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Discussion of compromise option between "public" and "state-related" for CSHE universities

Hi everyone! Many of you will have received a talk page post notifying you of a WP:DRN discussion following up on the previous RfCs about descriptions of the governance of CSHE universities (Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln) in search of a compromise that would satisfy both sides in the dispute. A user at WP:DRN observed that using that venue was unlikely to move discussion of a compromise option along any more efficiently than opening an informal talk page discussion here, and so I'm following that user's suggestion in moving it back to this talk page.

The main goal of that post was to seek a compromise between the two sides in those two "No Consensus" RfCs, since while both sides had reasonable arguments and were firmly entrenched, there was agreement on both sides that both descriptors ("state-related" and "public") are technically correct and are both used by the statutes of the state of Pennsylvania, meaning that the dispute came down to a question of which was preferable. Therefore, it seems that the only reasonable way of settling this dispute would be a compromise option which incorporates both terms in the lead. This might not be everyone's first choice, but since it's now been established that both terms are indeed correct and are compatible with one another, it seems clear that this is the only way of adequately addressing everyone's concerns.

Here's the only compromise option from the last RfC that started to gain traction before discussion died down (proposed by JBL):

I voted in the previous RfC about Pitt, but my view has changed somewhat. "State-related" is indecipherable jargon, and it would be absurd to have it as the unique relevant descriptor. Public is well-supported by sources, and I note (for example) that [this source] describes Temple as public and does not use the phrase "state-related". However, it is a reasonable point that just saying they're public and leaving it at that obscures something. Therefore, it seems to me that in both the lead and the infobox, it would be good to qualify in a non-distracting way. For example: in the infobox, the adjective "public" should be used, accompanied by an explanatory footnote. In the lead, the adjective "public" should be used in the first pass, but later in the lead there should be a one-sentence summary of the relevant body section that explains the governance structure, if such section exists in the article.

I'm not particularly committed to this compromise option rather than some other compromise option, but it's at least a good place to start since there were five people who voiced support for it in the last RfC. At this point, most of us will probably agree that the right way to handle this would be to either use one term and then explain the other in an explanatory footnote, or to use one term in the opening and then explain the other later in the lead. There may be other effective ways of handling this though, and I'm hoping that if there are, we'll figure them out through discussion. Regardless, I'm hoping that we can have a productive discussion and come to a reasonable compromise that tries to address everyone's concerns here. --Drevolt (talk) 21:36, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Also, I'm just going to go ahead and ping everyone who was previously involved in related discussions, please feel free to ping anyone else who I missed: @JayBeeEll: @Robminchin: @GreaterPonce665: @ElKevbo: @Hobit: @Qwirkle: @Chris troutman: @Vici Vidi: @Crazypaco: @Jonathan A Jones: @Juicycat: @JohnDorian48: --Drevolt (talk) 21:43, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
I am opposed to a compromise, as if Drevolt will only accept "public" and might allow an explanatory footnote. That this issue has been brought up again smacks of IDHT. Someone else already pointed out "Strict adherence to artificial binary categorizations is not a requirement of Wikipedia nor does it serve it well". To editor Drevolt: please apologize and withdraw. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) Chris Troutman (talk) 21:53, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
@Chris troutman: "I am opposed to a compromise, as if Drevolt will only accept "public" and might allow an explanatory footnote." When did I ever say that? I explicitly said that I was interested in trying to find an option which balanced out both sides in the RfC. I never said that the word "public" had to take precedence over the word "state-related", and in fact, I was very clear in saying that I wanted to engage in open and civil discussion about this. After two deadlocked RfCs that found no consensus, does it not seem like a reasonable decision to seek a compromise that wasn't previously on the table? The user at WP:DRN sure seemed to think so. Moreover, claiming that we can only use one term or the other in the lead seems like a pretty blatant instance of "strict adherence to artificial binary", don't you think?
So no, I won't apologize for trying to extend an olive branch to those on both sides of the RfC, nor will I "withdraw" this informal discussion post (whatever that means). I would recommend that you reacquaint yourself with Wikipedia:Etiquette and take some time to reflect on why you've decided to be openly hostile to another editor acting in good faith. After that, feel free to come back and apologize yourself. --Drevolt (talk) 05:47, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
I appreciate you raising this question so we can come to an explicit agreement on the way forward. The standard practice in a case like this is to keep the status quo ante and I don't see much reason to depart from that practice. It's a disservice to our readers and ignores the experts who actually work in this area but it - status quo ante in cases where a clear consensus cannot be formed and there is not a clear policy violation at stake - is the broad, project-wide consensus. We can - and should - revisit this in a year or two to see if a consensus can be reached but the articles should remain as they were before the RfC in the meantime. ElKevbo (talk) 21:55, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
I more-or-less agree with Chris, though with a bit less ferver. But yeah, I think we need to let it sit for a while and see if things change in a bit (as ElKevbo suggests). I'd say wait a year? Hobit (talk) 00:16, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
I tend to agree with Hobbit & ElKevbo here. We'll see what users think after a year or two. GreaterPonce665 (TALK) 01:41, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
The problem here is that binary categorization will always lead to problems with edge cases (for the US I am happy to agree that these are edge cases; outside the US I think the problem can be far more fundamental). The two extreme positions are to insist on binary (but inaccurate) categorization or to insist on accurate (but not binary) categorization. Each of these has the corresponding "compromise" position of adding caveats, but there's a more fundamental compromise position which is to avoid unnecessary categorization. My own view is that we should avoid categorization in the infobox and the opening sentence but could include a caveated sentence in the lead, with the accurate discussion in the main text. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 07:42, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
It's unseemly and very unproductive to begin rehashing the same arguments all over again. ElKevbo (talk) 14:10, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
Public is not incorrect in its application here (since it receives state funds and receives preferential treatment by the Commonwealth) and is a term that is familiar to all readers. State-related is a technical term used only in these cases, so it warrants an explanation. I think there should be a note explaining it in the 'Governance' section, but the lede should use the term 'public' since it is accurate (albeit not the most technical) and familiar. Both public and Private are catch-all umbrella terms, not technical ones. Harvard is private but receives plenty of public funds. Most public universities receive private funds and have some degree of autonomy from the state. Both are spectrums. If we start to carve out exceptions for each state system, it becomes a hodge-podge of terminology. The public/private dichotomy of US universities is well-recognized, accurate, and good enough approximation. These four institutions clearly fall on the public side of this spectrum, and their technical source of funding does not warrant in my opinion the creation of a third category. I did not vote in August, but you can consider this a vote for public, with further clarifications in the body, but not in the lede (and both terms in the infobox). Eccekevin (talk) 20:08, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
I agree that compromise is clearly necessary and that God arguments have been made on both sides. "Public" is correct, but potentially misleading in a US context, while "state-related" is correct but is a sub-category of public and is a technical term the meaning of which is far from obvious.
The obvious compromise is to use both. The exact way in which this is best worded can be discussed: a state-related public university, a public (state-related) university, or some other option. Using both together would seem to go a long way to addressing the issues encountered by either term on its own – it is made clear that these do not follow the normal meaning of "public" in the US, while the term "state-related" is placed within its category and users are primed to look for further information later.
Yes, this is a chance from my earlier position that the initial description should contain only high-level, easily understandable categories. I think this departure is justified by the need for consensus on order to move ahead here. Robminchin (talk) 17:55, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
Thank you Robminchin, well said. I agree completely. Regardless of what we end up choosing, I think the leads of these four articles should include both “state-related” and “public” and should have a clear explanation of the CSHE, possibly in the form of an explanatory footnotw. Hopefully others will be interested in finding a compromise as well. —Drevolt (talk) 20:08, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
Also in favor of a compromise. 'public, state-related' or 'state-related, public' work well in the lede. Eccekevin (talk) 22:05, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
Again?
As I wrote on this very page, I am not a little irritated that, more than one previous discussion having failed to convince enough people of their position, someone has simply tried again in a different venue. And now, having been rejected by a third venue, we're back here again? I'm beginning to regret having ever said anything in the first place, since it seems like I'm going to keep getting paged back to this merry-go-round every couple months for who knows how long.
As I said before, if people think the term "state-related" is confusing or the CSHE page poorly written, they should add text explaining what it means or rewrite that page. Infinitebuffalo (talk) 02:30, 25 October 2020 (UTC)
Again, there was no consensus for either of the proposed positions. So again, in the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, we’re trying to work out a compromise that everyone will be at least somewhat satisfied with. You’re not required to work with other users if you’re not interested in trying to find a consensus, but many other users are clearly interested in talking this issue through and trying to come up with a balanced compromise together. —Drevolt (talk) 03:38, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

So to refocus the discussion, here are a few possible ideas that it sounds like might be on the table:

  • Use the term "state-related" in the first sentence, then later in the opening paragraph, say something like "...XYZ became a public university when it joined the Commonwealth System of Higher Education in 1234".
  • Use one term in the opening sentence with an appended explanatory footnote which uses the other term in explaining the nuanced status of universities in the CSHE.
  • Combine the two terms in the opening sentence. There are a number of different ways this could be done (such as "state-related, public university" or "public, state-related university" or "state-related university in the public Commonwealth System of Higher Education" or "public university with state-related status").
  • Some other option that isn't listed here.

I think that any of these would be suitable candidates for balancing out the two sides of the RfC, but as mentioned earlier, I'm very open to other options. Any thoughts? --Drevolt (talk) 00:03, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

