Wikipedia talk:College and university article advice/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Draft proposal to clarify appropriate statements about prestige and rankings in the lede

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I think we need more concrete guidance - and subsequent editing of articles to bring them in line with that guidance - about when it's appropriate to have information in the lede of articles about the prestige or rankings of a college or university. There are far too many articles that have vague claims of "This institution is highly ranked" or "This institution is among the most prestigious." In some cases, the claims are supported by one or more citations to specific rankings. In other cases, they're an editor's attempt at summarizing the rankings and other information in the body of the article. In many other cases, there are neither citations in the lede nor enough information in the body - sometimes none - to justify inclusion in the lede.

Complicating this issue is that some of these claims are made in bad faith to promote the institution. Sometimes they're exaggerations. And sometimes they're a good-faith effort that falls too heavily on the side of WP:SYN. Regardless of why the information was added, in the end we have a lot of inconsistencies that mirror the many dubious claims made by the institutions themselves that a substantial number of them are highly prestigious. Many of these claims are not accurate and do not serve readers well.

I think we could help ourselves and our readers if we insisted on some clear cut language along these lines:

In most cases, the lead paragraphs of articles about colleges and universities:

Should not include specific rankings. Although rankings supported by reliable sources are often appropriate for the body of the article, this information is usually too detailed and ephemeral to merit inclusion in the lead.

Should not include editors' attempts at summarizing rankings unless that specific language has commonly been used by high quality, reliable sources. In many cases, editors' attempts at summarizing rankings is synthesis which is not permitted in Wikipedia articles. If there is language that merits inclusion in the lead, it must include explicit citations and must also be discussed, in detail, in the body of the article.

Should only language describing the prestige, broadly construed, of an institution if independent, high quality, and reliable sources explicitly and routinely use that language to describe the institution. In those cases, the claims must include explicit citations and must also be discussed, in detail, in the body of the article.

That's just a first draft of some potential language that would provide very clear guidance to editors on when it's appropriate to include this material in the lede of an article. I'd prefer if we could workshop this here to make edits to this language (e.g., add some specific examples) or something similar and see if there may be consensus around this. If that is successful, I would prefer to run a project-wide RfC as the next step before making any edits to this advice. If we change this advice to incorporate something like this, many articles will need to be edited to remove information from the lede and we'll need a strong indication of project-wide consensus as some editors will push back. I'm happy to do the bulk of all of that work if there is an appropriate level of agreement and support. ElKevbo (talk) 02:30, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for drafting this, @ElKevbo! WP:HIGHEREDREP is the main precedent in this area, so any proposal would want to link to that as background. A few thoughts:

• When we talk about "specific rankings", we should clarify that we're talking about qualitative rankings like U.S. News, not something like "Foobar University is ranked first for most underwater basket weaving championships", which could potentially be due for the lead if it's a defining aspect of the institution.
• "Most cases" leaves a fair amount of wiggle room. I think that's necessary given all the potential caveats, but it could also make it tricky to enforce.
• I'd also like more clarity about what we mean with summarizing. Let's say there's an institution like Grinnell known for its large endowment. If that info is due, we could try to give a specific rank, but that's subject to change each year, and also a little finicky since it depends on which other institutions get counted, etc. It's more durable to say something "Grinnell has among the 10 biggest endowments of American liberal arts colleges," but would you object to that as synthesis? There's probably a good source somewhere that talks about Grinnell that way, but finding it is a tall ask, and I'd be a little wary of mass-removals of statements like this demanding a source.
• For prestige broadly construed, there aren't any material shifts in circumstance since the last RfC, so I wouldn't expect the community's view to have changed.
• I think one of the biggest issues in this area is the lack of good examples. Editors correctly intuit that reputation is a significant aspect of an academic institution and want to discuss it, but they don't know how to do so without relying solely on rankings, and when they check other pages, those pages also just use rankings. I like to think I provided a good model at my FA, but that's only one example. Would you be willing to select a sample of half a dozen or so institutions of varying types/prestige levels and write out what you'd consider a good reputation section for them?
• One change I made at WP:UNIGUIDE and a handful of articles is to change the section header from "Rankings" to "Reputation and rankings", which I hope points editors a little more toward what we want these sections to look like. If there's a large discussion, it might be nice to see if we can get consensus to make that a mass change. I've found that section content tends to follow section naming, so the naming is important.

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:51, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response and helpful comments. I'll let this sit for a few days before responding in full so that others can also weigh in but it may be important that my sole focus in this draft proposal is what is written in the lede, not what is written elsewhere in the article. Other editors may want to broaden this discussion to encompass the body of the article, too, and that would be fine - it's just not where I am starting and what I am focusing on right now. ElKevbo (talk) 04:01, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I think the discussion will inevitably broaden out, since as soon as folks ask what is due/undue for the lead, that goes to what is appropriate or not in the body. And if there's no consensus there, the lead discussion will be messy. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:18, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this, ElKevbo. That looks like a good, and policy based, guide to what should be included. It might be worth referencing WP:DUE in the paragraph about including prestige. Robminchin (talk) 01:21, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

I think it might also be worthwhile whether "flagship", "ivy league", "public ivy", "sun-grant", "sea-grant" also mean anything. A university could be a flagship of the state or simply of that particular university system. Some states have two flagships and one has even gotten rid of the term completely. Meanwhile, it seems silly to include "public ivy" anywhere near the beginning since it has even less transparency on what qualifies a school to be on that list.

It might also be worth considering whether acceptance rate, retention rate, and 4 year graduation rate should be included in the lede. Same question on "employer ranking". Likewise, for religious colleges, would it be worth considering something like "Catholic" vs "in the Catholic tradition" to distinguish between them? My understanding is that the two might offer different traditions and expectations in terms of what's allowed and not allowed.

Prestige is an interesting thing. If you have to convince others you have it, chances are you don't. Nothing really ranks prestige. However, I think Williams College does a really nice job of talking about ranking and reputation within the lede. I think the only thing I'd consider changing below is to add an "As of date" for the alumni:

"Williams is a highly selective school with an acceptance rate of 8% for the Class of 2025. It has ranked first in U.S. News & World Report's rankings of National Liberal Arts Colleges every year since 2004, and the college has held high-ranking positions in other institutional rankings. In April 2022, Williams transitioned to an all grants system for financial aid, one of the few institutions of higher learning in the United States to do so.

The college has many prominent alumni, including 9 Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel Prize Laureate, a Fields medalist, 3 chairmen of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, 14 billionaire alumni, 71 members of the United States Congress, 22 U.S. Governors, 4 U.S. Cabinet secretaries, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a President of the United States, 3 prime ministers, CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 companies, high-ranking U.S. diplomats, foreign central bankers, scholars in academia, literary and media figures, numerous Emmy, Oscar, and Grammy award winners, and professional athletes. Other notable alumni include 40 Rhodes Scholars and 17 Marshall Scholarship winners."

Wozal (talk) 03:11, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Concerns about List of unaccredited institutions of higher education

I have some concerns about List of unaccredited institutions of higher education that I've posted in the article's Talk page. I'd appreciate some input from other editors as these concerns may necessitate the deletion of the majority of that list article. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 00:19, 21 July 2023 (UTC)