 | This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion. | |
These project guidelines aim to help advise editors on how school articles should be organized. Please feel free to update this page as necessary, but before implementing controversial changes please start a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools. Note that these project guidelines are advisory, and editors are not obliged to follow them.
[edit] General tips
- Write a strong lead. Be sure to write a lead that concisely summarizes the school into one or two paragraphs which make sense to someone who may know nothing about the school in question.
- Support your contributions. Before you start an article on a school, or make additions, it is strongly suggested you first have an adequate amount of verifiable information about the school readily available, written in reliable published sources, independent of the school. This will make meeting the recommended content requirements far easier than trying to find all the information after you have already started the article (or hoping others will).
- Use images if possible. Images can greatly enhance articles, but only use them when they help illustrate the topic (e.g. are relevant), and ensure that they are freely licensed or public domain (See Wikipedia:Image use policy). In most cases, the only way to accomplish this is for a Wikipedian (such as yourself) to personally take the photo and then donate the picture to the public domain or license it freely.
- Use an Infobox. Infoboxes provide quick access to vital information on a school, and are convenient for readers to find very common information (see the template section below for some sample infoboxes).
- Avoid bulk additions. The bulk automated entry of schools is strongly discouraged, as is the bulk adding of schools to the Articles for deletion page. As a general rule of thumb, only add schools that you are willing to do significant research on.
- Avoid ambiguity. Remember that Wikipedia has a worldwide audience. Abbreviations must be written out in full at the first occurrence, and local terminology must be explained or Wiki-linked, for example, K–12, Twelfth grade, Reception. Remember too that words can often have very different meanings in different countries. For example, kindergarten is a pre-school in most European countries but part of the school system in North America. A grammar school is a selective secondary school in Europe but an elementary school in North America.
- Be bold! You very likely know what perfect articles look like. They cover everything they should without going on forever. Common sense could have told you almost all of the items mentioned above. Ultimately, assume good faith and go out there and write some good articles.
[edit] Neutral point of view
Take care to maintain a neutral point of view when describing a school. It is especially important to avoid vague praise, even if sourced. Some examples that were found:
- "School X has had a long and glorious tradition."
- "School X has been consistenly been ranked as one of the top public high schools in both the state and country."
- "School X has one of the lowest admissions rates in the country."
Although written for colleges and universities, the advice in Wikipedia:PRESTIGE is applicable here, as well.
[edit] Structure
Make sure you name the article according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (schools) to avoid confusion. Follow the Wikipedia Manual of Style and only make links that are relevant to the context. Days, months and years should not be linked in school articles unless the inclusion of such a link is of specific relevance to the article.
The key to writing a good school article is to explain why the school is unique. What makes it different from every other school? Does it have special programs? A history of championship sports teams? Famous alumni? Has there been a noteworthy event there?
[edit] Did you know?
Any new articles or articles with more than 1,500 characters of prose, that have an interesting or unusual fact in them should be suggested for the Did you know? box of the Main Page. Eligible articles must be no more than five days old. Articles which have been significantly expanded (at least fivefold) in the last five days are also eligible.
[edit] Sections of the article
The following section names are for guidance only, and may be adjusted to suit local spelling, custom, and organization.
- Infobox — All school articles should have an infobox providing the basic details about the school, and preferably with an image of the school logo. The logo image should have its own specific fair use rationale. See Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline.
- Introduction/lead — Give the full official name of the school and detail about its location (town/municipality, county/state/province, country). Add a few facts about the school that make it unique. Provide the name of the founder and founding name, and affiliation with any larger school system, if applicable. Include brief statistics on the number of pupils/size of the student body (always state the date when the information is current and be cautious about having too many statistics that will need to be updated frequently). Summarize the main sections of the article – history, alumni, buildings, etc.
- History — Describe the history of the school, including noteworthy milestones in its development.
- Campus/school site — Describe the overall shape and size of the school site/campus. Ideally a picture of the school should be included if a free image is available. Mention any famous buildings or stadia and their architects if interesting or notable, and consider creating a Building(s) section where appropriate, as in City of London School#Buildings.
- Curriculum — Provide a brief description of the school's curriculum. Does it follow a National Curriculum or does it set its own subjects? Focus specifically on aspects of the curriculum which are unique to the school. Is it the only school in the locality which teaches Mandarin, Latin or Greek? Does it have a culinary academy?
- Extracurricular activities — Mention the sports team(s) of the school and what is notable about them. Here is also a good place to mention specific traditions of school, like students' union/student council activities, a student newspaper, clubs, regular activities, etc. The heading may be changed accordingly in regard to the importance of sports, clubs, traditions, students' unions etc. For example, alternative headings could be Students' Union, Sports and Traditions or Students' Union Activities. Mention significant championships for the sports teams. Specific students should not be mentioned unless they are notable in their own right.