"state-related, public university" or "public, state-related university" are both good options. Accurate and clear (public is self-explanatory, and state-related can be hyperlinked). I'd like to hear arguments against this compromise, if not I think it should be implemented.Eccekevin (talk) 00:48, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
Glad to hear it. This way of wording it isn't my preferred compromise, since I think it sounds a bit awkward, but at this point I just want to find something that everyone can agree on, so ultimately I'll support it if that seems to be the consensus. Robminchin has also voiced support for this option above. What does everyone else think? --Drevolt (talk) 00:37, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Since discussion has died down and more participants seem to be in favor of "state-related public university" than against it, I'm going to try it out in the lead on the relevant pages and see what everyone thinks. This is just provisional to see if this is a workable solution, please voice your concerns here if you find this this compromise objectionable. --Drevolt (talk) 23:35, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging me to this discussion earlier; my 2c are similar to my comment in the RfC, namely, that "state-related" is an accurate but extremely jargon-y term, and using it as a stand-alone descriptor is bad for that reason. A great many options that have been discussed do better, and "state-related public university" is among them. --JBL (talk) 23:39, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
I agree completely, and it seems like most of the other editors participating here do too. So far there haven't been any objections since the edits were introduced, so I'm hopeful that we've finally found a solution that works. --Drevolt (talk) 18:10, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
Folks, I thought it was pretty plain that a lot of spoke up, made it clear we think we are in a good place, and then left. If you felt you had a good compromise after it was clear what everyone's thoughts were, you should have pinged folks again.@JayBeeEll: @Robminchin: @GreaterPonce665: @ElKevbo: @Qwirkle: @Chris troutman: @Vici Vidi: @Crazypaco: @Jonathan A Jones: @Juicycat: @JohnDorian48:. Hobit (talk) 20:50, 3 November 2020 (UTC)
The “good place” I saw was a slight consensus not to bend facts to fit categories; not sure I’m seeing that here now. Qwirkle (talk) 21:02, 3 November 2020 (UTC)
I'm happy with the status quo. I'm happy with a wide variety of compromises. But I am not happy about being shouted at when I write things here, which is why I have largely stopped bothering wth participating. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 08:52, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
Hey @Jonathan A Jones: I'm sorry to hear that you felt shouted at. I think that various users here got a bit worked up in advocating for their respective views, but I'm hoping that we can keep things civil going forward. I'm glad to hear that you'd be happy with various compromises though, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the compromise currently under discussion if you'd be interested in talking about it. I think the conversation has been taking a more conciliatory tone recently, and it goes without saying that users shouting at or heckling each other won't be tolerated at this point. --Drevolt (talk) 22:53, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
As mentioned before, this is just a provisional change that was made with the aim of finding a workable solution, since it seemed like a balanced way of addressing the various concerns raised previously. My hope is that this was a modest compromise which reflected the gradually emerging consensus, but I can't say for sure. If anyone feels that's not the case, let's talk it through and see if we can find more common ground. --Drevolt (talk) 21:08, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
I am happy with status quo. I resent that one editor continues to bring this up as if the status quo simply isn't good enough. There is no consensus for a change; please stop pinging me to reassert that. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:43, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
I am also happy with status quo. In addition, I would appreciate if Drevolt would stop making unilateral changes (reverting the recommendation of the Pitt RfC, tinkering with the infobox during his own CSHE RfC) and implementing compromises without input from much of the community, even if it was provisional. I understand it wasn't the outcome you were hoping for, but at least respect the process if you expect people to contribute their time. JohnDorian48 (talk) 14:49, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

I think that this entire discussion has gotten sidetracked again, so I'm going to try to bring it back to where it was before. I'd like to emphasize that this isn't a third RfC, and it should not be treated as such. We're not voting on anything, never have been, and likely won't be for the foreseeable future. This is an informal discussion meant to find a way to set this issue to rest, since we had two consecutive RfCs that found no consensus, which is why there's been a good-faith discussion of compromises that's been ongoing for a while now. It's already been established that a considerable number of people who were involved with the RfC are interested in seeking a compromise, so that's what we're doing. I'd like to encourage those who have been participating recently to join the discussion as a discussion and talk about the substance of the proposals rather than reverting to the combative tone that some of us adopted during the RfCs. --Drevolt (talk) 21:37, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Is Cornell "one of the most prestigious universities in the world?"

Editors are disagreeing about whether the lede of Cornell University should say that it is "one of the most prestigious universities in the world." Additional opinions are welcome! ElKevbo (talk) 05:25, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

I have nominated List of De La Salle University people for featured list removal here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured list criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks; editors may declare to "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:28, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Proposed removal of "sea-grant," "sun-grant," and "space-grant" from infobox "type" parameter and lede sentence of all college and university articles

I propose removing "sea-grant," "sun-grant," and "space-grant" from (a) the infobox "type" parameter and (b) lede sentence of all college and university articles. These are fine research consortia but they simply do not rise to the level of being institution-wide, defining characteristics of institutions. Despite their names, they are not comparable to "land-grant" status which is much older and has a widely studied and thoroughly documented impact on curricula, missions, and organizations of designated institutions (and indeed it's been frequently cited as one of the unique and lasting innovations of U.S. higher education). I suppose it would be fine to include these in the infobox in the "academic_affiliations" parameter and they should definitely be included later in the articles, especially in the "Research" section (or the "History" section if there is not a "Research" section). ElKevbo (talk) 03:10, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

It should certainly have to be established that this was a defining characteristic of the institution, and the presumption should be that it is not. Robminchin (talk) 03:29, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

@Updater1969: You are objecting to this edit at University of Texas at San Antonio. Please discuss your objections here and please provide independent evidence that membership in the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program is widely considered to be sufficient to make member institutions a specific "type" of university.

(It would also be very helpful if you answered the question on your User Talk page asking about your relationship to that university. You are a single-purpose account who only edits articles related to the institution and the founding year of the institution is part of your username. That gives the very strong impression that you have a conflict of interest and raises legitimate questions about whether you may also be a paid editor. If you have a conflict of interest, you are strongly discouraged from making edits to the article and related articles. If you are being paid to edit the article, you cannot do so without disclosing that fact.) ElKevbo (talk) 19:43, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Seeing as there have been no objections, I have begun removing these from the "type" parameter and moving them to the "academic_affiliations" parameter. I am also removing them from the lede sentence of articles where they're present. I'm working my way through all of the articles listed in National Sea Grant College Program, National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, and Sun grant colleges so this will take me some time. Please let me know if you have any questions, objections, or time to assist! ElKevbo (talk) 03:23, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Just saw this. I have no objection. I concur in your position that such information is relatively minor and should not be in the infoboxes for American universities. Almost everyone in American higher education has at least a vague idea of what is a "land-grant university" but most of them have no idea what is a "sea grant," "sun grant," or "space grant." --Coolcaesar (talk) 13:14, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
ElKevbo, I've seen you adding space-grant to some pages as you've worked your way down the list. I certainly agree it doesn't belong in the |type= parameter, but I'm skeptical it's even warranted for |academic_affiliations=. For instance, seeing it added to Williams, I'd guess 90% of Williams grads don't even know it's a space-grant institution, and it's certainly not exactly known for its space research. This ties in to the discussion we had about the placement and appropriate uses of |academic affiliations= (which I now notice never really got carried to a conclusion—it would be nice to follow up on that). {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:08, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
I'm done with the sea-grant members and halfway done with the space-grant members so I kind of wish you had said something earlier... :)
I think your point is very reasonable and it's one that has occurred to me several times as I've done this work. I've erred on the side of consistently including this information in the "academic_affiliations" parameter (a) to be consistent among all of these articles and (b) to avoid having to make decisions about which specific institutions should have this information and which shouldn't (more specifically, I think that some editors would object if this information were removed from the infobox of some articles so adding it to all of the relevant articles seems to be the path of least resistance). There appear to be lead institutions in each state and regional hosts for the space-grant and sun-grant programs, respectively, so we could conceivably only include this membership for those institutions; there doesn't appear to be anything parallel for the sea-grant program or at least it's not noted in the article.
Each of these three programs - sea-, space-, and sun-grant - divides their members into subgroups so we could conceivably note something more specific than the large, national program for many of the institutions e.g., Minnesota Space Grant Consortium instead of space-grant. A few of the state-level space-grant consortia have articles but most don't and none of the sun- and sea-grant groups appear to have articles. So I don't know what this would buy us, however, and I'm not sure if it addresses your concern.
I'd be completely fine considering my first wave of edits as an initial step with further refinements. I already know that these associations don't often seem to be in cogent order in the template so it would be nice if someone can go through and at least place them in alphabetical order at some point. There is also inconsistency in how the associations are included in the parameter; sometimes they're separated by a comma, sometimes they're bullet points, etc. And there is also inconsistency about whether abbreviations are used. So there's a lot of further clean up work that could and should occur. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ElKevbo (talk • contribs) 26 November 2020 (UTC)
The space-grant isn't really less important (AFAIK, and I really don't know much about academic groups) than some of the other affiliations that tend to be listed in that parameter, so I don't think it's really a problem in the short term to add it. But it does just highlight the longer-term problem from our discussion at the infobox, which is that most affiliations aren't that significant and they end up bloating infoboxes, crowding out more important information. So I'd say go ahead and finish out the adding just to tidy things up, but just make sure we prioritize finishing out the conversation on what to do with that entire clump afterwards. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:47, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Listing of affiliations that should be removed from infoboxes

Below is a preliminary list of organizations that should be considered for blanket removal from the "academic affiliations" and "affiliations" parameters of the university infobox. This may not be the best place for this list and related discussion; feel free to move it!

As previously discussed, my rationale/concern is that these organizations have such broad membership criteria and missions that membership in them says very little about an institution. They're fine organizations; I've personally been a member of several of them and worked with some of them so I have a high regard for them. They just don't provide readers with much information about member institutions and we should be selective about how we use the limited space in the infobox. ElKevbo (talk) 02:01, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Sounds like a good start. I'm not familiar with them but I'll trust your judgement. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:10, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
I'll try to keep an eye out as I continue to edit infoboxes and add others to this list that I am comfortable arguing for removal. There are quite a few organizations that I am not comfortable adding to this list as I don't have much or any familiarity with them and I'll personally err on the side of keeping organizations when in doubt. If we get really ambitious about this we could always ask if someone more technically inclined can create a list of organizations in these parameters with frequencies of inclusion. ElKevbo (talk) 04:00, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 November 30 § Category:QuestBridge partner colleges

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 November 30 § Category:QuestBridge partner colleges. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Another FLRC

HAL333 has nominated List of Dartmouth College faculty for featured list removal. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured list criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks; editors may declare to "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

How can we clean up alumni miscategorized under a university rather than its undergraduate college?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Harvard University § Some substantial category cleanup needed. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Student affairs task force

We supposedly have a student affairs task force. The last activity on its talk page was...2008. Anyone want to give it a proper burial? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:28, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Several categories nominated for deletion

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 December 13 § Collegiate affiliations. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:33, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

FAR for University of Michigan

I have nominated University of Michigan for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. (t · c) buidhe 22:30, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Is anyone going to save this project's quality content?

Okay, so tallying things up, here are the current pages at risk of losing good or featured status:

Together, that's a big chunk of the quality content this project has produced, and losing all of it would diminish the group of articles we have available to point to to say "model off of this". WP:UNIGUIDE is nice, but sometimes you just need examples, so this would be a significant loss, and it's likely to happen if no one swoops in to fix up these pages. Is anyone willing to take that on? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:07, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Alumni galleries on college pages?

@Twenty-Sixty-two: I've noticed you adding or expanding the image galleries of alumni on a bunch of college or university pages, such as at Williams here and at Stanford here. I have a sense that the consensus for these lists is somewhat contested, and I found a fairly active discussion at the help desk in the archives, but I'm not sure there's been anything on the talk page here, so I think we should discuss and modify WP:UNIGUIDE as needed.

