Talk:Georgetown University

Alumni section ballooning

The alumni section here has grown way too large for this summary article. We have a fantastic List of Georgetown University alumni article that features all of these names, and there is no need to itemize the names in the prose or with an image gallery, which is specifically discouraged on Wikipedia articles. As of today, I count 70 individual names listed. I feel strongly that is simply too many, that many of the individuals are just trivial, and featuring them is a form of puffery. Individuals should ideally be included as part of a larger statement about alumni, and not because they attended the school and later became famous, i.e. "Georgetown's alumni include more U.S. diplomats than any other university,^[source] such as...".^[source] The first paragraph here is the sort we want, sourced data about the alumni as a large group, rather than one individual out of hundreds of thousands. Please leave the listing to the actual list article. Sound good?-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 18:10, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

I went through and tried to put my suggestion into action, by rewriting sentences to put the school programs or a statement about broader alumni first, followed by individual examples. I've culled the names down to 40, which still seems like a lot to me. And I replaced the image gallery with a photo of graduation. I've never felt that government portraits were the best option to illustrate this university's article. If there are to be photos of individual alumni, I think it should be of them speaking on campus, meeting with other alumni, or doing something related to the school. We previously used this image of Bill Clinton, John Podesta, and Jack DeGioia, but its kind of a weird angle and it kind of looks like Jack is saying "please don't touch me." Alternatively, there is a 37 minute public domain video of Clinton speaking at his Georgetown class reunion in 1993. Its spot on the topic, but I'm not sure the thumbnail reads well, so I'm happy to entertain alternative suggestions or better photos from graduations if editors have them.-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 16:44, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this trimming. I agree it was warranted and think it could probably go further. Except for the most important positions, listing individual people is less preferable than listing counts of e.g. X ambassadors. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:01, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

New schools

The university announced it would create two new schools by 2022 out of the School of Nursing and Health Studies: the School of Nursing and the School of Health. When the time comes that they are actually created, they will have to be added to the constituent schools table under #Academics. It is unclear to me from the announcement whether one or both will be considered continuations of the current NHS, for purposes of ascertaining their dates of founding. Ergo Sum 03:11, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Source about undergraduate admissions being used to support a claim about all admissions

Jmswllms0 is insisting that the lede of this article must say that "Admissions to the university are highly selective." However, the cited source explicitly focuses only on undergraduate admissions. So it's puzzling that Jmswllms0 has repeatedly removed "Undergraduate" from that claim. ElKevbo (talk) 03:15, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

I don’t even think this sentence belongs here. I would move it into the admissions section. To me it makes no sense to assert that just the undergraduate admissions at GU is highly selective, there are several graduate programs at SFS as well as the School of Medicine that are competitive. Jmswllms0 (talk) 03:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Moving it would be fine with me but we have to stick with what the source says. If you can provide other sources about the graduate admissions, that would be very helpful. ElKevbo (talk) 04:21, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

I added additional sources to support the assertion. Jmswllms0 (talk) 04:50, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

A sentence about admission in general is more useful for the lede than a sentence about undergraduate admission, specifically. As long as there is a good ref to support it, I support keeping it. Ergo Sum 16:12, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Issues with this FA

There are some issues with this article:

• Unsourced content
• Some sandwiching of images and tables
• Dated content
• It may also be overly dependent on primary sources, but I'm not sure.

Those are the major issues. There're some other things, like repetitive citations in the lead, but they aren't pressing. ~ HAL333 18:47, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

I pushed hard to get this to FA in 2007, and to keep it there for several years, but admit my involvement has tapered off over the last decade. I keep hoping another student, alum, or qualified editor will take up the project of keeping this article and subarticles up to date. I know Ergo Sum (talk · contribs) has done fantastic work on the president and Jesuit articles, and there may be some text and sources from those that overlaps and could help here. School articles will always have unsourced content, particularly with a student life section, but I'd say that's easier to remove without sacrificing the comprehensiveness of the article by-in-large. And primary sources are indeed an ongoing issue, many facts and figures have to come directly from branches of the school, but I think we'd rather have the info than not. When appropriate, it's fine to preface info as "According to the school..." to make it clear to readers it's a primary-sourced figure. I'd say the dated statement are in a way the most concerning to me, since they can kind of snowball when you realize how much of the article needs major prose rewrites because of the new data. I use a lot of Template:As of tags in the prose, so that can help identify facts tied to a date, just by searching {{As of in the edit window.-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 13:04, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Something that I have long had on the back burner is doing a proper WP:FAR for this article, since it's been well over a decade since it went through its FAC. Patrickneil did a fantastic job with this article the first time around and has maintained it diligently, so I very much hope you will contribute your input at FAR; I know I'd definitely rely on it. I just don't have the bandwidth to dedicate a lot of time to wiki right now, but I will have more in August. If the status quo for this article can remain until then, that would be appreciated. Ergo Sum 14:03, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Postponing until next month sounds like a perfectly reasonable request to me. I do think it'd be nice to have an FAR, given how long it's been since the previous one and how much college articles change (they're not as stable as e.g. history articles). As WP:HED's roster of FAs dwindles, this article takes on more and more of a role as a showcase model, so it's important it be up to par. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:54, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@Ergo Sum and Patrickneil: Just following up, any updates on preferences for scheduling the FAR? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:04, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm totally fine with primary sources from the university when that information can't be sourced from anywhere else. But I think there are many cases where secondary sources could replace these. For example, I would replace the Hoya source which describes the crucufix additions that "attracted national attention". If that change did indeed attract national attemtion, I'm sure the NYT or Wapo covered it. ~ HAL333 16:23, 2 July 2021 (UTC)