- Denver Online High School (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)
Closed as keep with the rationale that "There is very long standing consensus on this", despite the closure of several recent secondary school AfDs as delete and the outcome of this RfC, which found that secondary schools are not inherently notable. Closing administrator does not appear to have assessed consensus in the AfD discussion itself, where some of the comments were not supported by policy rationales. The consensus in the discussion is not to keep in my reading of it. My request at User talk:Spartaz#Denver Online High School AfD to re-open the discussion has been turned down, so bringing it for review here. Cordless Larry (talk) 17:03, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Sigh. Yet another example of people not being able to agree on what WP:SCHOOLRFC meant. It's pretty obvious to me what it means, but lots of people (many of whom have earned my respect) disagree with me. That says to me this battle is going to continue to be fought AfD by AfD, with the result varying largely by who happens to show up for which discussion. That's not a good situation. I would not have closed this as keep. I might have closed it as NC, or I might have relisted it. I can't find enough fault in the actual close to argue it should be overturned, however. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:14, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Surely the fault is in the failure to interpret the consensus in the actual discussion, as opposed to making an assertion about consensus in previous AfDs? There were more people arguing for delete than keep, and one of the keeps failed to offer a policy-based argument and seems on the fence between keep and merge. Setting aside the RfC, I don't see how we get from that discussion to a keep close. Cordless Larry (talk) 18:23, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
-
-
- Overturn to NC or Relist --Pretty much one word--Nonsense closure.He ought to have !voted rather than close it. ~ Winged BladesGodric 18:36, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn to NC or Relist. Definitely no consensus to delete showing in the discussion. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 20:23, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn to NC I don't see how you can make that closure Keep unless you make the leap that secondary schools have some sort of inherent notability, and we can't per the RfC. The Delete arguments aren't fantastic either though,
especially in light of the fact that the schools RfC expects a sourcing search of greater depth than usual. The discussion had enough participation for a closure. Hut 8.5 21:44, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- I thought the mention of a greater depth of source searching was intended to be about non-Western schools in the most part. Sources about an "online high school" in the US should be pretty easy to find if they exist. Cordless Larry (talk) 21:51, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Is the question on the table (a) delete/keep, or (b) reopen the AfD? Fundamentally, we are asking the same jury pool to rehear the case. THAT is a waste of time. If we are going to litigate this one again, then the argument ought to be useful and set a precedent. This article already has two recognized press citations and a reasonable number of primary sources. If the intent is to raise the bar, then say so. Rhadow (talk) 22:41, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Relist, the discussion was at most no consensus. The concern was lack of references, and the "keep" arguments did not provide additional references. There is not a "longstanding consensus" on schools any more, schools must follow the same standards as other organizations. Seraphimblade Talk to me 06:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Relist- it does not appear that the previous "long standing consensus" still stands. Reyk YO! 11:05, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn to No Consensus the article already has reliable sources and there was enough debate for a close so a relist is not required Atlantic306 (talk) 15:16, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn to no consensus, do not relist which was the actual outcome of the RfC, and everything else in it was pontificating by closers trying to tell a story that had no basis in the actual discussion. There is no consensus on the issue of schools at the moment, and the RfC did not magically change the guidelines based reasoning behind SCHOOLOUTCOMES (WP:NPOSSIBLE). The community is very divided on this now, and despite what the anti-schools crowd might think, the RfC did not give closers the policy basis to ignore !votes that look at the traditional reasoning behind outcomes. There have been deletions based on that, but they were supervotes with no actual policy basis. Until such a time where we have an RfC that develops an actual community consensus for this, no consensus closes make the most sense. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:28, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- change to Non-consensus which better reflects the actual discussion. But keep should have been be the right conclusion: The basis for keeping these articles is not that high schools have inherent notability, and people who say delete based on the rejection of that argument are confusing the issue. The basis for keeping high school articles is that WP is better served by considering them as if they were notable, just as we do a few other subjects, such as Olympic athletes or populated places. The reason it's better is that it avoids these sorts of arguments. There are tens of thousands of high school articles,and we would be having the same discussion over every one of them.
- Before we tacitly agreed to deal with them as if they were notable, we had many such discussions a day , and the results were an argument like this for every one of them, with essentially random results. That helps nobody. The people who did want them & didn't want them spent much of their effort at this, and AFD was much more clogged up than at present. AFDs go better when there are not too many of them, and those interested can concentrate on the real problems.
- The effort here to delete seems based on the rationales that these articles are so inappropriate that even removing a few at random helps WP, and possibly a desire to bring that about by an attempt to overwhelm the other side. The first argument is wrong--WP is an encyclopedia , and reference works such as encyclopedias are supposed to have reasonably consistent coverage. As for the second, that is indeed a recurrent tactic at WP, and it is destructive of any possible cooperation. There's an inherent tendency to spend too much time on arguing at the expense of writing and improving articles, and we need to fight against it. WP is not really harmed by including some articles on unimportant subjects, and the more rational course is to accept that people judge different fields differently, and we should tolerate one another. Toleration is the basis of consensus. DGG ( talk ) 01:01, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP is not really harmed by including some articles on unimportant subjects --I will try to make some progress arguing along these lines in AFDs:) ~ Winged BladesGodric 08:29, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Harm can happen at various levels. There's waste of resources. I've never seen anybody seriously argue that machine resources (storage, server cycles, bandwidth) are an issue. More important is lost productivity of our most important resource: human editors. For the editors writing the articles, well, I guess it's their time to spend as they please.