Personally, I can see an argument for single-line galleries with ≤10 images like the one at Williams—there often isn't any good alternative for a visual for the alumni section, and they help communicate at a glance what sort of people the institution's most famous alumni are. However, the larger galleries that try to include every famous alum, such as at Harvard and now Stanford, are very much undue; those images belong at the "List of X people" page, not the college's main page. What do the rest of you all think? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:35, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

This was discussed at the schools project, and the consensus there was that such images were not appropriate in alumni sections in high school articles (but OK in stand-alone alumni lists). See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools/Article_advice/Archive_2#Pictures_in_alumni_sections. There was no intention for that to apply anywhere but to the lower lever schools covered by that project, but the arguments for and against raised there may be of interest here. Initially it was thought that such images were rare, but it was found that they were actually common enough that mention was added to WP:ALUMNI. Meters (talk) 02:18, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Updating the universities rankings info-box to include QS's USA 2020 rankings

QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) has recently released their first (2020) USA ranking: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/usa-rankings/2020

I made several unsuccessful attempts to edit the universities rankings info-box to include a link to their USA rankings not knowing such a inclusion needed to be discussed first. (My apologies.) Given their international rankings are already included in the info-box. And Given QS's, stature, I suggest that incorporating their USA 2020 rankings is entirely appropriate, as in the cases of the US News and World Report and ARWU. Wrrsimone (talk) 19:51, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

This might be a case of WP:TOOSOON. The rankings need to be popular to warrant inclusion (I'd need to look into it more to figure out exactly where our bar is), and I'm not seeing media coverage to indicate that the launch of their U.S. rankings has really made much of a splash. The popularity of their global rankings won't necessarily translate.
More generally, I think we're justified in being fairly picky about which rankings we include, per WP:INDISCRIMINATE. To merit inclusion, I'd say a ranking needs to either have a very strong case for its popularity, or have a case that it measures something meaningful to readers that other rankings do not. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:07, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Use of the word faculty in category names

There's a discussion ongoing at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 January 3#Category:University of Zagreb faculty that is likely of interest to this WikiProject. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 09:00, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

How to refer to semesters?

Many institutions that operate on a semester system designate them by referring to seasons, e.g. "Fall 2019" or "Spring 2020", and I've seen a bunch of articles with text like the college enrolled 7,400 students as of Fall 2020. I have a few questions:

  1. Is it okay to use seasons at all, given that MOS:SEASON advises against using seasons to refer to a particular time of year because of the ambiguity of the hemispheres, but allows it when it is part of a formal or conventional name or designation.
  2. If it is okay, should "Fall" and "Spring" be capitalized? Per MOS:SEASON, they normally aren't, but if semesters are considered formal periods, they might be. Amherst's style guide recommends it, FWIW.

Thoughts? I'll invite the MOS folks over here for their input. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:22, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

  • I'd say that it is okay to use "fall" in this context as it is referring to the fall semester at a US institution. I would say it would be more in keeping with Wikipedia style not to capitalise – fall semester is a formal period but is still a generic name, like president, rather than a formal title like President of the United States. Robminchin (talk) 07:55, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
  • You have said "many institutions" but have not qualified it with whether you are talking in a world-wide context or a specific country. In Australia, we always called them term 1/2/3/4 (for primary and secondary schools) or semester 1/2 (for universities). And of course, if we did refer to a season it would be "autumn" instead of the American "fall". Looking at Academic term, most of the world names the terms and semesters similar to Australia. If season names are allowed then it must be very clear that it is an American thing and not a world-wide thing.  Stepho  talk  23:58, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
I'm perfectly fine with us adhering to different standards for institutions in different countries. In the U.S., it's nearly universal for semesters or quarters to be labeled with the prevalent season e.g., winter, spring, summer, or fall. I don't think the capitalization matters so we should follow whatever our own internal styleguide says (which I think is "use lower-case" as Sdkb and Robminchin note above). It might be good to get some expert guidance from editors who frequent WT:MOS or a more specific part of the MOS to verify that we're on the right track. ElKevbo (talk) 00:31, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Quickly following up, a good solution that didn't occur to me until it was pointed out is just writing "as of the fall 2020 semester" instead of "as of fall 2020". {{u|Sdkb}} talk 13:15, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
  • BTW. Our CS1/CS2 citation templates support seasons and quarters when given in uppercase, like:
  • Title. Spring 2020.
  • Title. First Quarter 2020.
Semesters are not supported yet, but could be easily added on request.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 04:06, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Updating showcase articles

Shadowssettle recently made an attempt to update the showcase articles on our project page. Some of the additions didn't seem ready for primetime and I think that any addition to the section should be discussed, so I reverted for now, but I appreciate the opportunity to discuss and hopefully update the selection.

I think we should begin by making sure we're on the same page about what this section is for. The subsection is titled "National differences", but de facto the role it serves is that of a showcase, i.e. "if you're looking for an example of a high-quality page to model off of for a page you're trying to improve, look to these pages". To best serve that role, we need some variation in geographic region, but within limits: if one is trying to improve an article for a country that has no strong FA articles, it makes more sense to look to FAs elsewhere than to whatever the best university page is in that country. It also means that we should have variation in type of school, and in type of page (e.g. some subpages for history/campus/alumni/etc.). I also think we should be using GAs only sparingly when we have no featured pages in a category, as really showcase status ought to be only featured pages in top shape.

Okay, getting into specifics, we currently have six pages for the UK, four for the U.S., and one for India. There's one history page (Texas A&M) and one page for a campus feature (The Green at Dartmouth), but that's it.

I haven't surveyed institution pages well enough to know whether or not the selected ones are our best.

For a history page, History of Texas A&M University seems our only featured option.

For a campus page, we have no FAs. It looks like Campus of Michigan State University and Campus of University of the Philippines Los Baños are our two GA options.

For a campus organization page, Jesus College Boat Club (Oxford) looks like our only featured option. I'm not sure how representative it is, but I don't think we have any FAs for a student government or student newspaper.

For a campus feature/building page, if we want to replace The Green (Dartmouth College) it looks like we have Tech Tower and a few other featured options.

If we want to add a traditions page, the best option we seem to have is Traditions of Texas A&M University, a GA.

For a people list page, I'd put forward List of Pomona College people, which I recently brought to FL status. I looked through the other FL people list pages as I worked on that one, and frankly I doubt any of them could currently survive a FLRC without extensive edits.

For a geographic list page, e.g. List of colleges and universities in Alabama (just the first alphabetically), there are a bunch of options. Any thoughts on which is our best or most useful as a model?

Am I missing any major categories? These are obviously a little tilted toward the U.S., but honestly I think it'll be most useful for people if we surface our best pages, even if they're geographically clustered. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:50, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Oh, an athletics page might be another category we'd want to highlight. Anyone know what our best options for that might be?
And once we decide on which pages we're selecting, we should make sure they're all tagged on their talk page with {{Model article}}. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:04, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
ElKevbo Do you have any thoughts on this? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 15:29, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
I like your recommendations and trust your judgment. ElKevbo (talk) 16:13, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb I'm not too fussed by the order or what exactly, just that they are all GAs/FAs. If you look at the UK ones, they were selected to show the range of article coverage someone should head towards as they were all GA+ at time of making the original list:
  • A unitary university
  • A collegiate university
    • A college
  • A London institution
  • An ancient university
    • An ancient college
Shadowssettle Need a word? 15:52, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
It would be good to have a modern (post-1992) university example for the UK as well, if any have GA+ articles. Robminchin (talk) 23:08, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
The list should not be dominated by any one country. ElKevbo (talk) 23:30, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
Looking at the UK articles, they're all GAs (and old ones at that), except for Oriel College, Oxford, which is an FA but looks to be about to undergo an FAR, a process that it's unlikely to survive without a concerted effort to save it. (The University of Michigan, arguably our biggest FA, recently lost its star with zero such effort.) {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:24, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
I agree it shouldn't be dominated by any one country; I was pointing out that this is a significant type of UK university that wasn't represented in the list given. I suspect it will be unavoidable that most examples are from English speaking countries, but I think it would be better to add universities from other countries than to miss out major categories of university. However, it looks, as I suspected, that none of the articles on post-1992 universities are rated as particularly high quality. Robminchin (talk) 03:03, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
The point was not to try to make this UK-centric, just explaining why we have the current selection we have from there; that there was some order to it. It may make sense to trim it, but I don't currently see the need. I think the underlying point, that showcase articles should show a variety of types, is helpful to guide article writing, given an article on an ancient/Ivy-League/collegiate/etc. university or a college might need to cover different points to one on a modern or a unitary university. Also, I would add {{model article|Higher education}} should probably be added to those on the final list, as it is already on Oriel–Oxford. Shadowssettle Need a word? 11:33, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
Oops, I see Sdkb has already made the point on {{model article|Higher education}}, sorry Shadowssettle Need a word? 11:34, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Oregon State University

Can some other editors please help by watching Oregon State University? An unregistered editor is edit warring to remove "land-grant" from the lede of the article and insisting that the lede include a reference to www.bestcollegereviews.org, a site that is clearly unreliable. He or she is claiming that articles about other land-grant universities don't have this in their lede sentences - a claim that is clearly false except possibly a few articles that have mistakenly omitted it and will be corrected as soon as they're identified - as well as refusing to participated in the discussion in the article's Talk page. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 04:07, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Help with DeVry University

I’ve made a number of proposals to improve the article about DeVry University at Talk:DeVry University#Request Edits February 2021. I can’t implement these myself since I have a conflict of interest. Could someone in the project take a look at the requests? Thanks NaturaRagazza (talk) 18:46, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

FAR Michigan State University

I have nominated Michigan State University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. FemkeMilene (talk) 07:58, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Welp. Barring something unexpected, looks like we're headed for another delisting. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 09:15, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Linking biographies in names of buildings, etc.

I'm not quite sure how to handle edits like this one from Caius G., which wikilinked George C. S. Benson within George C. S. Benson Auditorium. On the one hand, this goes fairly clearly against MOS:PARTIALNAMELINK, so I don't think we're allowed to. However, since the auditorium would not be notable for a standalone page, we're not able to link George C. S. Benson Auditorium and then link to Mr. Benson from there, and writing George C. S. Benson Auditorium, named after George C. S. Benson at Pitzer's page would be both redundant and WP:UNDUE (universities love to bring up donors whenever they can, but we don't have to follow their lead), so I don't know of any other way to introduce the link. I don't want to see it totally removed, either, though, since it seems useful. How should we resolve situations like this? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:16, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

It does seem that the partial looking is wrong. Possibly it could be made less redundant by re-wording, e.g. "The George C. S. Benson Auditorium, named after the local academic and administrator,…" Robminchin (talk) 04:14, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
Hi Sdkb. Thanks for raising the issue, I wasn't aware of WP:PARTIALNAMELINK. Robminchin's suggestion seems good, I'll implement it later today. I'm not too worried about WP:UNDUE, as Benson played an important part in the College's founding (although his article doesn't mention it yet). Best, Caius G. (talk) 07:54, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
Here you go. Best, Caius G. (talk) 17:17, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Assistance needed at University of the People

Assistance is requested at University of the People. It has become a very contentious article with multiple single-purpose accounts, several recent semi-protections, and one editor blocked from editing the article. Editors disagree on many subjects and edits are routinely made and reverted with little regard for the discussion in Talk or prevailing Wikipedia policies and practices. Personally, I am completely frustrated with the lack of support from Wikipedia administrators so I am removing the article from my watchlist. As it stands, my best guess is that the article and its editors are headed toward arbitration but perhaps a few level-headed, experienced editors can salvage things. ElKevbo (talk) 17:13, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree. We need uninvolved experienced editors to help out because I believe arbitration is probably the next stop. Weatherextremes (talk) 11:16, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Non-notable yearbooks and alumni magazines

Browsing through Category:Alumni magazines, it appears many of the articles have a dubious-at-best claim to notability. If anyone has a more deletionist bent than me and wants to do full WP:BEFORE searches and then AfD them, you could probably get quite a few redirected. Similarly, Category:Yearbooks has a bunch of pages that aren't actual university yearbooks, but among those that are, the situation is similar. There are also probably other categories that didn't occur to me filled with similarly dubiously notable pages. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:06, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

List/category naming inconsistency for alumni/faculty/people

There is some inconsistency with how lists and categories are named for alumni/faculty/people associated to educational institutions. See this discussion. — MarkH21talk 06:22, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Notability of extracurricular organizations

Since watchlisting Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/News media with an eye toward student publications, I've seen quite a few student newspapers come through. I'd like to open a broader discussion about notability of college extracurricular organizations to get a better sense of how folks feel about these pages.

