Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Albany High School

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was - kept - SimonP 21:09, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

Albany High School (moved to Albany High School, Georgia)

Appears to be being used as a message board/vanity site/school project. At best this page requires significant revision - at worst it is completely irrelevant. ESkog 01:12, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

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If someone feels as if the page Albany High School is a message board, it is not. No posting is allowed, and if that happens, which it hasn't than it would not be me that does it. It also is not a school project. This page is no way associated with Albany High School or the Dougherty County School System. I created it for one reason, and one reason alone; to inform anyone who cares about this school.

And futher more, I would like to add, that both the articles that ESkog has mainly contributed to, appear to be about sports arenas. I don't understand about how explaining the structures and facilities of two sporting complexes is a less "vanity site" than a page about a respected high school.

I would ask that this page not be considered for deletion because I have worked very hard on it, and I believe that it can offer useful information about Albany High. If there are any revisions or edits to this page that I could make to make a worse candidate for deletion, please let me know. Twister3328

• After a bit of discussion and looking further, I would actually vote that this should be revised or cleaned up rather than deleted. Apologies for the needless vfd - I know that's a pet peeve of many and, as Twister points out, I am still fairly new here as well. From looking at what I might consider a "model" high school entry, I think a great deal of the article may need to be removed, such as the list of faculty or the detailed descriptions of clubs which could be listed under thousands of high schools. ESkog 02:25, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

• (Weak) keep and cleanup. Alai 02:59, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

• Move to more appropriate name, e.g. Albany High School, Albany, Georgia, U.S.A., because there is Albany, Western Australia and numerous examples of Georgia. Admittedly, there is no Albany High School in Albany, Western Australia, but it has an "Albany Senior High School" and a "North Albany Senior High School" [1]. Peter Ellis 05:47, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ... and on the other side of Australia, in Brisbane, Queensland, there is Albany Creek State High School. Peter Ellis 05:52, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep All schools should have an article and this one already has lots of info. Gillian Tipson 06:30, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Probably needs a cleanup. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:57, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, unless they display some encyclopedic information rather than a loooong list of staff members. Radiant_* 08:54, May 10, 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into the appropriate geographical article once all the extraneous info that is suitable for their website but not an encyclopedia had been excised. Average Earthman 09:14, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into Albany, Georgia and delete. If this was written by someone in that school, maybe s/he could form a school project to expand the town article. - Skysmith 10:11, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, could be worth finding a better title as per Peter Ellis. -- Lochaber 15:25, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Move - I agree with Peter Ellis. If this article is to be kept, it needs to be moved to a more specific article title. It may be located in a larger and more politically significant Albany, but it's still ultimately just a high school, so its location does not afford this article superior right to the article name over Albany SHS in WA. Also, although the Western Australian school is named "Albany Senior High School", it is common practice in these parts to just refer to these schools as "Albany High". - Mark 15:59, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Edit: I see the page has now been moved to a more appropriate title. Keep. - Mark 16:08, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• extreme delete. How is this article to be maintained? All it contains is a lot of boring info on after-school clubs. yawn. Dunc|☺ 16:18, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• keep it seems to be maintained ok to me Yuckfoo 17:16, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete Even if all the information on this page were relevant, I see it getting out of date super-fast. Best left for the high school's own website where it can be better maintained. Kweee 18:14, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment Remember that you can remove out-of-date and hard-to-maintain information from the article *now*. There is no need to delete the article simply because you think some of the content is inappropriate. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 18:18, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Condense and Merge with the appropriate geographic or school district article. --Carnildo 19:33, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep 119-year old school. Needs its BEEFSTEW factor jacked up, but surely a school this old has had some notable alums. -- BDAbramson ^thimk 20:51, 2005 May 10 (UTC)
  • I've looked at Beefstew, it's utterly pointless. It dismisses many perfectly encyclopedic facts that one would expect to want to know about a school. Whether a school is ancient or new or has notable alumni is beside the point--schools are inherently verifiable and hence encyclopedic. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 22:11, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
  • BECAUSE THE ARTICLE, Albany High School, Georgia HAS STIRRED SUCH A "CONTROVERSY" AMONG MANY WIKIPEDIA MEMBERS (THAT SEEM TO HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN LOOK FOR INNOCENT PAGES TO DELETE), I HAVE DECIDED THAT IT SHOULD BE DELETED IMMEDIATELY. IT ONLY STARTED AS A SIMPLE SCHOOL PAGE, BUT I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS WORTH ALL OF THIS DEBATE FOR SOMETHING SO UMIMPORTANT. SO TO ALL THOSE WIKIPEDIA MEMBERS: YOU CAN BE GLAD YOU STOPPED A "WORTHLESS" PAGE FROM BEING PUBLISHED TO AN ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA THAT HAS AN ALMOST "INFINATE" AMOUNT OF SPACE, AND MAY YOU HAVE A LIFETIME OF HAPPINESS EDITING AND DELETING PAGES THAT IN NO WAY AFFECT YOU IN ANY WAY. THANK YOU. Twister3328

