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 Keep. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-02-09 09:04Z

Lewisville High School (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Delete per WP:N, WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE. No real claim of notability made, not linked to any articles except to lists other schools, no independent sources cited. Appears to be vanity article that's more or less a school brochure. talk to Ytny 07:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - If LHS' article is deleted, then it stands that all public school articles should be removed. Yes, this article could use some more content and some extensive clean-up, but that alone is not a reason to delete it. Wyv 08:08, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, but a lack of notability is a reason to delete it, and you're making a WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS argument. I see nothing wrong with deleting all public school articles be deleted if they don't make any assertion for notability - this just happened to catch my attention because I was looking at previous edits by a vandal. As far as I can tell, this is just an unremarkable high school that doesn't meet the criteria inclusion. talk to Ytny 08:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • OK, but why is a public school not, on its face, notable? Yes, Wikipedia is not simply a collection of facts, but it is a collection of encyclopedic knowledge. Scale says that not everything is notable (for example, we don't have articles on every person in the world), but most things which are limited in scope are (such as schools, cities, counties, discovered stars, etc). The existence of Lewisville High School is very notable for those of us who live around it. LHS has played a large role in both the immediate area and by producing otherwise notable people who have graduated from it.

The page you indicated, WP:NOT#INDISCIMINATE, gives examples which are stated lists or small blurbs. Public school entries, not just the entry for LHS, rise, in my opinion, above a stated list or small blurb. Simply because a school article might not be notable outside a given area doesn't mean it's not otherwise notable. Wyv 09:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep The nomination makes two claims as justification for deletion, citing failure to meet WP:N and WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE. This well-formed, thorough and well-written article makes explicit claims of notability regarding its multiple state football championships. Claims regarding WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE cannot be taken seriously, nor can they be properly addressed, as none of the specific areas that WP:NOT specifies are mentioned. In general, WP:NOT is used rather bluntly to mean "anything I have arbitrarily decided doesn't merit an article in Wikipedia for which I won't bother to come up with an actual reason". The content, form and thoroughness of the article in question are ample rebuttals of the claim in this case. Alansohn 13:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Alansohn's comprehensive reasoning. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:35, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep — It meets my personal criteria for H.S notability. — RJH (talk) 20:17, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep has claims of notability, such as 2 state athletic championships. Edison 05:47, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep There are no school notability guidelines with any meaningful consensus, so other criteria have to be used. This article meets WP:V and can surely grow into one that meets WP:N from what is there. I just spent an hour adding an infobox and straigtening up (when I should ahve been sleeping, thank you very much), but was unable to add much in the way of independent sources--not because there aren't any, but because there are too many Google hits to go through--more than 13,000 for '"Lewisville High School" texas'. The local papers don't seem to keep stories in open archives long, but there's lots of sports and band stuff and a $200 million local bond issue for the school district (hmmm... do you think that some independent sources may have written something about that?). The high school is over 100 years old, has changed campuses three or more times, and has over 3000 students. It needs local editors to find sources for encyclopedic information that they already know of or to do more focussed searched for what they know must be there. I'm sure that the story of its growth and the development of the other four high schools in the district must be incredibly boring, compared to, say, Japanese football, but the simple solution to a strong personal aversoin to school articles is to click the random article button and read up on the Pokemon character or 1950s soap opera or whatever. This article should have been tagged some other way to ask for cleanup or citations. Is is very annoying to have to do crisis managment like this whenever a high school gets put on AfD with no prior effort to improve things.--Hjal 08:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Nothing in the article indicates why it stands out from its peers. Winning a few championships is not notable: it happens to every school from time to time. We need to see real notability ( a special partnership with industry, special teaching methods, a tradition of producing great athletes or biochemists or whatever - just give us something that marks the school out ). Importance in the local community is not enough ( if it were there'd be an article about every local bar and post office ): we need to know why someone who isn't from the local community should be interested. WMMartin 15:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's rather the point of the debate, I think. Is Wikipedia limited solely to topics of a "large" interest, or are obscure-to-those-who-don't-live-there articles allowed? If so, where is the "large" drawn? Major cities? States? Countries? There are sovereign nations in the world whose population is dwarfed by the mildly-recognized suburb I live in. Who gets priority? Honestly, I don't see a problem with Wikipedia having an article about every local bar and post office. Computers can contain and organize huge amounts of data; the search function here and in major search engines is so good that there's not "wading through the crap" any longer. I think there should be a bias towards more information and more articles on more subjects, not less. Wyv 01:07, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep based on the comprehensive reasoning provided by Alansohn above. (jarbarf) 19:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per comments above and for reasons described at User:Silensor/Schools. Silensor 20:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Silensor. --Myles Long 20:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per the arguments cited by Alansohn. Several factors, including the size and age of the school play into the notability. RFerreira 08:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep per commenters above. I really don't want to say "If we delete x, we have to delete y too", but since LHS is in the same district as Hebron and Marcus high schools (which are highly notable, at least in texas), it shouldn't be deleted (at least on because of a lack of notability). Until there is a set critera on what makes a school notable or not, it is better just to only delete the poorly written ones for now. Zadernet 02:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Response For what it's worth, there is a proposed criteria for schools at Wikipedia:Schools, and this high school fails each one. In absence of a notability policy for schools, we have to go by WP:N, which requires the school to be the subject of multiple, independent and non-trivial coverage, which isn't the case here. Most of the information comes from self-published sources, and the one (i.e., not multiple) independent source that's cited makes no case for the school's notability - what school hasn't had some sort of construction done?