Beyond newspapers, the college organizations that tend to have pages are often student governments or arts organizations (e.g. theater groups). The quality of the pages varies widely, but their notability is often in a similar spot: as the oldest/largest clubs at their institution, they have a documented history, but the sources are mainly/all affiliated enough with the institution to raise some questions. They'd likely pass a charitable application of GNG, but probably not a strict application of WP:NORG.

This might just be a more specific way of invoking the age-old inclusionist vs. deletionist debate, but I'm curious whether you think we ought to be trying to focus on bolstering the sourcing for these pages to preserve them, or AfDing them to clear them out and redirect editor attention toward institution pages. Personally, I think applying NORG can sometimes be a little overly harsh, since that standard is designed to combat commercial promotionalism, and beyond the vanity of appearing on Wikipedia (which applies to just about everything), most college orgs don't really have a commercial interest in having a page, so I don't think we need to police them quite as stringently. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:28, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Anyone? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:51, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
As you said this is just a specific version of the Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia debate and I doubt we can say much more than that. I tend to support keeping such articles where there is any demonstrable nod towards notability, but then I'm an inclusionist. I am, however, happy to decruft articles, such as removing lists of officers of societies, which tends to be the most overt form of promotionalism. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 09:12, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Laureate Ed. request for assistance

Hello editors, I'm Patrice, an employee of Laureate Education and representative on Wikipedia. I have recently learned more about the rules and guidelines of the site for editors like me who have a "paid conflict of interest" or "COI". Having mistakenly edited the article myself in the past, I now understand why I must not do so. I'm working to follow the rules strictly, now that I understand them better, and seeking the community's assistance with suggested improvements to the page going forward. In addition to the Talk discussion page, I wondered if this WikiProject would be a good place to collaborate with interested editors? I noticed other institutions have done the same and my post from January remains unanswered. If this is the appropriate process to follow and any editors are interested, would a volunteer be willing to review my post and make a few updates to the infobox on my behalf? Thanks for any help or feedback, in advance! PMV1111 (talk) 07:47, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Started. --Anneyh (talk) 11:11, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Nightingale College

Can some other editors please take a look at the recent edits made to Nightingale College and its Talk page? There is a dispute about a new "Controversies" section and other material added to the article. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 01:08, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

An editor who has begun editing the article has begun making personal attacks so I'm removing the article from my watchlist and moving on. Apologies for not sticking with it longer to help out but I'm going to spend my free time arguing with someone who is so unpleasant. ElKevbo (talk) 01:46, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
Some of the material in that article is now being discussed at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard#Nightingale College. Robminchin (talk) 03:19, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
User Elkevbo, you have a history of deleting comments you do not like on your talk page. [1] I am trying very very hard to WP:AGF - assume good faith, but you warned me to not post on your page again, but then you posted here. I am really, really concerned about paid editors on Talk:Nightingale College as there is an entire section by a paid editor. I have seen this before, and there is a long history of paid people editing Wikipedia with a WP:COI. Infinitepeace (talk) 03:47, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Nightingale College of Salt Lake City appears to have a really shady history. There is a history on the talk page in which Nightingale college has paid Wikipedia editors.

There appears to be an ongoing defamation lawsuit in federal court and whole sections are now being deleted. I am at a total loss. Any help would be most appreciated.

thanks a billion in advance. ( ＾◡＾)っ ♡

Infinitepeace (talk) 03:42, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

The article has been edited. I think it's neutral and relies on proper sources. --Anneyh (talk) 16:07, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Education Dynamics

I am seeking additional opinions and input about Education Dynamics also known as EDDY. The company is a marketing and enrollment company serving several hundred colleges and universities, especially in the online realm for adult learners. Its research arm produces annual reports on the consumer demands of adult learners. EDDY and its websites have been mentioned in several reliable sources, including the New York Times, CBS News, NBC News, the Hill, and Inside Higher Education. In 2020 the company acquired the higher education vertical of Quinstreet. --CollegeMeltdown (talk) 12:15, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

IMO, there is bit of promotional tone in parts of the page (literally says key player in the first sentence. Haven't heard of it before, pretty much as I'm not in higher-ed business. GreaterPonce665 (TALK) 18:23, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Request for comment on the naming of Category:Faculty by university or college and its subcategories

Please see Category talk:Faculty by university or college#Request for comment on naming. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:31, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Joy, if you haven't already seen it, you may wish to check out the related discussion linked by MarkH21 above. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:34, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, I cross-posted there now as well. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:38, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Stub for John Thelin

@ElKevbo: I've seen you mention Thelin before as the kind of author we ought to be using for references in higher education articles. I started an article for him, since I think it's a good idea that we provide information about the people we use for citations when we can. I'm not going to take it beyond a tiny stub with enough references to avoid deletion, though, so help expanding it from anyone inclined would be appreciated. I'll do a run with WP:Findlink to integrate it, but there's probably additional work there for anyone who wants, too. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:02, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Although I have several books that he has written I don't have any special knowledge of Thelin. He's a prominent and prolific scholar who is among the most well-known in his field so it shouldn't be hard to find information about him for anyone who wants to expand his article. I'd be happy to offer feedback if anyone has specific questions. (I'd also place Roger Geiger on the same plane as Thelin; they're probably the two most well-known historians of U.S. higher education particularly among those who write broad, era-spanning, and synthetic histories.) ElKevbo (talk) 21:23, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
ElKevbo, Geiger meets WP:NACADEMIC criterion 5, so I created an (even more stubby) article for him. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:07, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Proposed "accreditation" parameter for Template:Infobox university

I have proposed a new "accreditation" parameter for Template:Infobox university. I would appreciate comments and discussion on this proposal at the template's Talk page. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 23:24, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Naming Porter & Chester

Good Day Sirs


I am a potential student doing a research paper on Porter and Chester in Waterbury, CT.

My question is; How did the school receive the name?


Best,

Ms. Elma — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:19a:4680:73f0:e968:aeb5:3e30:6f7 (talk) 02:29, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

IP editor, This is the talk page for discussing WikiProject Higher education and anything related to its purposes and tasks, so it is the wrong place for your question. You may find an answer on the college's website or in the Wikipedia article about the college, Porter and Chester Institute. TSventon (talk) 08:21, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:University of Cambridge § Proposed merge of Winter Pool into University of Cambridge

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:University of Cambridge § Proposed merge of Winter Pool into University of Cambridge. Hopefully this discussion will snow, but it'd be nice to get the merge notice off of the top of the Cambridge article before it sits there for too long. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:00, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Student affairs task force

Following up from before, I've marked the student affairs task force as inactive. Anyone who wants to give it a more proper burial is welcome to do so; just move everything to the archives. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 02:11, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Colleges and Schools of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I wanted to bring up the informality of the University of Illinois school and college page titles (see the list below) that favor the styling of "UIUC College/School of ______." While I know UIUC is a term often used by students as a shorthand, I don't know how well it is known outside of the campus as a reference for the Urbana-Champaign campus. Most people I know call it the "U of I" or "Illinois" or just "University of Illinois" as it's the flagship. I want to move all these pages to prefer "University of Illinois College/School of _____" as is the style of the page for the University of Illinois School of Architecture and University of Illinois College of Law. Grainger, Gies, and Carle are distinguishable by their names. But the schools and colleges listed below are vague enough to need specificity.

The College of Media is the only college with such a name in the country and already carries an article title without "University of Illinois."

I run into an issue with the College of Applied Health Sciences because the Chicago campus has an identically named school so could get confusing just saying "University of Illinois," though the Chicago campus's college lacks a Wikipedia page.

Please let me know your thoughts! JustinMal1 (talk) 00:54, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Are there even sufficient independent reliable sources for these subjects to be independently notable and have their own articles? (A quick glance shows the answer to be "no" in most or all cases, in my opinion.) ElKevbo (talk) 01:13, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
These schools and colleges certainly have enough notability to have their own pages, the references section may not make that clear. More citations are patently necessary, but that's no reason for deletion, just more work. JustinMal1 (talk) 01:20, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Mills College‎

Can some other editors please weigh in on the recent edits at Mills College‎? I am very concerned that an editor is abusing the article and the encyclopedia to promote a specific viewpoint and advocate for a cause. ElKevbo (talk) 13:00, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Nominations § Student exchange program

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Nominations § Student exchange program. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:36, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Dartmouth College Featured article review

I have nominated Dartmouth College for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:58, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:University of Mississippi about use of "Ole Miss" nickname

There is a discussion at Talk:University of Mississippi about use of the "Ole Miss" nickname by Wikipedia editors in the article. Additional perspectives are welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 19:31, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Merger of American Sentinel University and Post University

American Sentinel University merged with Post University in March 2021. I added a sentence and source to its History section, but much more is needed to reflect this merger. As a new editor, I am not sure how to navigate this. I would be greatly thankful for some help from more experienced editors. YarnShifter (talk) 01:14, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

YarnShifter, since these institutions have a few decades of independent history, they should probably retain individual articles. But note the merger in their history section as you've done and probably leads as well. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:29, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Use of primary sources

I haven't had too much experience in the wikirealm of higher education. Are these articles held to the same standard as others when it comes to primary sources? I've come across quite a few FAs and GAs that heavily rely on sources published by the university itself. Would that merit a FAR or GAR? Just want to make sure. ~ HAL333 00:56, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

HAL333, Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_317#College_historical_accounts is probably relevant to your question. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:58, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
At some level, this depends on what you call "published by the university itself". Serious academic works published by an academic press owned by the university in question I would use without hesitation (e.g. The History of the University of Oxford). WP:SCHOLARSHIP still applies. More generally, if an academic (working on a relevant field) has put their name to it, it's likely to be reliable, but this might be open for discussion – I would tend towards treating such sources as monographs, unless obviously biased or problematic but YMMV. Stuff pumped out by marketing departments should be treated the same as any other corporation's marketing. Robminchin (talk) 06:18, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
I think it would be accurate to say that there is an inappropriate reliance on self-published sources in many articles about colleges and universities. Some of it is problematic: In some instances, we have information in articles that probably shouldn't be included if an editor can't find independent sources. Some of it is okay: These institutions probably publish a lot more information about themselves and exhibit a higher level of transparency than most other institutions. Moreover, much of what is published in independent sources is information from the institution that is simply being republished by someone else e.g., nearly all of the basic facts such as number of students and graduation rates is provided by the institution with no independent confirmation. ElKevbo (talk) 13:26, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at University of Mary Washington‎

Can someone please take a look at the recent edits made to University of Mary Washington‎? A new editor with a conflict-of-interest has initiated an edit war to add numerous external links to the article, capitalize the common noun "university," and add many details that are typically omitted from articles. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 00:18, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

WP:UNIGUIDE "Organization and administration" section

In WP:UNIGUIDE, the article layout section suggests creating an "organization and administration" section, which is to include:

Discuss the structure of the administration, current leadership, budget, relationship with a board of trustees or regents, student government, endowment information, and academic divisions of the college/university. If this college/university has a special organizational structure, such as a residential college system, then it should be mentioned here. If the university is part of a larger system (as in University of California) or otherwise has formal relationships with other colleges/universities, discuss this relationship and provide requisite wikilinks. Capital campaigns and major endowment numbers should also be presented here, with any notable gifts being referenced. If the college or university has formal affiliations with other educational institutions (e.g., Five Colleges) or is a member of a major consortium or other inter-university organization (Annapolis Group, Association of American Universities, etc.), mention these as well.