• Keep. I've restored the article from its history. Please don't shout. It's rude and unnecessary. I think you should take a little break now. Ground Zero 22:02, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep and make room for extra helpings of BEEFSTEW. Hardly a "message board" as the nominator suggests, unless I'm missing something in the edit history. —RaD Man (talk) 00:27, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into Albany, Georgia, and delete. Jayjg ^(talk) 05:00, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. You have to start out with an existing article to actually try to improve it. There are many ways school articles can be valuable, but you have to let them live first in order for those improvements to occur. -- Natalinasmpf 05:04, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete BEEFSTEW score of 3 (ACE) (This does include the dreary, out-of-focus photograph). This is probably the longest list of school trivia I've seen. Thryduulf 09:53, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, *yawns*. James F. (talk) 11:29, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Vanity, low beefstew. Jonathunder 12:37, 2005 May 11 (UTC)
• Keep. On the contrary, this article has quite a satisfactory BEEFSTEW rating of 7.5 (ABCDeFIJ) in its present form. Verifiable and notable graduates include Ambassador Edward "Skip" Gnehm, Paula Deen, and Ray Stevens. Statistically speaking, any school with a history greater than 100 years will inevitably have a number of graduates worthy of encyclopedic note. Bahn Mi 21:16, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete Mcfly85 22:51, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete Nick Catalano (Talk) 00:59, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep fighting the power! —Teknic^Talk/Mail 03:43, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, but maybe pare down some of the small details in the body of the article. (Disclaimer: A cousin or two of mine might actually have gone to this school.) Samaritan 06:00, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep User:GRider/Schoolwatch Klonimus 07:02, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep well above the average school article, could use some cleanup/revision ... but otherwise worth keeping.  ALKIVAR™ 07:08, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep and continue to improve. High schools should not need to establish notability, plus this school has a great deal of verifiable information on it. --BaronLarf 14:07, May 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into Albany, Georgia, and delete. Jni05 17:30, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Intrigue 18:23, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete This high school is insufficiently noteworthy. carmeld1 01:47, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, we have been through this.--Prem 03:24, May 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Useless collection of generic facts about an insignificant school. This is not an encyclopedia article. Individual schools are not inherently encyclopedic and there is nothing to distinguish insignificant schools like this one from thousands of nearly identical schools around the world. Gamaliel 22:15, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

• Keep all high schools. --Unfocused 06:23, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
• All the angry Inclusionist outbursts in the world aren't going to sway my Delete! This is NOT noteworthy enough I'm afraid. I cannot possibly word it better than Gamaliel did. "Useless collection of generic facts about an insignificant school. This is not an encyclopedia article. Individual schools are not inherently encyclopedic and there is nothing to distinguish insignificant schools like this one from thousands of nearly identical schools around the world." My sentiments exactly. I'm beginning to think we need to launch WikiSchools to stop this angry "all schools are auto-notable!" idealism once and for all. Master Thief Garrett 05:21, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Part of the problem here is the presumption that there is consensus that "non-notability" is sufficient grounds for deletion. Deletionists toss around "non-notable" as if it meant something. Some don't even bother with that and shorten it to "NN". Let's be clear: no such consensus exists. See Jimbo Wales' view on notability, as expressed in the poll where notability failed to become an accepted reason for deletion. The school may be insiginficant to you, but that does not mean that it is insignificant to readers living in Georgia. Ground Zero 19:52, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
    • No, there's no consensus, but notability is often the sole reason given for a deletion vote here on Vfd, so it's become pseudo-policy. While I am definitely a mergist by nature (in that I want any and all useful tidbits to be united together, see Wikipedia:Pokeprosal), when something can't be merged in order to make it more useful than it can ever possibly hope to be in its current form... I'm at a loss and choose Delete.

Conversely, what role *exactly* will an article about this school play on Wikipedia? Will it be a fascinating and detailed article, will it cover interesting things that non-Georgians want to read... or could one use speedy methods like Search and Replace to turn it into an article about any of dozens of other similar schools?

