broad, expansive encyclopedia has a logic behind it. As follows: high schools are community landmarks and are almost invariably the subject of substantial media coverage, sponsoring sports teams, drama clubs, bands, orchestras, choral groups, etc. Moreover, proper biographies often include the exact name of a high school and these links should be blue, not red; elementary schools are not mentioned by name. Elementary school articles are invariably vapid, containing daily schedules, lunch menus, teacher lists, and so forth that often run afoul of NOTDIRECTORY. This is the consensus that has emerged, it works. We don't need to spend half an hour every day fighting over overzealous deletionists challenging this high school or that or overzealous inclusionists arguing that Smalltown Elementary School should be included because the Smalltown Cryer and the Smalltown Community News each have run a couple articles on the school over the years. High schools which exist are in, elementary schools unless extraordinarily noteworthy are out, end of story. Now, here's the catch... For this system to work, there need to be redirection targets — articles on school districts. These entities should be treated like high schools, if their existence is confirmed, they should be in. The fact that these are lousy machine-created stubs should not detain us, Wikipedia needs these target pages, which WILL inevitably flesh out over time. If you want to call this an WP:IAR defense, that's fine, although I think a careful consideration of the logic of this situation should support what I'm suggesting here. Carrite (talk) 18:21, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Give it 100 years maybe. I took 10 articles on existing articles at random, none of them had been meaningfully expanded in years of existence on here and mostly anything added was an infobox with the superintendent in.Some have barely been touched in 7 years and still contain less facts that could be put into a sourced table in a list. I'm still not seeing a valid argument why, as a start, a sourced list isn't the way to go and easier to manage.As for the argument "if the article exists people will come and expand it" this is generally not the case and the ones I chose at random have not been written into articles. So currently readers will have to peruse hundreds of articles to get less info than they'd get in a single sourced table list.. The idea that newbies and ip's will come along and expand them all fully with sources and well written is really overly optimistic. It's rarely the case, expanding them meaningfully will be left to regulars who might be part of the school project or state projects. In these circumstances they can branch out into meatier stubs and start-B class articles when they want to write it, a list format is easier to handle the basic facts to start with given that the editor has professed to planning on creating short stubs on all 12,000 and something school districts. Wouldn't 50 decent sourced lists crammed full of data be a better, more logical way to start this? That said if the article creator can code something and show an ability to create start class articles on these districts with as much information as he claims which is more than can fit into tables I'd like to see an example and would support him overriding all of these with a bot and using it to generate proper useful articles if he can do this without major errors..♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 18:32, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And again, past performance by other editors, using other techniques is not relevant to a system that is designed to throw off wikipedia pages as a side effect of a larger, self-sustaining project. You are making the assumption of bad faith pretty central to your AfD claims. That's not a good thing. TMLutas (talk) 18:00, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - I've looked at four of the named articles nominated here. Each is a one-sentence sub-stub, but not a one had a period at the end of the sentence. Also, all had (and mostly still have) unacceptable abbreviations of names. However this discussion ends, the article creator needs to use proper punctuation and orthography for any future article creations, and if these articles are kept, they need to be fixed. TMLutas, you keep talking about what you have time for; you must take the time to use standard spelling and punctuation. If that slows down your article creation, so be it. LadyofShalott 21:22, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all These are probably all notable topics for the reasons that DGG and Carrite stated, and issues with length and style are reasons for improvement, not deletion. While I agree that most of the articles are low quality and probably should not have been created in that state, some of them are reasonable stubs or have been improved since their creation; for instance, there's nothing objectionable about Hartselle City School District itself at this point. Moreover, if some of them have been improved, there's no real way of knowing, since the nomination appears to include a few hundred articles and 95% of them aren't linked above or properly tagged. If we deleted all of them, we'd either be throwing out a bunch of good articles or at best telling the closing admin to sort out which of these are "good enough", which is pretty subjective when the topics are all notable. I agree that TMLutas needs to stop making these articles if they don't have time to check for errors and use proper style, but AfD isn't the place to settle problems with editors' behavior. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:01, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I cleaned up the Hartselle CSD article after this AfD was begun. LadyofShalott 00:49, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete or Userfy towards adding this sparse info to List of school districts in California. I am disturbed that many of them were elementary school districts, which are really not needed here. I can see also deleting only the elementary school districts. What i dont understand is why someone would want to create these sub-stubs, which dont give more info than a directory, which we are not supposed to be. doesnt even list the schools in the districts, which, if secondary schools, would be notable, and if not secondary, could still be listed. if recreated as list(s), the individual districts could be slowly built up into articles if possible.