However, I cannot actually find any college/university articles that have such a section. None of our (rapidly dwindling) set of college/university FAs do. Are there any good examples? Or is it that this section shouldn't exist, with its information better presented elsewhere? Or is it that we're really bad at presenting this kind of information? I'm thinking about creating this section for some pages I'm working on, but not sure if I should. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 02:18, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, there are articles that have this section e.g., University of Washington, Purdue University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I also seem to recall seeing some articles that have this section labeled "Leadership" section or something similar.
It has been my experience that a minority of articles have this kind of information. My best guess is that it's another symptom of having so few higher education experts and scholars editing these articles; this is the kind of information that is not likely to be of interest to students, alumni, and others who don't have specific expertise and professional or scholarly experience. It's rather boring-but-essential information that's easy to overlook and omit in favor of flashier information like number of rankings, award-winning alumni and faculty, athletic team accomplishments, and easy-to-copy lists of buildings and student organizations. ElKevbo (talk) 02:52, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, that's helpful. I managed to write out what I think is a decent org/admin section, although there weren't really many secondary sources available. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:51, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
Having a quick look around, the section is well represented in UK university articles (I didn't manage to find one which didn't have at least a section on the organisation). Robminchin (talk) 04:58, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Notability of Frederick G. Slabach

Frederick G. Slabach is the president of Texas Wesleyan University. I assert that this makes him notable for a standalone page per WP:NACADEMIC criterion 6, but another editor has been waring to redirect his page to the university, in what seems like a pretty transparent attempt to try to force me to expand the page if I want to keep it around. Could another editor please help assess Slabach's notability decide how to apply NACADEMIC here? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 09:36, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

The disagreement seems to be about WP:PAGEDECIDE rather than WP:NACADEMIC? Jonathan A Jones (talk) 10:24, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't think it makes any sense to present biographical information about a president at a university page. Such pages typically warrant only a sentence or two about the president, so we'd run into WP:DUE issues extremely quickly. Leaving it standalone, by contrast, gives it appropriate room to grow. This really seems quite cut-and-dry to me. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 11:06, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
While I agree in principle that probably isn't going to work in this case. Prepare the article in your sandbox and then move it over the redirect once it's clearly too big for the main article. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 12:16, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Thought on rankings subsections

First, to get it out of the way, these sections are always going to be massive boosterism magnets; I'm not sure there's much we can do about that beyond just applying our standards from WP:UNIGUIDE as widely as we can. But thinking about what these sections ought to ideally be, they should really be summarizing an institution's broad academic reputation, rather than just listing how it ranks in various outlets. This is both because of the myriad problems with rankings that make them of limited use to readers and because even to the extent they're meaningful, {{Infobox US university ranking}} or similar captures the important ones plenty well, leaving the body as a place we should expand on the things that are better captured in narrative form.

Given all this, I wonder if we ought to be retitling sections currently named Rankings to Rankings and reputation or similar. This would both signal to reader that the section contains (or ought to contain) something broader, and hopefully encourage editors to write (hopefully well-sourced, but see first sentence) more broadly about reputation rather than just listing out how an institution has ranked. Thoughts? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:05, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm fine with renaming the section and encouraging editors to write it with a broader focus. Do you have any thoughts or a draft of how this should be reflected in WP:UNIGUIDE? ElKevbo (talk) 18:36, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
How's this for a sentence to insert at the end of the academics bullet in the article layout section? Titling the subsection "Rankings and reputation" rather than just "Rankings" may help to encourage a broader scope. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:26, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
The ranking services already factor academic reputation into their rankings (e.g. instructors' memberships in prestigious societies, papers published, etc.). As long as the rankings are taken seriously by the public, they should be included. How would one express a "reputation" otherwise, in a way that would not be subjective, and how would that not be an even more attractive boosterism magnet? Dhtwiki (talk) 19:23, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
Dhtwiki, rankings just lump together an entire group of institutions on a single scale, which is a radical oversimplification. There are tons of other dimensions that an institution's reputation may have. It might be known for having a particularly strong program in a certain field, or generally acknowledged as the top school in a particular category (e.g. women's college, HBCU, flagships), or it might be known for having strong personality traits (e.g. party school, liberal/conservative, etc.).
And as has been argued at length before, while characterizing a reputation directly in wikivoice would be subjective and non-neutral, noting the existence of a reputation found widely in RS is not. There are quality sources that can be used, several of which were mentioned in the discussion I linked above. The boosterism magnet will always remain, though, no matter what we do. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:43, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
I'm not all that familiar with the ranking methodologies, but I assume that each measures several quantities, as well as there usually being more than one ranking service shown for any particular school. The ranking that's complained about is US News..., but the criticism article doesn't say much about why their methodology is flawed. The other qualities you mention seem to be ones that can be included in the History or Academics sections, without putting them in the Rankings section, or changing that section's heading. Dhtwiki (talk) 21:58, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Oriel College, Oxford Featured article review

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National Institute of Technology, Puducherry listed at Requested moves

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Wikipedia:Your alma mater is not your ticket to Wikipedia is outdated and incorrect

Wikipedia:Your alma mater is not your ticket to Wikipedia is a notability essay that is sometimes cited by editors - often as WP:ALMA - in discussions or edits related to the "Notable alumni" sections of school, college, and university articles. I'm dropping a polite note here to let everyone know that the article is woefully outdated and the advice it provides is incorrect; I've left some details in its Talk page. It needs to be updated or deleted. ElKevbo (talk) 19:43, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Review request for Draft:ETOPIA

Hello, everyone, recently I resubmitted a draft of an article related to WikiProject Higher education. It is about an introduction to an EU-funded project. I saw some similar projects are reviewed by WikiProject Higher education if this one is also interesting to you, may I request to review this one Draft:ETOPIA if it is convenient to you? Thanks so much in advance for the help. Any comments to improve this article are very welcomed. Lu Wan (talk) 08:00, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Lu Wan, the rejection feedback says "This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article—that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject (see the guidelines on the notability of organizations and companies)." This is still a problem with the current version. TSventon (talk) 00:45, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
TSventon, Hello, thanks for your comments. Actually, some references are removed and many secondary references are added according to the rejection feedback. For example, Ref. 3 is one article in a magazine that mentions the necessity of ETOPIA. Two interviews (Ref. 4 and Ref. 6) are from independent sources (Craiova TV station, Bright Cities company). Ref. 10 is also from a magazine talking about the ETOPIA summer school. From my understanding of guidelines on the notability of organizations and companies, those references are sufficient to show the notability of the topic. In fact, there are similar EU projects with similar references are reviewed by WikiProject Higher education or WikiProject Articles for creation, such as Smart Cities EMC Network for Trainingand Computational Spectroscopy In Natural Sciences and Engineering. If it is convenient for you, could you please indicate which reference does not satisfy the criteria? Thanks so much! I really appreciate your kind comment on this draft. Have a nice day!Lu Wan (talk) 12:42, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
Lu Wan, I have copied this section to Draft talk:ETOPIA and responded there as it may help a future AFC reviewer. TSventon (talk) 22:41, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

FAR for Duke University

I have nominated Duke University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:31, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Let's hope we can avoid another delist. Our featured content is not trending in a good direction... {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:31, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Discussion about Controversy section in James Cook University

I have posted a discussion about a controversy section content on the article for Talk:James Cook University#Controversy section proposals June 2021 I think members of this project might be very interested in this discussion of proposed changes. These matters concern topics that I think may be too controversial for the ‘Request Edit” noticeboard, which is only for straightforward requests. I want to disclose that I have a conflict of interest because I work for James Cook University. Thanks Mrssquiggle (talk) 00:20, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Texas Tech University Featured article review

I have nominated Texas Tech University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. FemkeMilene (talk) 08:01, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Assuming that this ends up getting delisted, that'll leave us with only five remaining FAs for full institutions (as opposed to subpages). All in the United States. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:40, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Athletics and traditions as subsections?

One thing I've seen on many pages is for traditions and athletics to have their own level-2 section. Sometimes this is the result of cruft, but in any case, these things are aspects of an institution's student life, so with rare exceptions, I think they ought to be level-3 subsections of the level-2 student life section. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:18, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

I truly hate it but intercollegiate athletics at many U.S. institutions, particularly NCAA Division I institutions, is so prominent (massive budget, large staff, ridiculously high public profile and public interest, etc.) that it warrants its own section. I don't know if it's better for us to strive for consistency and keep this as a section for all U.S. colleges and universities or if we should distinguish between institutions that place more or less prominence on athletics (NCAA Division I and II gets a section and everyone else gets a subsection?) and structure the article accordingly. I like the idea of consistency as it makes things easier for both editors and readers. But I would also have sympathy for an argument that article layout and structure should, to some degree, reflect differences between institutions as that is a great way to make those differences apparent to readers. ElKevbo (talk) 21:16, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
That's fair. At least within the U.S. context, the NCAA divisions give us a very helpful dividing line. I'd be fine with a WP:UNIGUIDE note that generally Division III should be a subsection and Division I should be a section. I'm not familiar enough with Division II to know whether it's more similar to I or to III; what's your view on that? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:39, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Linking WP:UNIGUIDE from our talk banner?

What would you all think of adding a quick link to WP:UNIGUIDE from Template:WikiProject Higher education? It's a great resource we've developed that should be relevant to any page we've tagged, and I think putting it in the banner would help more editors who could use it find it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:15, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. Robminchin (talk) 04:50, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
Sandbox at Special:Permalink/1031189004. I'll implement in a day or two if there appears to be consensus. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:47, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
Implemented. I'll try to remember to check in a week or few to see if it has much impact on the number of views UNIGUIDE gets. If it doesn't move the needle much, we could consider bolding the link. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:07, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

University of California, Riverside Featured article review

I have nominated University of California, Riverside for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. ~ HAL333 21:06, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Globalize First-generation college students in the United States?