You say the school is not very significant to me; that is true, BUT the schools in my town are also insignificant to me. Are they interesting to me? Yes, quite. Would I expect to find them in an encyclopedia? No, because the vast, vast, VAST majority called the Outside World don't give a ****. Things that seem great to you are useless to others.

That is the key, really, who are we writing Wikipedia for, the entire world or selective groups? Is it supposed to be collective consciousness or "schools and streets and clubs in townnamehere" with selective readerships for each cloister? "oh, the whole world of course!" you quickly reply. But who is interested in a school outside of their state/province/country? Probably very few, unless it's Colombine or similar.

As with my work at Wikipedia:Pokeprosal, I'd be blissfully happy if we could have things like High Schools in Georgia with subsections for each one. On their own they are entirely non-notable to all but an extremely select few (i.e., those in direct contact with them) but when put together can become an interesting look at high-school education in Georgia as a whole. THAT would be interesting. WP pages that are virtually NPOV equivalents of enrollment handouts for parents aren't.

Please understand me when I say this isn't favouritism, that even my *own* educational institutions are completely and utterly unworthy of individual articles here. It does not matter how near and dear they are to me and others, but what the outside world knows of them, or cares of them. That is not to say you shouldn't seek to learn things you don't know (as I am increasingly doing thanks to Vfds) but... yeah... pretty much all I'm saying has been voiced before on every ****ing Schoolwatch topic to date.

We have rules about notability of books, websites, bands, people, fictional characters, songs, etc., but nothing about schools. As yet anyway. Well, there's BEEFSTEW but that doesn't necessarily help and isn't "carved on a bronze plaque" yet. This Vfd should be an open-and-shut case with people assessing it based on their own opinion and the guidelines. As it is, every one of them dissolves into an "ethical" battle between "Schoolwatch fanboys" and "deletionist cronies". Now, if you'll excuse me, I have vanity pages to cull. THOSE at least don't have hangers-on... Master Thief Garrett 07:01, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

"No, there's no consensus, but notability is often the sole reason given for a deletion vote here on Vfd, so it's become pseudo-policy." So, because deletionists throw "non-notable" around as if it meant something, then it's a pseudo-policy? That would make it, in my opinion, a pseudo-argument, i.e., not a real one. Sorry, mob-rule doesn't work here.

"the vast, vast, VAST majority called the Outside World don't give a ****. Things that seem great to you are useless to others." I can assure you that Pokemon doesn't interest me in the least. I paid some attention to it while my nieces and nephews were into it, but now that they're all over the age of 9, it is too uncool for them. But hey, if it interests you, then why not include it on Wikipedia? My area of interest is not American high schools, but minor canadian political parties and politicians. It is great that there is a space like Wikipedia for those of us with that obscure interest -- which is not just uncool for 9-year-olds, it is uncool for people of all ages -- to share information.

"Is it supposed to be collective consciousness or "schools and streets and clubs in townnamehere" with selective readerships for each cloister?" With over 500,000 articles in the English version alone, Wikipedia is not going to be a summary of the most important collected knowledge, but a vast compendium of information that its editors want to write about. Endless articles on Pokemon, or even omnibus articles as you propose, do not, in my opinion, form a part of the collective consciousness. Pokemon will be gone in 10 years or so.

BEEFSTEW "isn't "carved on a bronze plaque" yet" - I don't think you carve bronze plaques, you engrave them. (Forgive my pendantry. It is an affliction.)

"As it is, every one of them dissolves into an "ethical" battle between "Schoolwatch fanboys" and "deletionist cronies"" Right you are. I think the best solution is for each side to retreat to their own corners -- let the schoolnuts have their articles, I can go back to my obscure Canadian political stuff, and you can have yours about Pokemon and whatever else strikes your fancy. There are lots of good reasons to delete: vanity, unverifiability, original research, etc. I see no need to add the controversial and inherently POV "non-notability". Ground Zero 13:57, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

• Keep. What is gained by deleting school articles? Err on the side of keeping such articles. --Zantastik 19:37, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Wikipedia would not be improved by the deletion of this article. ~leif ☺ _(talk) 01:35, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
  • But will WP be improved by it remaining? Hmmm... Master Thief Garrett 07:01, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete unless wikipedia wants a boring, pointless article for every average school in every country. CDThieme
• Delete Wikipedia != Triviapedia, infinite storage does not change our charter. Instutional Vanity. Gmaxwell 06:20, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.