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:12, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete until ready: I am not a fan of the quality of these micro-stubs by the creator and we have discussed this at some length and I have provided suggestions. My focus is in List of school districts in Arkansas and creating quality articles for each school district, which I believe can be done with available resources online. My biggest complaint is the quality, lack of punctuation, spelling and formatting. If the articles were better, I would be a proponent of keeping, but like others have mentioned, these articles will rot like this for years and reduces the value of Wikipedia. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right. Separately, as time allows will I likely create articles for all of these school districts, the answer is yes. But I don't and won't create articles that are simple dumps of information from another database. Djharrity (talk) 04:14, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There you have it, a sensible response from an editor who actually works on school district articles. I agree, and if they were created like Carlisle School District (Arkansas) at a minimum I'd happily have articles on every one of them.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 10:11, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As this is all done via autogenerated text, an improvement on one is an improvement on all. I'm not currently doing *any* improvements on the actual wikipedia pages until the AfD is done but I am improving the database off wiki. If you have any improvements you would like to suggest, I already have a track record of adding them. I'm currently trying to figure out a way to get the NCES data in the infobox correctly. Unfortunately, NCES uses its own district naming system that neither matches Wikipedia or the Census so that's a semi-manual process. TMLutas (talk) 04:22, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding "I don't and won't create articles that are simple dumps of information from another database," isn't that how Wikipedia in part was build up in the first few years? That's becuase there was agreement then that such actions were needed. There's nothing wrong with simple dumps of information from another database. However, it should be done based on consensus agreement, not a lone editor acting against requests of multiple editors. See my post below for further comments on this point. -- Jreferee (talk) 12:20, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all as per Doc B. trivial, not notable: we are not a directory. SchroCat (talk) 12:43, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

All of these pages describe governments with taxing, regulatory, and spending powers devolved by their respective state governments. That makes them notable. There are school districts that do not have those characteristics, for instance dependents districts on military bases. None of those are included in my list of additions specifically because I was not sure if they *were* notable. What other criteria should I have used in addition to that? TMLutas (talk) 04:26, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all, AfD is not a substitute for clean up. The question really should be is each of these different school districts are notable organizations? Each one of these organizations should be reviewed independently. That being said, a compromise would be to create list articles, for each state, of the school districts. As individual school district articles are created, once notability is established for each school district, those redlinks would become links to actual articles. Many organizations receive multiple mentions in reliable sources, and when taken in total could be considered significant coverage; that being said, each one of these organizations should be examined on a case by case basis. For instance take my local elementary school district, it has received over 100 mentions (some of them potentially significant). --RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 00:07, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just a small note, all school districts that have the characteristics of governments (they can tax, spend and regulate) are included in a once in five year census of governments conducted by the US Census Bureau. Every single one of these districts is going to show up in NCLB ratings reviews as well as their state equivalents. Every single school district is covered by the local real estate people in multiple forums. There are also school district rating organizations like GreatSchools. I really don't know what school district wouldn't be notable under standard RS criteria. TMLutas (talk) 04:30, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 00:14, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep All Established consensus described in WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES is that the vast majority of elementary school articles (except those about schools of genuine historical or architectural notability) ought to be redirected to an article about the school district or locale. To me, an article about the responsible governmental entity, namely the school district, is always preferable, as that is the logical place for a list of schools, a list of board members including elections and taxing authority, a description of the history of education in that geographical area, and so on. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with a stub about any notable topic, and as time goes on, users who learn that we rarely have articles about individual elementary schools but usually have articles about school districts, will be motivated to expand these stubs. It ought to be considered indisputable that these governmental entities have received significant coverage in reliable sources over periods of many years, even if such coverage is not always instantly available through a Google search. Many local newspapers are not yet indexed online. This encyclopedia is a work in progress, and I believe that one of our long range goals ought to be an informative, well-referenced article about every single school district on the face of the Earth, and I commend TMLutas for efforts in that direction. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 05:43, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I expanded and referenced Pope Valley Union Elementary School District to show that even the tiniest and most obscure school district is discussed in reliable sources, and worthy of a brief article. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 06:44, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I do worry about our criteria for notability when an unexceptional institution responsible for the education of 71 US children is "notable" while a school anywhere in the world with hundreds of young (pre-highschool) students is, almost always, automatically deemed not to be - just because of a quirk of US governance structure whereby school districts exist and can be considered as "governments". (Is every "government" notable? Every English parish council would be a "government", but would not have a separate article, being treated in the article for the parish or its main village.) I could show Ofsted reports for any primary school in the UK, and doubtless many of them have local newspaper coverage for some initiative or other. PamD 08:19, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree Pam, and it is concerning to me that "we are a work in progress" is used as an excuse for keeping any article, regardless of quality and errors. We still need to maintain a minimum standard.If you can't see why Green Forest School District is problematic as an initial entry. Lacks even basic punctuation and isn't even categorized, still red linked. We should strive to have these articles produced with sources and at a minimum standard which is acceptable as a start without errors. It would be easier in my opinion to delete them and restart them properly using a coded bot, if we must "have articles on every school district on the planet".♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 17:56, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, Green Forest School District was problematic but AFD is not clean-up. I spent about 20 minutes gathering sources, adding text and an infobox, and doing a bit of cleanup and now, other than relying solely on one newspaper because my quick search was shallow, it's a perfectly reasonable start/stub. Any of the remaining one-line stubs could be replaced by a bot without having to delete these articles, almost none of which have any notification that this discussion is taking place. - Dravecky (talk) 22:04, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Better, but it is still pretty trivial.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 15:57, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES doesn't support your comment by any means, it actually says the opposite. That page specifically points out that (1) schools fall under WP:ORG, and schools are not inherently notable, (2) notability requires verifiable evidence, and (3) WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES has no bearing on articles at AfD; previous outcomes do not bind future ones. The actual "established consensus" is found at WP:ORG, and it does not support your rationale, but rather contradicts it. I agree comepletely that "there is nothing whatsoever wrong with a stub about any notable topic", but notability is not a default, it must be shown, not assumed. That is the established consensus. - SudoGhost 12:15, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: contrary to what has been stated above, there doesn't seem to be anything in our notability guidelines that gives a "government" (to use the loosely applied word) automatic notability. WP:ORG has nothing that exempts "governments" (or school districts) from its general rules. Claims that school districts are inherently notable are not supported by our guidelines. Fram (talk) 09:06, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• It's not that they're inherently notable as much as that they're usually notable when somebody looks for the sources, which qualifies in this case because it's unrealistic to look for sources for several hundred articles in the week this AfD is supposed to run. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 09:39, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Arkansas-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Arizona-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all - school districts as official bodies are notable and as a repository for information on non-notable elementary schools these articles serve a valuable purpose. They way forward is to expand and source, not to delete, which is the way that stubs and hence the encyclopaedia is developed. TerriersFan (talk) 22:36, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all of them. It's true that elementary SCHOOLS are not generally considered notable, but school districts should be. There is nothing wrong with stubs if the subject matter qualifies for an article, and school districts do qualify. IMO TMLutas should be thanked for filling in this huge gap in our coverage of school districts. --MelanieN (talk) 15:29, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  in what way does San Ysidro Elementary School District or any other "fill in a gap in coverage". The subject is not filled in or covered created in this way.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 15:52, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  Thank you for an excellent example. It took me only 15 minutes to find multiple Reliable Source references to this school district and add them to the article. A little later when I have more time I will expand it further. Bottom line, the sources DO exist for these agencies. All one has to do is look. --MelanieN (talk) 16:34, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