I just searched for if we had any coverage of first-generation students to wikilink, as it's an unfamiliar term. It took a bit of searching as it had no redirects and wasn't linked from the first generation dab page, but I eventually found it at First-generation college students in the United States, and it seems to have Educational interventions for first-generation students as a companion article. Is the idea of first-generation students something that exists outside of the United States? If so, the article may need to be globalized. If not, "in the United States" is probably an unnecessary disambigufier in the title. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:33, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Oh, and there's also Blue-collar scholar. This area is ripe for cleanup if anyone wants to take it on. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:37, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
User:Sdkb, a google search suggests that the equivalent term in the UK is first-generation (university) students. To me the article reads more like an academic paper than a wikipedia article so I would recommend starting a new global article rather than using this one. Perhaps that could be a challenge for another US university class. Educational interventions for first-generation students also seems to be US based. TSventon (talk) 22:41, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
reads more like an academic paper than a wikipedia article Tell-tale sign of student editors haha; if the style problem is bad enough, you can tag the pages. I went ahead and tagged the interventions page for globalization, as it doesn't try to restrict its scope in the title. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:49, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
User:Sdkb, do you know why first-generation students are so prominent in the US (and US university articles)? Only one English university article seems to mention them, University of Sussex. Perhaps they are not a priority for the Office for Students. TSventon (talk) 01:34, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
@TSventon, I'm not sure. I know that issues around socioeconomic status are approached differently in the U.S. than in the UK, with class considered a more rigid concept in the UK. I imagine that there's some sort of discussion about class-based affirmative action there, but perhaps it's not as centered around the idea of first-generation status. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:44, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
Apologies for butting but I suspect that this has to do both with U.S. culture and access to U.S. higher education. I suspect - but defer to those who are more culturally and historically informed - that the United States purports to allow more class and wealth advancement than many other countries (the "American dream") and for the last 80 years or so this has expanded to include attending college. I am much more certain in saying that this is probably also linked to the much expanded access to college in the United States that began in the middle of the 20th century, first with the post-World War II GI Bill that provided access to veterans, many of whom were not from families who could afford and expected their kids to attend college, and then continued with expanded access to women and people of color. Expanding access has continued to be a priority for many people, particularly those who work in higher education, with those on the left focused on ensuring that people of color and women continue to have access and those on the right somewhat focused on ensuring that people in the lower and middle classes continue to have access. The number of people participating in higher education and the number of colleges and universities in the U.S. exploded in the 20th century and this was - and continues to be - a very prominent population in that growth. ElKevbo (talk) 01:53, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb, I don't generally tag articles. My feeling is that if it is too difficult or time consuming for me to fix, the next editor will probably feel the same. Rewriting this article is a good example of this.
ElKevbo, what I meant to ask, but didn't put into words, was whether first generation college students have been made a priority due to US government policy at state or federal level? I found a partial answer in Upward Bound, a federal scheme which has existed since 1965 and does focus on FGCS. The UK Sutton Trust is not a government scheme, was founded in 1997 and does not appear to focus on FGCS. TSventon (talk) 19:39, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Is Ashland University a Christian university?

There is a dispute among editors of Ashland University about whether the lede sentence should label the university as "Christian." There is a relevant discussion open in Talk; additional opinions and suggestions are welcome!

(For what it's worth, this general topic of labeling institutions as <adjective for a specific religion> (e.g., Christian, Baptist, Jesuit) has been on my mind for a few years now because we are inconsistent in our practices. It's often an easy decision to make when the institution makes a very clear claim to such a label and other sources follow suit. It's much more difficult when an institution claims that there is nuance e.g., the institution is "sponsored" by a religion or religious organization, the institution claims that it only has a special relationship with a specific religion. This specific example is a very good one as it has some common elements of these decisions. But it's worth holding a broader discussion on this topic so we can establish some clear guidelines and examples for those of us who edit in this space.) ElKevbo (talk) 21:24, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

That's a good question to raise. I'd say that we should first look to what RSes say. Given that these labels are the sort of thing typically brought up in the first sentence when introducing an institution, sources should hopefully be available for most institutions. When that's not enough to determine the wording we should use, I'd say it's okay to give some amount of weight to what an institution says about itself. When there's a clear religious connection but it's not formal, the phrase "de facto" can be very useful. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:11, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
There is a bit of a challenge in that many journalists appear to be content to copy or follow an institution's self-description without any critical analysis or context; I suspect this is even more common for local journalists or those who don't specialize in education particularly higher education. So we need to be a little bit wary there. ElKevbo (talk) 17:37, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
I hate to say this, but many sources follow what Wikipedia says without independent verification. 96.255.253.95 (talk) 11:04, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

"New York Chiropractic College" name change

NYCC has changed its name to Northeast College of Health Sciences, but the old name is still displayed on the List of Colleges in New York State: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_New_York_(state)

@1charliedw:  Fixed; thanks for pointing out the need for an update. Next time, feel free to be bold and make the change yourself! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:02, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Pomona College FAC nomination

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Pomona College/archive1. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:06, 15 July 2021 (UTC) {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:06, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

University of the People and College Navigator

An editor on the University of the People page keeps removing College Navigator (diff, diff) as a source. He argues CN uses the word "campus" to describe the school's setting, so it is "deceptive" because the university is online only. He keeps substituting a link to an office real estate website, LoopNet, instead. I am done with it, so perhaps more experience editors can deal with this. SimoneBilesStan (talk) 14:38, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

I think that I gave up trying to edit that article because of the persistent POV pushers who have dominated the article for some time now. It may be time to ask other editors for help at another noticeboard e.g., WP:NPOVN, WP:RSN, WP:COIN. ElKevbo (talk) 22:41, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Request to review a COI edit

Can someone please review this edit to University of Dayton by one of the university's marketing employees? I've left him a message on his Talk page and I worry that if I also review and partially revert or edit his edit he might think I'm bullying or harassing him. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 19:33, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Dispute at Tulane University; additional input requested

An editor with a tight focus on Tulane University is insisting on including misleading and promotional information in the article's lede. Additional input would be appreciated as he or she is edit warring with little participation in an ongoing discussion in the article's Talk page. ElKevbo (talk) 01:07, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Peer review for University of Mississippi

I have a peer review open for the University of Mississippi. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks! ~ HAL333 17:36, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Should dining services be covered in student life sections?

Over at the Pomona FAC, Nick-D has challenged whether it's appropriate to include a paragraph on the college's dining services in the student life section. Copying our exchange:

*Delete the para starting with 'Pomona's dining services are run in-house' as it's basically trivia. If anyone wants to know what they can eat here, surely the college's website has this.

  • I have to disagree that we should remove all mention of dining services from the article. Nearly all students are on the meal plan and eat nearly all of their meals from the dining halls, so it's a major aspect of student life. Dining services also employs a sizable percentage of Pomona's staff. The fact that the services are run in-house is mildly noteworthy, as it's much more common for institutions to contract out to a provider like Sodexo. This is a single paragraph pretty far down the page, so it doesn't have a huge bar to clear to be due, and I think it meets it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 02:00, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
    It's trivia. Delete it: this is something I'd expect to see on the college's website in material aimed at prospective students, but I don't see how it's encyclopedic. Nick-D (talk) 10:30, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Whether or not we ought to cover dining services in college articles is a broader question where we should be consistent between institutions, so I'd like to seek wider input here. I still feel that it's relevant for student life sections. What do you all think? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:02, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I would say so. Anyone who has ever been on a college tour knows how much schools emphasize (or should I say sell) dining amenities. ~ HAL333 19:32, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
Pretty sure we should include it. Dining is an aspect of college that people will research, so a Wikipedia page should help address that by at least including some information on it. While we don't need a menu or anything, it should be mentioned under student life. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 22:35, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
Unless there is something exceptional, this does not seem like information that belongs in our articles. I get that we all have to eat and many undergraduate students have - and are sometimes required to have, at least for a year or two - meal plans but I don't think that means that we need details about the institution's food services. An example of something that I would think worth mentioning would be the college-wide meals shared by the students at the U.S. Naval Academy as that is something unique to its mission as a service academy, including the very odd fact that the institution has its own dairy farm that the institution has tried to shut down several times only to be prevented by congress. (It's possible that Pomona College's situation is unique or important enough to warrant a brief mention; I'm only trying to answer the general question that was asked.)
It may be useful to think about the other information about critical services that institutions provide and are used by students on a daily basis but is not included in articles e.g., who provides the custodial services, the source of their drinking water. ElKevbo (talk) 06:54, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

Notice of Featured Article Review

I have nominated Texas A&M University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. ~ HAL333 23:00, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Someone else feel free to chime in. IMHO, this is a malformed FAR. Feel free to check me on this one. Buffs (talk) 21:01, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Pomona College peer review

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Peer review/Pomona College/archive1. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:41, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Would California Institute of Integral Studies count as a major institution?

This question has emerged out of a discussion where the notability of a certain subject was being evaluated as C5 of WP:Academic. Was suggested by Hoary (tagging them here so that they can also follow this discussion). Previous discussions on this:

  • My talk page [2]
  • Tea House with me Hoary [3]
  • Tea House with me [4]

Please help. Nomadicghumakkad (talk) 12:15, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@Nomadicghumakkad: For your particularly situation, most academics that are notable via C5 and have published several books are also notable via GNG through reviews of those books. I would look for those if you haven't already. If you and Hoary continue to disagree, you have the option of moving the page directly to mainspace, letting Hoary nominate it for deletion, and then making your case at the deletion nomination page.
Regarding the broader question, one reasonable proxy for what counts as "major" is whether or not it's been accredited by a reputable accreditor. For CIIS, the institution overall has been accredited by an expected accreditor, but it unfortunately for your case, it looks like the psychology program in particular has struggled to receive the accreditation it wants. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:19, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
I don't think I disagree with Hoary. I had my moments of clarity after such discussions in past on other complex situations. So I guess I am only trying to find a conclusive answer here. Will follow your advise and see where it leads us. Thank you. Nomadicghumakkad (talk) 01:53, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
I don't think I disagree with you either. (Incidentally, I rather think that it's the job of the writer of the draft to point to reviews in [non-fringe] journals of the biographee's books, not the job of the reviewer to look for these.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:21, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
Hi Nomadicghumakkad and Sdkb, I just looked at the Accreditation section of wiki page for CIIS (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/California_Institute_of_Integral_Studies#Accreditation_and_exam_pass_rates). The American Psychological Association (APA) corresponds to the Clinical Psychology and not East-West Psychology. Secondly the named chair that is under scrutiny here is Haridas Chaudhuri chair which is university-wide, not specific to a subject like psychology. You may look at the WASC website for CIIS University accreditation status (https://www.wscuc.org/institutions/california-institute-integral-studies).
As for the book reviews kindly look at the References section of the draft article that is being discussed (Links #10, #6, #7, #17, #20) - (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft:Debashish_Banerji#References)
@Nomadicghumakkad: In that case, I'd say that Debashish Banerji probably has a strong enough claim to notability that the page would be kept if nominated for deletion. I can't make any guarantees, but that's my educated guess. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:45, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of presidents of Princeton University/archive1. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 20:52, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Cambridge professorships notability