- Notable alumni—If possible, provide a list of notable alumni of the school with appropriate and sourced detail on each, moving the list to a separate article if it is too large. The section may also include an overview of the school's alumni, providing appropriate details where available, such as the school's reputation for their alumni, the fields in which the school's alumni have had a impact, and any alumni society. See #Alumni for further guidance.
- Notable teachers/faculty — The names of current and former teachers should only be included if they are notable in their own right (for example, they are published authors or they have won a teaching award) or they have been the subject of multiple non-trivial press coverage.
- Former headteachers/principals — A list of former headteachers/principals, with a short description of their achievements, is often useful. Long lists should be split into a separate article (such as the List of headmasters at Eton College).
- References — Provide verifiable reliable sources of information about the school, that are independent of the school itself. An article should not rely solely on what its subject has to say about itself (as with any article in Wikipedia). A school's own website is not an independent source. References from third-party sources are particularly important for school awards and contentious statements. For private schools in North America, an accreditation body or government source should be provided to show the organization is a legitimate school. If a resource is online (which is ideal) consider that potentially it will go offline (newspapers often allow free reading only for recent stories) and provide sufficient information so that the story could still be found (author, publication, full article title, date, etc). See Wikipedia:Footnotes for the technical details of how to do this in a standard format.
- External links — Give a link to the website of the school, preferably one in the English language. Include other informational links that might interest readers, but whose contents might be beyond the scope of inclusion in the article (for example, links to the school's Parent Teacher Association).
[edit] School district and List of schools articles
Should you wish to create or improve an article on a school district or create a list of schools article, a fine example can be found at Dallas Independent School District, and a list at List of schools of the Dallas Independent School District. A less complicated example list is List of Clark County School District schools.
[edit] What not to include
School articles should only contain material of encyclopaedic interest; lists should be kept to a minimum; prose with context to the individual school is preferred. Remember that Wikipedia is not a directory. School articles should specifically not include:
- Lists of current teachers, pupils, administrative staff, school secretaries, etc.
- Excessive amounts of detail about the school uniform or dress code, unless it has seen significant coverage in multiple secondary sources. However, the uniform may still be mentioned briefly without this level of coverage, particularly if it is unusual.
- School timetables and bell schedules.
- Trivia which is only of interest to pupils in the school (such as daily lunch menus, location of the toilets, a room-by-room description of the school facilities).
- Current school events which are only of short-term interest.
- Telephone numbers, fax numbers, and e-mail addresses.
- Lists of college and university acceptances.
[edit] Applicable categories
Generally all of Category:Education, but especially articles in the subcategories of
See also:
[edit] Sources
[edit] History
Some schools have published histories. Check the online catalogue at Worldcat. For UK schools the best reference is COPAC. Smaller schools might not have deposited a school history with one of the major deposit libraries so check the catalogue of the relevant local library (most are now online). Even if you do not live in the locality it is possible to borrow any book for a modest fee via the inter-library loan system
Many schools have buildings which are of architectural importance. Some English schools have been classified by English Heritage as listed buildings and are included on the Images of England website, while some American schools are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
[edit] Statistics
[edit] Australia
- SchoolChoice provides information on a number of New South Wales and Victorian schools (mostly private schools), including fees, history, enrolment numbers, facilities, location and occasionally alumni.
- Australian Boarding Schools' Association has a fairly comprehensive listing of Boarding schools in all states of Australia. Includes introductory information about schools, enrolment statistics, contact details and year levels offered.
- Australian Schools Directory Provides fairly detailed information on schools with featured pages.
[edit] United Kingdom
[edit] Awards
[edit] United Kingdom
[edit] United States
[edit] Alumni
All alumni information must be referenced. See Wikipedia:Footnoting for technical help. Individual alumni need a citation a) to verify that they did indeed attend the school and b) to verify the statement of their notability in their short one or two line description. If an alumnus has their own article in mainspace, then it is not necessary for their notability to be referenced, as long as it is done on their actual page. Be sure to check the existing article to ensure that it demonstrates alumni status with a cited reference.
[edit] Who should be included?
Per Wikipedia:Bio#Lists of people, alumni to be included should meet Wikipedia notability criteria. All alumni meeting these criteria are to be included on an alumni list, regardless of how much time they have spent on a school roll, from one day to several years, and whether or not they graduated.