For the last time, I'm not questioning that sources exist, just who you think is going to cleanup up 500+ articles and expand them all to something half decent that's all.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 16:41, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you concede that sources exist, then there is nothing else to debate; that's the equivalent of a "keep" vote. If the topics are notable, they deserve an article. The QUALITY of the article is not a valid reason to delete. Wikipedia allows stubs. It is not up to the creator of the stub, or the discussants at this article, to recruit the volunteers who will expand the articles. Are you seriously suggesting that all these articles should be deleted because we don't know right now who is going to expand them? --MelanieN (talk) 18:38, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Many times in wikipedia's history we have deleted a big batches of stubs which are notable, either people of BLP concerns or those which contain so many errors and problems it is easier and a cleanup to get rid of them and start from scratch. I have a lot more experience on here than you do. I'm saying that it would be easier to delete them all and code a bot to create virtual start class articles full of data and consistently sourced and categorized yes and i believe that would be more productive for wikipedia in the long term.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 19:19, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all It is inconceivable that sources don't actually exist for these government agencies. Sure, citing sources would require that someone actually look for them, and in some cases, that the "look for" involve using paper sources, but the claim that no such sources have ever been published (not even by the local newspapers?!) is not credible. Notability cares about whether it is possible for a sufficiently motivated and sufficiently resourced person to obtain sources. It does not care whether anyone has done this yet, or whether sources are available for free online, or can be found by asking your favorite web search engine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The delegation for an international conference could mistake the corridor for the toilet. Doesn't make their shit notable and doesn't change the fact that some poor janitor has to clean up after them. I don't think anybody is really questioning that these can be expanded, the whole point of the AFD was in light a mess has been created with empty stubs with lack of even basic grammar and sources and to produce something more constructive it might be easier to organize something to replace them or redirect at present into a more useful lists with data for our readers. That none of the "keep!" voters (except Cullen who has spoken to Lutas and myself) seem to care about the extent of the cleanup needed is irresponsible. If somebody at least said "Keep, I can clean these up using AWB and will commit to expanding them" at least would be something.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 16:40, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have Watchlisted this page so I will have a convenient list of the stubs needing expansion. I will start working on the California articles in a few weeks after I get past some Real Life obligations. I do agree with others above that TMLutas should revise his creation tools so that words like "elementary", "school" and "district" are spelled out. I also think they should create a script to go back and expand those abbreviations in the articles already created, and to put a period at the end of the sentence. --MelanieN (talk) 18:52, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, I've personally done at least a basic clean-up (recat, grammar, links, punctuation, wikiproject templates on the talk page, and stub sorting) on about half of the Alabama school district articles (manually!) and hope to finish the list soon-ish. Also, I've significantly expanded a couple of the singled-out articles just to show how easily it can be done. - Dravecky (talk) 07:57, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, good luck with expanding all 500 odd!♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 10:35, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but WP:Deletion is not clean up. If you personally don't like looking at underdeveloped stubs, then don't click on those pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• 7000 articles on Chinese townships were deleted from an AFD on wikipedia because they needed cleanup. Funny how none of you turned up to keep those.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 17:03, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Personally, I don't participate in every possible AfD and only have a dozen of the noticeboards watchlisted. It's not a conspiracy, just time management. - Dravecky (talk) 07:52, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• I missed that one, too. Do you have a link to the AfD? I would be interested in reading the close reasoning. -- Jreferee (talk) 12:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all - Schools and school districts fall under WP:ORG, which these fail, outright. The editors citing WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES seemed to have missed, well, the entire thing they cited. Wikipedia:SCHOOLOUTCOMES#Citing this page in AfD specifically, and the fact that it specifically says that schools fall under WP:ORG. Notability has to be established, and when the relevant notability guideline specifically says that nothing is inherently notable, it makes protestations to the contrary very weak arguments, not supported by a single thing on Wikipedia; nothing is notable "just because". Short of explaining how these articles meet WP:ORG, they do not belong on Wikipedia, per established consensus. - SudoGhost 12:02, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply to SudoGhost The only way to determine if any given one of these school districts meets WP:ORG would be to make a good faith effort to look for coverage in reliable sources for that specific school district. Consider the case of one of the nominated articles, Benicia Unified School District, a district which I happen to be familiar with. This district operates seven schools enrolling nearly 5000 students. Using Google News Archive, I was easily able to find 100 articles about this district in seven different newspapers, three of which are major regional papers, namely the Sacramento Bee, the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News. Unfortunately, almost all of these articles are hidden behind pay walls, but the snippets available make it clear to me that this district meets WP:ORG. How many other such indisputably notable districts are hidden in this mass deletion? Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 00:59, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Without actually seeing these articles, I very much doubt that they make the subject "indisputably notable"; just because it's mentioned in a newspaper doesn't mean it warrants an article; that's Wikipedia policy ("While news coverage can be useful source material for encyclopedic topics, most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion. For example, routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities is not a sufficient basis for inclusion in the encyclopedia|). I looked at a few, and they were routine coverage of local events, not something that makes an article notable, let alone "indisputably so". - SudoGhost 06:14, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • I spent about 20 minutes improving, expanding, and sourcing the Hartselle City School District article that is still the only one properly tagged to point people to this discussion. This quick scrape of the surface of the news coverage shows that in-depth coverage from multiple reliable third-party sources is available for this subject. Also, the section of policy you cite is specifically about current events, not organizations. - Dravecky (talk) 08:02, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • It still applies to topics such as this, and local papers aren't exactly "third-party" when it comes to their local area. This is not independent of the subject, it is a local piece for a local school, and WP:ORGDEPTH specifically points out that these are insufficient. They are also extremely routine coverage, the exact type of source that is insufficient for establishing the notability for a subject. Looking at the sources in that article, if that's all there is for that subject, then that subject most certainly fails WP:ORG and does not warrant an article on Wikipedia. - SudoGhost 08:14, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • No, it explicitly applies to events, not organizations, which is why "Wikipedia is not a newspaper" is immediately followed by "See also: Wikipedia:Notability (events)". Either your reading of WP:ORGDEPTH is severely constrained or our definitions of routine coverage are very different. (Controversies erupting over planned "live shooter" training exercises in an elementary school full of kids just a month after Sandy Hook strikes you as routine? No. That the Hartselle City Schools were the only public school district in the the state to routinely test all of its students for drugs? No.) Huntsville and Birmingham are not "local" to Hartselle by any useful definition. Plus, that's hardly "all there is" as I stated clearly above. The Hartselle school district was formed in 1975 and I merely added a handful of the top results from the last 3 years. Could an editor build on my work to improve the article? Heck yes. But the verifiability and notability thresholds are easily crossed by this subject. - Dravecky (talk) 10:46, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • Hartselle is most certainly "local" to Huntsville by almost every definition, and WBRC routinely covers minor events in Hartselle, which a "non-local" source would not do. That is as local as one can get, which is why that article fails to meet the notability requirements given the poor sources in the article and found elsewhere, hardly "easily crossed" it fails horribly. - SudoGhost 11:29, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep all - What's done is done and deleting these articles is not a best way to address conduct. I do not like stubs, but once they are created, they have to be judge by different standards than would be applied before they are created. Regarding that standard, newspapers are going to provide source material for Wikipedia on school districts because school districts have a wide impact on the families and tax payers in the community (which is just about everyone in the community). There should be stand alone articles on these topics to provide editors a discrete place to contribute information from those reliable sources. The above list does look like a lot of articles, but they would appear to be a very small number if you also listed Wikipedia's other 4,175,000+ articles above. As for User:TMLutas's conduct going against concerns from multiple editors advising him not the create so many stubs, we need a better way to address single editors deciding to create numerous stubs. I'm not sure where you would put it, but perhaps there can be a statement that the creation of more than 10 (20?) articles in any 24 hour period first requires consensus. We have the 3RR rule, so there is precedent on restricting the number of certain edits in a given period of time. We also require the repetitive actions of a bot to be approved before hand not so much because it is a bot, but because we do not want one editor making repetitive edits that are going to upset others. I see that the articles were created via autogenerated text. If that is "a semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain articles of the English Wikipedia", see Wikipedia:Bots, then perhaps consensus was needed per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval. Lack of consensus to create the stubs would be a reasonable basis to delete the created articles if consensus was needed, even though the semi-automated tool technically was not a bot requiring approval via Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval. If this AfD is closed as no consensus, you might relist at AfD using the lack of needed consensus line of reasoning as the basis to delete the autogenerated text articles. -- Jreferee (talk) 12:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• The fact that "school districts have a wide impact on the families and tax payers in the community" is actually exactly why WP:ORGDEPTH does not consider those sufficient sources for establishing the notability of the subject, you may or may not agree with that, but that's what community consensus has determined. It has nothing to