I just noticed that a whole bunch of the professorships at List of professorships at the University of Cambridge, like Corpus Christi Professor of Latin (currently linked from the main page), somehow have articles. I really don't think folks would take too kindly to it if I tried to create an article for every one of the endowed chairs at an American liberal arts college (sometimes several dozen), and I'm not seeing sourcing that makes these any different. If anyone wants to go through Category:Professorships, I'm sure you'll find many instances of AfDable articles. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:37, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@Sdkb: What would the notability criteria be for these kinds of articles? ––FormalDudetalk (please notify me {{U|FormalDude}} on reply) 21:38, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
I'm not sure of any applicable SNGs, so I would assume GNG. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:40, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb, are you aware of WP:NACADEMIC Academics meeting any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through reliable sources, are notable. ... 5. The person has held a named chair appointment or distinguished professor appointment at a major institution of higher education and research, or an equivalent position in countries where named chairs are uncommon? TSventon (talk) 23:04, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
@TSventon, yep, I've used that criterion to create quite a few articles. But that applies to people, not to the professorships themselves. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:32, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
Sdkb NACADEMIC does mean that a long established Oxbridge chair will have had a number of notable occupants, which is not necessarily the case for a less major institution. I think that makes a list like the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford useful, but I don't know what an AfD discussion would decide. TSventon (talk) 23:46, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
WP:NLIST is a little less fleshed out than some other notability realms, but the key thing is whether or not the list items have been discussed as a group in reliable secondary sources. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:47, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
NLIST says One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources, per the above guidelines; notable list topics are appropriate for a stand-alone list. That means there may be other accepted reasons and I would argue that groups mentioned in NACADEMIC, such as holders of named chairs at major institutions are also notable. TSventon (talk) 08:55, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
Well, I could imagine one could have an article on at least the Lucasian Chair, so that might be the genesis of these. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:01, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Infobox discussions

There are two discussions happening at Template talk:Infobox university that may be of interest to members here; one concerns how we represent staff counts and the other concerns the start date line. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:15, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Year established?

Is year established for a university when it was chartered or when it first opened its doors to students? ~ HAL333 00:34, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

For the infobox, I would say chartered, but if there's a significant difference, note both. For the body, note both. For the lead, there's probably some discretion. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:56, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
Ok - thanks. ~ HAL333 02:19, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Alumni sections

I've been working on the Princeton University article (and some affiliated ones) for about two months or so. One of the sections I still got to work on for the main article is "Notable people", which encompasses both notable alumni and faculty under two subsections. My issue is on how exactly to tackle this: Princeton is a historic and influential institution that has produced many notable figures, ranging from U.S. Presidents to Nobel Laureates to others; similarly, many notable people have been part of its expansive faculty (See also: List of Princeton University people). Obviously, I can't list everyone and choosing who to list also seems highly subjective. Any suggestions on how to tackle this? It would be much appreciated and also help with the rewrite of the article. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 04:22, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

The big issue with notable people sections is that they tend to be too long. Galleries can make it worse. An individual alum is barely ever notable enough to warrant more than a brief mention, especially in the context of an institution as venerated as Princeton. My suggestion, if you can manage to do it, would be to try as much as possible to include facts like Princeton has had X Pulitzer winners or Y ambassadors, rather than listing individual people. I've never seen a university page that manages to do this well, but with Princeton there just might be enough sourcing available to pull it off. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:28, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
Appreciate the advice. I did remove the gallery that was on the page as I agreed with the mentality that they are less productive than helpful. Will start gathering sourcing for that and will attempt your suggestion. Thanks again! PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 06:08, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Infobox update: Total staff, not administrative staff

Following the discussion here, we've added a new |total_staff= parameter to the infobox, and updated the documentation to encourage its use rather than |administrative_staff= because the latter is generally imprecise. Basically all the higher education articles will need to be converted, but it'd be helpful if the project members here could at least cover the FAs/GAs. Also courtesy pinging folks I know who may want to convert for an institution/institutions they maintain: Ergo Sum, PoliticsIsExciting, HAL333, Buffs. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:24, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll get to it after the FAR. Buffs (talk) 21:41, 13 August 2021 (UTC)
Appreciate the ping. Life is a little busy at the moment, but I'll try to help out wit the FAs/GAs, as well as other universities I'm interested in. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 01:28, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

GAR for Patrick Henry College

Patrick Henry College, an article in this project's scope, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:56, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Notice of Featured Article Review

I have nominated Florida Atlantic University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Bumbubookworm (talk) 20:03, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

More infobox reforms

More reforms are underway at {{Infobox university}}—your input would be appreciated on a technical split of the |campus= parameter and the deprecation of the |sports= parameter. I will be implementing both if consensus holds. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:24, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

The campus parameter has been split. Please help spread the change to new articles: just change the existing e.g. |campus=[[Urban]], {{convert|47|acre}} to |campus_type=[[Urban]] and add a new line with |campus_size={{convert|47|acre}}. Courtesy pinging folks I know who may want to convert for an institution/institutions they maintain: Ergo Sum, PoliticsIsExciting, HAL333, Buffs. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 02:23, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping again. Updated the Princeton page, and I'll try to work on some of the good articles soon. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 04:35, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Burial of dead section

The "new articles" are handled automatically by article alerts nowadays, and the PR section is dead (PRs should be done through WP:PR, where they'll also show up automatically in the alerts. I'm moving them to the talk page here to archive the existing (all quite old) ones, and I will immediately archive it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:05, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

New articles

Please feel free to list your new University-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). Any new articles that have an interesting or unusual fact in them should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Main Wikipedia page. DYN has a 72-hour time limit from the creation of the article.

Peer review

Interesting query

For anyone curious, here are the largest "X University" articles on Wikipedia, and here are the largest "X College" articles. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:54, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Sdkb interesting, but the reports exclude most UK universities, which have "University of X" articles. TSventon (talk) 08:01, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
@TSventon, here are those. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:06, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Tuck School of Business FAR

I have nominated Tuck School of Business for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Bumbubookworm (talk) 13:08, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello,
Please note that Student exchange program, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing!
Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:06, 20 September 2021 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

Auto-tagging

There are currently roughly 9000 pages that use {{Infobox university}} but are not tagged on their talk page with our project banner. I'd like to put in a request that this be done using WP:WikiProjectTagger using the standard settings and canonicalizing redirects to the banner. Are there any concerns or objections? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:23, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Capitalization of courses and titles

I've noticed that the University articles use title case for names of courses and faculties. Is this correct or should we use sentence case?Reabrooker (talk) 14:38, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

We should be following MOS:CAPS. This means that names of courses shouldn't be capitalised (except for things like English and French, of course).
However, things get more complicated when it comes to names of faculties, departments, and other subdivisions of universities. These might or might not be capitalised depending on whether they are being used as a proper name, e.g. 'Alliance Manchester Business School' but 'the business school at Manchester University' (per MOS:INSTITUTIONS). Whether something like 'Faculty of Engineering' should be capitalised is not entirely clear – is this an abbreviated form of a proper name (following the example given in the MOS of "State Department", used in context) or is it a generic term (like church, hospital, university). I'd tend towards the former, but arguments could be given either way. Similarly for something like "College of Arts and Sciences", but "College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity" is definitely a proper name. "University College" could be either a proper name (in the context of the universities of Oxford, Durham or London) or a generic name for a type of institution. Robminchin (talk) 06:27, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Black Student Union article

Hello! I recently created the article Black Student Union, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 18:30, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Discussion about what to do with Educational institution

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools § What to do about Educational institution?. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:56, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Miami Herbert Business School

Hello! I am an employee at Miami Herbert Business School and have a conflict of interest. I have posted a request to update and expand the school’s Infobox. Since I have a conflict of interest, I am looking for the help of other editors to review and update the page on my behalf. Many thanks for your time and consideration. MT for University of Miami (talk) 18:04, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Princeton University/archive2

I have nominated List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Princeton University for featured list removal. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured list criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks; editors may declare to "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. TompaDompa (talk) 01:48, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Wesley College (Delaware)

Can some other editors please take a look at the recent editing history at Wesley College (Delaware)? I am concerned that two (?) single-purpose editors are edit-warring to insert blatantly POV material. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 05:20, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Redeemer University College

Can some other editors please take a look at the requested move discussion I have started a at Talk:Redeemer University College#Requested move 16 November 2021, which follows two unsuccessful RM attempts and a reverted cut and paste move by a university employee. The article has been tagged since for content that is written like an advertisement and relying excessively on sources associated with the subject. TSventon (talk) 13:21, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Higher education accreditation nominated for deletion

Editors here may be interested in reading and participating in the recent nomination of Higher education accreditation for deletion. ElKevbo (talk) 06:05, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

The nomination has been withdrawn. Thank you to everyone who participated. ElKevbo (talk) 21:00, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Bolding in non-lead infoboxes

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Bolding in non-lead infoboxes. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 09:25, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Differences between faculty and academic staff

Short version: Are there (sometimes?) differences between "faculty" and "academic staff", in particular with respect to what extent these terms include researchers? PhD candidates, are they students or can they count as faculty / academic staff? What is included in the NCES faculty numbers?

Long version: Hi all, Hi @Sdkb and Urselius:, could you please help me with the meaning of "faculty" and "academic staff"? Here, let us neglect the use of "faculty" for a division of a university as described in Faculty (division). Then the fact that the page Faculty redirects via Faculty (academic staff) to Academic personnel seems to indicate that faculty is the same as academic staff, also Wiktionary [5] defines (in Noun - 1.) faculty= academic staff (with the remark "chiefly US"). My question relates to the reseachers at the universities. From my point of view (which is a German and natural science one), reseachers - professors as well as PhD candidates if they get a fixed salary - typically belong to the academic staff. According to some sources, including dict.leo faculty is essentially the teaching/instructional staff - plus some of the adminstration like deans who might not be actively teaching. Also the usage part in the Wiktionary entry [6] mentiones "teaching staff ... are preferred in British English" and the translation part, "scholarly staff at colleges or universities" seem to indicate that faculty mainly includes the teachers (professors/instructors/lecturers), but not the research staff.?? In a typical German university department, there is one or a few professors, there might be some lecturers (Privatdozent or Akademischer Rat), and many academics doing their PhD. Although many PhD have to do some contribution to the teaching part, e.g. by being instructors for practical courses, this is typically just a minor fraction of their work. Therefore, many PhDs count as academic staff, but not as teaching staff (≈ faculty??), and there might be a considerable difference between the numbers. How about universities in your countries, e.g. in England and the US? Do PhD candidates get a salary at all? To what extent do researchers (PhD candidates, others like postdocs) belong to the academic staff and/or to the faculty? When I edit the German Wikipedia, should I use faculty numbers as given College Navigator of the National Center for Education Statistics NCES and academic staff numbers as given by the HESA as numbers of teaching staff ("Dozenten") or as academic staff ("wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter")? Does it make sense to distinguish here? Pseudoneu Anondeux Zweitnamensmann (talk) 11:13, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

