my son created an account and tried to add a page for his middle-school, only to have the page deleted and told it's not notable enough to have a page.
after that my son hasn't tried editing Wikipedia.
after that my son hasn't tried editing Wikipedia.
Yes, Wikipedia policy pages say to be "bold" with editing, but that only really works for things like fixing typos. If you know that someone might object, you should focus on in-depth discussion and let concerns be addressed that way.
This is volunteer work. They can take it or leave it, but they don't get to complain that people stop being interested in contributing when their Truth By Committee design blows up in their face.
If Goodwill didn't have a dock where I could drop things off and an employee to put it where it needs to be, I wouldn't donate.
You incentivize contribution by lowering the barriers to it.
But I would argue, that it affects quantity and quality in significantly different ways. Meaning that quantity is increased vastly more of the two. Average quality most probably decreases. I.e. given high barrier only the most dedicated are donating, which affects quality positively.
Wikipedia wants to strike some balance between quality and quantity. (At this moment probably push towards quality)
Edit: Where wikipedia clearly fails, is effectively communicating which contributions are desired, ahead of time.
People spending time with good intentions only to finally get rejected, is definitely suboptimal outcome for both sides. (Negative emotions, wasted time, decreased chance of further contributions, bad publicity)
Enough people remain that I doubt they are really hurting for more contributors. But yeah, that's a good part of why more technical or niche topics can be spurious.
But at the same time, less people visit those pages so it hurts the site less.
Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work.
The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating.
Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource their content.
If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space western series but not for a real-life school, we have a problem.
Things like names of teachers or sizes of current classes - those temporal things (which are correct now) become broken windows of "someone needs to update it" in the future.
And if one says "Ok, this one is acceptable" - then how much more maintenance and curation of pages are the core group of volunteers expected to take up?
If the answer to that question is "none" - who is doing it? or is it going to become a repository of outdated information?
Having content is an ongoing cost of time to the people who maintain it. If it isn't maintained, it isn't valuable (or notable) enough to be put in there in the first place.
It might be better served as a part of a larger page that covers the school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... which are a name and optionally a note. Other districts don't even have notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... ).
If it was just a paragraph of content that was timeless (when established, mascot, municipality, etc...) then consider reformatting the school district page (which may well exist) to include the information rather than creating a new one.
If it gets few views it's not important to fix, and if any of the few views cares they can fix it. Lets not pretend that each page needs the same level of attention. A random middle school wikipedia page having a slightly out of date content or even vandalism isn't a big deal at all and can be fixed, and if it's not fixed - it has few views anyway. Wikipedia already acknowledges this and certain pages are much harder to edit than others.
You could even have a computer class where kids from the school would update their school's wiki page as a way to learn how to contribute to wikipedia. Might actually be the easiest type of page in the whole wiki to keep fresh now that I think about it, while creating a whole generation of interested editors.
It's like they think they run a paper version of a encyclopedia with these rules about what is notable or not.
This type of effort often creates a disproportionate amount of work for the volunteers maintaining Wikipedia.
If you feel that that would be a good thing to do, the school should stand up its own wiki about itself that students could update and maintain.
That also avoids possible conflict with the rules of Wikipedia.
I recall a school that attempted to do "ask a question on Stack Overflow" and all the students in the class asked the same question - nearly word for word - about their current assignment... that all then got closed as duplicates of each other.
If the goal is to introduce someone to the application platform, it is likely better to have them work in a private instance where the mentor to new user ratio is much higher and things like "you need to make sure that you are using proper and correct English with capitalization and punctuation," are not "revert and leave an impersonal comment on their talk page about the expected quality of their contributions."
One such article - small problem.
But what if such low-view, and now outdated/vandalized articles start approaching 50% of wikipedia content? That might reflect badly on credibility of whole wiki.
It is nontrivial problem of striking balance between content quality level vs content quantity/contributor freedom.
(Open source software projects deal with same problem, just not on such scale)
As someone who leans inclusionist I wondered about that, but I think it also has to do with the existence of reliable sources. You need them to write an article, and the notability guidelines exclude articles that would be impossible or hard to write due to lack of sources.
Even if we say "ok, the cost of the page on some random middle school is 1 minute / year" then as it grows to that 13,000 schools - that's 220 hours. Five and a half weeks of checking each page once a year for 1 minute with a 40 hour week.
And looking, I'm slightly off on the number of schools.
> During the 2020-2021 school year, there were 13,187 public school districts. These school districts enrolled 47,755,349 students across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State... )
Many school districts have multiple schools (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dallas_Independent_Sch... )
How much time are you willing to spend maintaining individual pages as opposed to a page that lists all the schools and a little bit about each one. The list page takes a similar amount of time to maintain than each page as an individual one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Metropolitan_School_Di... as another example. Pages for high schools? They tend to have sufficient information about them (though the high school that I went to doesn't have a page). Multiply that number by two for the middle schools and by twice again for the elementary schools... and it gets to the difficult to maintain realm.
Another example of a school district and note the lack of middle school distinct pages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Unified_School_Distr...
I've worked on two separate projects where having every middle-school in the state on wikipedia would've helped, so tell your son I appreciate his work!