Being in the same district as other schools doesn't cut it either, because notability doesn't transfer simply because of geographical proximity. And the school having a band or a state champion football team doesn't really separate the school from any other.

While the opinions here are overwhelmingly in favor of keep, you can find the majority of those arguments in Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions, including WP:USEFUL, WP:NOHARM and WP:ABOUTEVERYTHING. I have yet to read one argument that actually makes a case that the school meets Wikipedia's standards for notability. Ytny (talk) 02:20, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Re-Response There are more sources now. BTW, you are repeating yourself to little effect. The current Wikipedia:Schools is unlikely to get consensus and WP:N does not require that articles about the construction of a school seem "notable" or interesting to you. The existance of the articles demonstrates "notability" by definition. A school is not a person (or, for that matter, a grandmother). Typical persons (and grandmothers) get a few short mentions in the news over their lives--birth, marriage, death--their construction jobs are not written up unless they are extraordinary, whereas every major school project gets multiple coverage because the community is interested (as they are in championship teams) and the publishers think that it is notable (as in the dictionary, "worthy of note"). And, if you don't like using the "Show preview" button, the next time you add a couple of paragraphs, you might not want to mark the last of five edits "minor."--Hjal 08:39, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid the "Show preview" button didn't show me that those redirects were dead, and I made one error and added a short sentence, those are the three minor errors. And I'm not sure where I'm repeating myself. I simply addressed the arguments made based on Wikipedia policy, and if that's repetitive, well, WP hadn't changed since I last commented.

I did notice a section about football records were added, which is at least a claim to notability (though I wonder if the state championship scoring record might be more appropriate in an article about high school football in Texas and I'm actually surprised there isn't one).

The question you have to ask though, is what distinguishes this high school from other schools? Why should anyone who doesn't have vested interest in the school care. Stuyvesant High School has multiple Nobel-winning graduates. Glenbrook North High School has pop culture significance and national notoriety through a hazing incident. Little Rock Central High School has historical significance. You can certainly make a case with the football record, though honestly, I'm not sure if that's enough. But that's up to the closing admin to decide.

And remember that WP:N is a minimum threshold, not a "Two articles and you're in" pass. Mentions in the local paper are certainly worth considering, but construction news and sports scores are trivial to all but those within the community. Ytny (talk) 23:46, 8 February 2007 (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.