Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aberdeen Middle School

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 merge to Harford County Public Schools. –Juliancolton | ^Talk 00:03, 1 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Aberdeen Middle School

lacks 3rd party references, not seeing how this can meet notability guidelines RadioFan (talk) 20:26, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions. KuyaBriBri^Talk 20:33, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Maryland-related deletion discussions. KuyaBriBri^Talk 20:33, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge. Doesn't appear to be a Blue Ribbon School, merge to Harford County Public Schools per common deletion outcomes and the school notability proposal. tedder (talk) 20:46, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge. I did a thorough survey of the news results for this school on Newsbank, which is a password-required database like Google News Archive but with full text of all the articles dating to the early 1980s. 100+ articles mention this school but none are about the school - all are about events at the school, ex-students, teachers, etc. The school was apparently founded in 1973 so maybe there's articles about this school on microfilm, but we can't just assume they exist, someone would need to find them. In the past I have saved several middle school articles through archival research, and the sources just aren't there this time. Merge, unless someone finds real sources. --Chiliad22 (talk) 20:51, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Do Not Merge.I'm a little confused with some of the notability guidelines, but I have placed some secondary sources to prove of the school's existence. What other proof would I need to provide to acknowledge Aberdeen Middle School as notable. RickNightCrawler (talk) 21:13, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The two "profile" links are not independent sources as they are written and published by Aberdeen's school district. With school articles, what I've found in the past have been newspaper articles about the school's history. See Roy Martin Middle School for a modest example. --Chiliad22 (talk) 21:48, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I added a couple more things to Aberdeen Middle School, including a newspaper article reference. RickNightCrawler (talk) 23:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Unfortunately, that is one of the sources I looked at in forming my initial opinion. It's really about an incident that occurred at the school, the article isn't about the school itself. It only contains information about what happened that one day, there's no bigger picture information about the school, and bigger picture information is what we put into encyclopedia articles. If a gang incident occurred at a given street intersection, would that street intersection be notable because of the newspaper article? I don't mean to sound combative, believe me I'd be happy to keep this article if sources can be found, I just have a relatively high standard for what constitutes sufficient sourcing about a topic. --Chiliad22 (talk) 13:14, 24 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and expand or merge. School article AfDs have always been a controversial issue, and there's little consensus. WP:SCHOOL has never passed as a policy because no one can agree on school article standards. There's the deletionists that say "burn all school articles" and the antideletionists that say "spare all school articles." Something important to consider is WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, nor is Wikipedia an indiscriminate collection of information. Something that has always puzzled me is how we keep all (senior) high school and secondary school articles (for the most part) while we don't always keep middle school, elementary school, grade school, junior high school, and primary school articles. How is this article different than Hillsboro High School (Ohio) or Bayshore High School? Now I'm not suggesting that we start nominating all of the HS articles for deletion since we have several of them that are half way decent articles that would be merged with articles of far lower quality and deleted, but I don't see how we should be deleting these middle and elementary school articles when we have high school articles of equal quality being kept. A perfect example of where WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a paper encylopedia should be considered was a particular middle school article I saw with a merge tag that was rated as "B" class. I don't remember what exact article that was, but that was kind of silly in my opinion. By the way, the history section should be removed from the article considering WP:NOTNEWS; although the deletion of the article may be debateable, there is no question that the inclusion of such a non-notable event in the article is incompatible with our policies. PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 04:12, 25 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually the gang incident was added as a part of someone looking for reliable sources on the school. Incidents of violence can be part of covering a school encyclopedically, see DuPont Manual High School... sometimes an incident like that can become a notable part of school history. At any rate, I want to include school articles when the school has been covered by reliable third-party sources and merge when it hasn't been. It's pretty simple... when you write articles based on summarizing sources, the way WP:V tells us to, your concern should be whether enough sources exist about the subject to support an article... in this case they don't seem to. --Chiliad22 (talk) 16:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge we keep all HS articles because we have found that 90% or so are notable when investigated; we merge others unless there is something special, because 95% are not. It may sound like very rough justice, but it's considerably better than we could do we debated each of them. We do have practical consensus for this as a guideline at AfD, though a few people persistently objective have held up adoption formally, as has happened to many other good guidelines. If there's anything special here, now's the time to say it. DGG (talk) 04:33, 26 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge/redirect to Harford County Public Schools which is accepted practice for middle schools where the school is not a Blue Ribbon school or otherwise notable. TerriersFan (talk) 02:21, 27 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Harford County Public Schools. Rmosler | ● 21:35, 27 June 2009 (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.