[edit] Style of entries
The WP:Embedded list guideline invites consideration of whether information might be more appropriately presented in list or prose form. As the notable alumni of a school typically form an assorted group with little in common, describing all of them in prose would be clumsy. Unless there are very few notable alumni, lists are recommended as the most accessible way of presenting all of them. Adding a prose summary is encouraged, particularly if the list is split off as a separate article.
Entries should be bulleted and have a one- or two-line description declaring notability. Links to articles related to an entry are encouraged, but beware of overlinking, for example if many alumni have entered parliament, there is no need to link to parliament of a certain country more than once. A decision about which entries to redlink, in the case of many entries without their own article, should be made by editors at individual pages. After a description, state when they graduated or what years they attended. After that, list any school awards or positions e.g. School Captain.
Alumni should be categorized according to the field that made them famous: e.g. Politics, Medicine, Academia. It is acceptable to list someone in more than one field, provided that this is mentioned in a side note. Add something like: "(Also listed in Sport)".
Other ways to categorize entries include purely alphabetically, but it has been expressed that this is not particularly helpful to the reader.
As all alumni who attended a school for any amount of time must be included across all alumni articles, some attendees will have attended more than one school. Place in brackets the name of any other schools that they attended.
[edit] Separate alumni pages
If a list of alumni in a school article becomes quite large, consider moving it to another page entitled "List of...". It is not necessary to include "notable" in the article title. As everything on Wikipedia needs to adhere to Wikipedia:Notability (people) having "notable" in the title is redundant. Have a look at other alumni pages in Category:Lists of people by school affiliation to get an idea or see the following examples:
If the alumni are listed in a separate article, the Alumni section should link to the list article and provide a brief summary. See Harrow School#Notable alumni or Baltimore City College#Notable alumni for examples.
[edit] Notable alumni sources
The following is a list of external sources which contain notable alumni from various schools, which don't (all) yet have articles. Ideally this should be used for sources that are selective (separating the most notable from the rest of the alumni). Also, please try to list large sources at the top, and sources for individual schools lower down. This can be used as a future reference if/when a school article is made in the future, or if you find a source that has more useful information than you can take advantage of right away. When using information from one of these sources, always try to confirm it with another source (such as a newspaper article specifically about the person) and don't automatically assume any source is comprehensive, even in its field of expertise. Ideally you can confirm something from both sides (e.g. the school acknowledges the individual, and the individual acknowledges the school).
[edit] International sources
[edit] United States
Athletes:
- The Baseball Cube has a very extensive database of baseball players, with the data searchable by city, high school, college, team, etc. Here is the search for Long Beach, California. Although I am always leary about secondary sources, they seem to have gotten the facts correct for every person that I knew details on, and people who collect baseball statistics seem pretty fanatical about accuracy. They do admit that it is not a complete list.
- National High School Baseball Coaches Association contains lists of BCA award winners back to 1992, including National Senior Players of the Year Winners, Coaches of the Year and Assistant Coaches of the Year (by District), and National Groundskeeper/Field of the Year; District and National High School Baseball Coaches Association All American Teams, 2005 through 2007; National, District, and BCA/Louisville Slugger State Players of Year. The BCA Hall Of Fame lists coaches inducted after meeting criteria, including 20 years of varsity coaching experience, and being elected.
- Women's United Soccer Association – Each player bio seems to have the high school the player attended.
Local sources:
Other less reliable sources: The following probably shouldn't be relied on as a proper source (at least not alone), but will inform you of an association that you can research for a proper source:
- Celebrity Prep Schools – This appears to rely heavily on tips. So you probably shouldn't use it as a single source, but once you get two names (famous person and school) it might be easier to find a better more reliable source.
[edit] Individual alumni information
Use this sub-page for recording school alumni who can't yet be placed in an article (e.g. the school article doesn't exist yet). When an article is made, the info can be moved there. By linking from this sub-page, somebody who creates the article would see this in the backlinks.
[edit] School songs, school hymns and fight songs
[edit] Copyright
As a general rule of thumb if the name of the author is known copyright usually expires 70 years after the death of the author, although some countries have slightly shorter terms. If the name of the author is not known, copyright expires 70 years after the first known performance, except for schools in the US where copyright expires 95 years after the first known performance. All school songs should be referenced. It is recommended that school songs without appropriate references where the copyright status is unclear should be deleted. For further guidance and for advice on a case-by-case basis visit Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
[edit] Languages
In any event, in addition to copyright concerns, song lyrics in other languages may be appropriate in the relevant language wiki; on English wikipedia, lyrics other than English should be excluded, as should be their translations, unless the English translated versions are equally known/sung.
WikiProject Schools 