- The real loss is time spent in these sorts of discussions. It's fine to have some amount of discussion, to hash out an issue, but as DGG points out, when you've got a large number of extremely similar topics (i.e. secondary schools), it's a big waste to keep having the same argument over and over again. Better to come to some global conclusion and apply that everywhere. If that means that we have some articles about schools that we shouldn't really have, I'm willing to accept that because the cure is worse than the disease. I was hoping that WP:SCHOOLRFC would give us that guidance, but we're still arguing over what the outcome means, so sadness there.
- The other kind of harm is to our reputation. We want to be someplace people can come to and trust that they're getting good information. Every time we allow crap into the encyclopedia, it reduces that trust. It's death of a thousand paper cuts. This is where we need to start factoring in WP:PROMO and WP:COI to make sure we stay an encyclopedia, not a no-cost marketing channel. In this particular AfD, PROMO and COI never came up, so I assume it's not an issue for this school, but it is for some. We need to stay alert for that. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:42, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- endorse Closer is correct on what we generally do. It has been a long standing practice as noted in the discussion and attempts to change it have not found consensus. NC would also have been a reasonable close. But we don't generally (ever?) overturn a keep to NC or the other way around. Hobit (talk) 01:49, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse Since we are not WP:BURO, I see no benefit of changing to NC close to placate bare delete !votes like this. I very much agree with the response of the closing Admin, while he stood with his close, he also didn't believe it will result in delete in other venue. And it is clear here, it won't be deleted. So changing to "No consensus" is bureaucratic symbolism without any benefit to the pedia. –Ammarpad (talk) 10:46, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn and relist with a reminder that schools are no longer default-notable. Stifle (talk) 12:19, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- I remind you that the RfC closed with a statement that there was no consensus to end the practice of keeping all secondary school articles. That is indeed default treating as notable. DGG ( talk ) 18:41, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
overturn to keependorse The discussion seemed to turn more into a referendum on the recent anti-consensus "consensus", and this school seems to have gotten picked as a suitable battleground. I can find enough to where I would have kept it, and my experience is that, on GNG arguments, I tend to be pickier than consensus. But in this case it seems to me that DGG's picture of things, in the discussion, is generally accurate: public high schools in reality enjoy pretty much the same degree of actual note, but due to vagaries of location and community, finding this is much easier to come by from some than others. The school in question actually seems to have more real note than most due to its unusual nature, but when it comes down to it, it wouldn't be hard to treat public high schools as a class as lacking notability. I can't see that being defended, so it seems to me that neutrality has to turn in the direction of keeping these per the established consensus that one argument over in a corner doesn't get to overturn. It doesn't seem to me that real checking of sources figured in the discussion (I found an NPR story in which it figured as an example): the point seemed to be to find some school to delete in order to lay down the law. Mangoe (talk) 12:18, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- @Mangoe: You do realize the original AfD was closed as keep, so overturn to keep doesn't make much sense? Did you mean, endorse? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:18, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Sorry, there are too many going on and I get confused. Mangoe (talk) 16:19, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Hello Mangoe -- You say, "it wouldn't be hard to treat public high schools as a class as lacking notability." Tell me, then, please, how would that logic apply to the hundreds of articles on Japanese train and trolley stops, none of which have a single reference? Which is more important to an encyclopedia reader, a high school or a trolley stop? Rhadow (talk) 18:36, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Don't ask me to defend them: I tried to get a bunch of "just the stats" train stop articles deleted, but they got kept anyway. Personally, I think that even down at the bottom of notability a high school where we can get demographics on the student population etc. is going to come higher than a platform by the side of the tracks where you might be able to find mention of it in a schedule. I've long ago given up hope that WP's standards on this were ever going to be as high as mine. Mangoe (talk) 19:10, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- There's a lot of crap in wikipedia that shouldn't be there. In the scheme of things, secondary schools with dubious notability hardly seem worth worrying about. Likewise, I can't get too worked up over the zillions of trivia articles from rail-fans, pokeomon-fans, football-fans, etc. I'm much more concerned over the people using wikepedia for deliberate for-profit marketing/SEO/spam.
- The current count of unreferenced rail transport articles is 22,554 [1] Rhadow (talk) 22:37, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse. I think this should have been ended as merge or redirect but that wasn't discussed despite the nom mentioning it. Presumably the outcome of the DRV will be NC and it will get chucked back on afd before long, maybe merge/redirect will get discussed in more depth at that time. Whatever the case or closing rationale there is no consensus to delete in that AfD. Szzuk (talk) 19:05, 9 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Vacate close since it's incorrect per the aforementioned RfC and it does not follow the discussion that was held. I really don't care if that results in overturning to NC, relisting, or simply reopening it—so long as Spartaz's close is not the final judgement. -- Tavix (talk) 22:32, 12 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment Does it really matter whether it's closed as Keep or No Consensus? The outcome is the same either way. This whole DRV is a waste of a lot of people's time. Unless someone has an actual reason this should have been closed as delete, this DRV should be closed immediately to so as to not waste any more people's time. Smartyllama (talk) 15:30, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- "Keep" implies that there was consensus, when in fact there was none. You may feel this does not matter, but several other editors, myself incldued, do feel this distinction is important enough to merit this discussion. -- Tavix (talk) 20:20, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
|
