User talk:Neos Sphere

Montgomery Bell

My opinion, or your opinion of who is notable is not at issue. There is a standard (WP:N and all its many subsections), and you must show references from reliable sources (not the school's webpage) to support their notability. The standard is that there must be enough sourcing shown to create a Wikipedia biography on anyone you want to list in an article. (WP:NLIST) Obviously, if they already have a Wiki bio, it is no problem to include them, as you can Wikilink to their bio for reference. But keep in mind that the article is about the school, not any individual on the staff. Even if a person is notable, the amount of copy on them should be minimal. People can follow the wikilink if they want to know more.

School article guidelines WP:WPSCHOOLS/AG discourage the inclusion of student or faculty names for a good reason. As Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", the presence of student or faculty names in an article encourages the inclusion of more, leading to namecruft, ie, the insertion of names just so an individual can see their name in print.

You may not be aware, but this article has been a longstanding problem on Wikipedia as the school itself has tried repeatedly to use it as a publicity organ. That is not gonna happen. I can promise you that every edit that survives on this page will be Joe Friday, just the facts, maam. Much of your recent additions have been in flowery language much more suited for a press release than an encyclopedia article. This is an encyclopedia; it is supposed to be somewhat boring.

A good general rule of thumb to go by when deciding what to put in a school article is this: If you were totally unfamiliar with the school, is (what you are thinking of adding) a piece of information that I would want to know? The CV of the band director is not something that would fall into that category. If Leonard Bernstein was on the faculty, that would be something that would interest people everywhere. One of his students, not so much.

Please look at some other school articles. You will see that most are much shorter than Montgomery Bell. You might notice too that although the article on Montgomery Bell is roughly four times longer than most school articles, it is still only a "start" class article, the second from the lowest classification for quality. Why? Because most of what gets added to it is just trivial junk. I know it seems important to the school's community, but that isn't what you should be shooting for...rather, the article is for an audience including the whole English-speaking world. Gtwfan52 (talk) 06:18, 21 May 2013 (UTC)