do with the actions or the number of edits, but the notability of the subjects, which are non-existent according to WP:ORG, which is the criteria under which schools fall, assuming it's notable isn't enough, it it must be shown, and these do not meet that criteria. - SudoGhost 08:22, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't know to what part of WP:ORGDEPTH you are referring. Would you mind quoting the text from WP:ORGDEPTH that does not consider those sufficient sources for establishing the notability of the subject. Also, when you say notability, are you talking about whether school districts are important/significant enough as a class of entries to be part of Wikipedia or are you talking about whether there is enough reliable source material for standalone articles on school districts? -- Jreferee (talk) 09:51, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• The section titled Audience: "The source's audience must also be considered. Evidence of attention by international or national, or at least regional, media is a strong indication of notability. 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, national, or international source is necessary." - SudoGhost 11:29, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Some of the best stuff is from local media. If the audience guideline makes it into WP:GNG, then that would provide a community consensus which could be applied consistently from one subject to the next. Until then, it is not clear as to why people should be given access to the sum of all human knowledge, except for organizations and companies. -- Jreferee (talk) 02:03, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some of our existing entries on school districts are rather sparse in sourcing and trivial in content it has to be said. They're low importance articles in my opinion. I'd like to see an article expanded beyond trivial "xxx was lieutenant as of 2013" and "Hugsy is mascot" and see if anybody can produce a full well sourced article on one. I'd love to see Benicia Unified School District expanded using those sources Cullen.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 14:45, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As you requested, Dr. Blofeld, I have expanded the article on Benicia Unified School District, showing that its direct predecessor is notable in the very early Gold Rush history of public education in California. One of the first public schools in California was established there in 1849. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 05:56, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Great job, Cullen! It's now an interesting, factual, and well written article. Has anyone noticed that every time - literally EVERY time - Dr. Blofeld dismisses one of these individual articles as trivial and unworthy, someone is quickly able to bring that article up to encyclopedic standards? If nothing else, it shows that these articles can not be treated en masse - because so many of them pass muster when looked at individually. --MelanieN (talk) 14:56, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm right there with you. "Oroville Union High School Dist is a public school district based in Butte County, California, United States."[3] Except for the fact that it is not a "Dist," the rest of the fact is true. I read it and think, "Yes, and ...?" A WP:V statement such as a public school district that "encompasses 723 miles of eastern Butte County" (that is a lot of miles), "that serves high school needs of 14,490 residents," (that's a lot of people). I looked at a few of the articles and see no indication of importance. While speedy deletion excludes educational institutions, that does not mean slow deletion excludes a need for educational institution articles to indicate importance. I think a strong argument for delete is that, while these topics each should be treated in a standalone article, the lack of consensus to auto-create a set of a significant number of articles that do not indicate why its subjects are important or significant supports the idea that we should delete and start over with a consensus agreeded-upon plan for growth in this area, including minimal criteria such spell check and one sourced indication of importance and other things you mentioned. I think a strong argument to keep is the reasons I listed above. I think the closer can make a wise decision either way. -- Jreferee (talk) 02:03, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep all per DGG, Dravecky, MelanieN, and Jreferee. Altairisfar (talk) 14:40, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I have also started to help expand and add sourcing to the articles. Altairisfar (talk) 15:08, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have wikified, sourced, and expanded Demopolis City School District, Linden City Schools, Marengo County School District, and Wilcox County School District (Alabama). I have struck them out in the above list. I believe that they have been expanded and sourced well enough to pass muster now, if this AfD is successful. Altairisfar (talk) 21:31, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for doing that. There are others that have been similarly improved and could also be struck. But the reality is that "delete all" is probably not even a valid option at this point. Both because so many of the articles have proven worthy when looked at individually, and because the additional ones (other than Hartselle City) do not have an AfD tag on the article. I thought that was required. --MelanieN (talk) 02:10, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rincon Valley Union Elementary School District has an AFD tag pointing at a separate discussion.

I have mixed feelings about the expansion efforts. On the one hand, a properly written and sourced article is undeniably a good thing. On the other hand, people who clean up these articles in response to a sloppy, pointy, or wikilawyering nomination are rewarding and encouraging that type of nomination by making an AFD be an effective method of finding someone else who will stop what they're doing (which might be more important) and clean up the nominated articles ASAP. I don't think that we want to reward this kind of nomination. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.