'Faculty' as a collective term for academic or teaching staff at a higher education institution is really not used in the UK. The position in regard to who constitutes 'academic staff' is rather complex. At one time, prior to about 25 years ago, academic staff had much better employment contracts than other staff. They could only be dismissed for extreme misconduct. However, this has changed and academic staff now tend to have contracts much like those of other university employees. Academic staff were once expected to both teach and conduct research. Today, research 'high flyers' might expect to do much less teaching than their more pedestrian counterparts, and academics with research-only positions are becoming more common. Also academics who perhaps have not been successful in attracting research grant money, might find themselves moved into a teaching-only role. Academic staff, are those who are either 'principal investigators', who lead research groups, or academic teachers, or have a mixture of the two roles. Full or part-time teaching assistants, who usually have fixed-term or 'zero hours' contracts, are not usually considered to be academic staff. Staff, such as librarians and senior technical specialists, who provide scientific services supporting research, are often termed 'academic-related staff'. Sometimes these are lumped in with technicians, administrators and clerical staff as 'professional support staff'. Most researchers, including post-docs are on fixed-term contracts and are classified as 'research-only staff'. PhD students are just post-graduate students, but can also function as part-time 'demonstrators' and teaching assisstants, which they are paid for, but they are not regarded as being staff in any real sense. Urselius (talk) 12:51, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation, and thank you for your sentence "Academic staff ... both teach and conduct research", reminding me of the Humboldtian model of higher education. Of course, this is still very influential, also in Germany, but on the other hand, there is also a trend to have some kind of "teaching only" and "research only" staff. So your description of the developments also fits to those in Germany.
It seems to me that due to the differences between universities in the UK and in Germany, it is hard to translate the term "academic staff" correctly. "Akademisches Personal", "Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter" = "scientific personnel" and "Dozenten" = "academic teacher" are quite close to "academic staff", but both do not fit perfectly: PhD candidates are not considered as academic staff in the UK as you describe above, but they often belong to it in Germany. Since there are these "research only" positions, teaching and academic staff is not the same. Pseudoneu Anondeux Zweitnamensmann (talk) 16:24, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
We recently deprecated "administrative staff" because of ambiguity concerns and replaced it with "total staff". I don't think we'd want to do the same for faculty, because for many institutions in the U.S. and some other countries it has a pretty well-defined meaning. But if you're working on pages for countries where its meaning is not well-defined, you have two main options. The first is to choose whichever definition you think will be most helpful to readers, and then to include an explanatory footnote or similar to make your editorial decision clear to readers. The second is to just leave it out and use total staff instead. That would be a perfectly reasonable choice—the existence of a parameter doesn't mean it's mandatory to use it all the time. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:36, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
The numbers we use for UK universities come from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which defines academic staff as:

Academic contract staff are defined as professionals holding a contract for planning, directing and undertaking academic teaching and research within HE providers. Examples of such contracts include those for vice-chancellors, medical practitioners, dentists, veterinarians and other health care professionals who undertake lecturing or research activities.

It subdivides these for some purposes into "teaching only", "research only", "teaching and research" and "neither teaching not research", but these subdivisions aren't important for our purposes.[7] Robminchin (talk) 03:34, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for your contributions to clarify this issue! Pseudoneu Anondeux Zweitnamensmann (talk) 13:06, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
The US Department of Education has the definitions they use online.
Faculty: Persons identified by the institution as such and typically those whose initial assignments are made for the purpose of conducting instruction, research or public service as a principal activity (or activities). They may hold academic rank titles of professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, lecturer or the equivalent of any of those academic ranks. Faculty may also include the chancellor/president, provost, vice provosts, deans, directors or the equivalent, as well as associate deans, assistant deans and executive officers of academic departments (chairpersons, heads or the equivalent) if their principal activity is instruction combined with research and/or public service. The designation as "faculty" is separate from the activities to which they may be currently assigned. For example, a newly appointed president of an institution may also be appointed as a faculty member. Graduate, instruction, and research assistants are not included in this category.
Instructional staff: An occupational category that is comprised of staff who are either: 1) Primarily Instruction or 2) Instruction combined with research and/or public service. The intent of the Instructional Staff category is to include all individuals whose primary occupation includes instruction at the institution.
There are other definitions that may be relevant to your question if you look in the glossary linked above. ElKevbo (talk) 14:34, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Oklahoma Christian University‎

There is a dispute over content in Oklahoma Christian University‎. Additional input from other editors would be appreciated! ElKevbo (talk) 02:32, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Proposed WikiProject Purdue University

Hey all! I would like to invite any editors here to show their support for and potentially join the new WikiProject: Purdue University. It hasn't technically been made yet, and I only proposed it just a few minutes ago, but I'm trying to start out strong. The Project would aim to improve existing Purdue University-related articles and create new ones. As it is still in the proposal process, you can show your support here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Purdue University. Thanks!! Invinciblewalnut (talk) 20:24, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Invinciblewalnut! I'm glad you're looking to improve Purdue, and if you have questions or want support resources, the folks here can help you out. I would not recommend trying to create a WikiProject, though. Individual schools, even larger ones, are just too niche topics to support a WikiProject, and the WikiProject system as a whole has been consolidating rather than expanding.
Looking at Purdue's article, it's in pretty decent shape compared to many other institutions. I'd recommend slimming down the notable alumni section and adding more references, particularly to secondary sources. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:06, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Research output of universities

Why is there no information about the research output of the universities in the Infobox? For example, the number of peer-reviewed publications.

There is no systematic information even in the text except for major scientific achievements.

Nowadays, the ranking and reputation of universities rely on their research output. It will be very helpful if we have quantitative measures about the research output of universities (preferably in the Infobox).MojoDiJi (talk) 15:51, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I know that the Carnegie classification takes research into account, and that's often at least in the lead. To go in the infobox, the measures would have to be both important and representative of an institution's level of research. I think we could certainly do more in the body beyond just listing major research accomplishments. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:21, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
Each and every ranking system puts a significant weight on research. Take a look at College and university rankings, the term "research" has appeared 91 times, and the term "publications" (referring to the number of publications of faculty members) has appeared 11 times. In most ranking systems, the number of publications of each university is directly considered as a key factor, though some ranking systems use specific publications (e.g., in specific journals as My2Vice mentioned. You may argue the number of publications does not represent the institution's level of research. Similarly, the number of students as mentioned in the Infobox does not represent education. So much the worse, the definition of the number of students varies from source to source: part-time vs full-time, undergraduate vs graduate, graduate minus doctoral vs doctoral only.MojoDiJi (talk) 18:14, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I'm not sure that a neutral measure of research output exists. If it does, I haven't seen it in discussions on bibliometrics within academia yet. So while it would be nice to have something like this in the infobox, it's not really feasible. Robminchin (talk) 04:54, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree that it is not easy to measure the research output, but the number of publications is a fairly standard measure, though there is an attempt to add more factors such as the impact of publications. However, many universities report their number of research publications as a measure of their research strength. It is much easier to measure the research output rather than education excellence.MojoDiJi (talk) 18:18, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Number of publications is a commonly understandable measure, as many resources use this raw measure (e.g., profiles of individual researchers on Google Scholar and other platforms). However, I suggest something to cover the quality as well as quantity, such as the number of publications in reputable journals. Something like Nature Index, but more scientific, as Nature Index has a commercial weight attached to it by covering a specific journal. In any case, research input should be definitely covered, as the battle of research is raging on in higher education.My2Vice (talk) 09:35, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
We cannot have both quality and quantity in a single measure. We have to report two different measures side by side. The Nature Index will favor a specific range of universities who regularly publish in Nature.MojoDiJi (talk) 18:20, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia editors cannot be in the business of creating metrics or rankings on their own. We can report what others have written - if they're reliable sources and are presented with appropriate weight - if there is a consensus to do so. So if someone believes this information should be included in articles, they need to (a) find where it has already been compiled and published and (b) propose or pilot a way to add it to articles in a way that works for most editors.
For U.S. institutions, I don't know offhand of a single metric or publication that describes total research output and has large scale acceptance in the academy. Many articles already include some of the disparate sources that provide a partial summary or some kind of proxy e.g., total external research funding received in specific time span, some of the international rankings that attempt to quantify research output and quality. As mentioned above, the Basic Carnegie Classification does this to some degree as research is included in the algorithm for classifying institutions, at least for universities, and that has widespread acceptance although it's a very, very coarse classification that few people actually understand except in the very broadest sense. So I sympathize with the desire to include this information but I don't think it's feasible, especially in any manner that is comparable across national borders. ElKevbo (talk) 03:36, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Where did I suggest creating metrics or rankings? I just suggested including commonly understandable numbers such as the number of publications and citations for the sake of comparison. There is no shortage of sources for the number of publications and citations. Every publication database can aggregate the results based on the affiliation. As a matter of fact, this is one of few credible data about universities. You can check the validity of the results with another database. There are also open-source datasets of publications and citations. What is your source for the number of students, staff, endowment, etc. (all in the Infobox)? The university report. Can you double-check it with another source? No! You simply report what the university claims.MojoDiJi (talk) 10:51, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
They are publicly available data. Editors can decide on choosing a database as the main reference. There is no weight, these are absolute numbers. We do not create a metric here, just reporting what is commonly known to everyone.MojoDiJi (talk) 11:31, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree that this isn't feasible. To address one specific point made, number of publications (particularly in the form of papers, which is what is normally measured, and even then varies depending on the definitions and methodology adopted) is not the same thing as research output. The guidelines for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021,[8] for example, state that "In addition to printed academic work, research outputs may include, but are not limited to: new materials, devices, images, artefacts, products and buildings; confidential or technical reports; intellectual property, whether in patents or other forms; performances, exhibits or events; and work published in non-print media." (Paragraph 217; a longer listing of the various categories of research output is given in Annex K). We have no way of balancing journal articles, edited books, compositions, artefacts, etc. in a way that isn't original research – which is why the idea of using bibliometrics for this sort of thing has been abandoned by the REF in favour of expert panels. Robminchin (talk) 07:11, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
When applying for a faculty position, your application will not be even taken seriously without a strong record of publications (in scholarly journals), at least in 80% of disciplines. The same happens when applying for a research grant. The guideline you mentioned simply try to support other forms of research output, but still, journal publications are the dominant research out (books in a narrow range of disciplines). Instead of relying on the numbers, the REF classification of research excellence is based on the review of selective publications nominated by the universities (which I believed is just a fancy bureaucracy). Still, the judgement is based on the journal publications by a large margin. How do the universities select their representative publications? Most likely, the highly cited publications in famous journals. The output of REF reviews of higher education institutions directly correlates with the number of publications in famous journals and citations. Have you ever seen a small university beating Oxbridge in any research review? There's no magic, is it the science of statistics.MojoDiJi (talk) 10:51, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree with other editors here that assessing research output of a university would tend to be WP:OR, and I understand the suggestion made here by MojoDiJi to be explicitly WP:OR and/or WP:SYNTH. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 11:12, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
You can choose a reference source for all the metrics I suggested while people can cross-check with other databases. The point is that these data exist. Imagine Wikipedia decides to include these metrics, and use the university as the source (like other metrics in the Infobox). Isn't it better to use a third-party source for all universities? MojoDiJi (talk) 11:23, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

I would like to summarize my suggestion, as it is somewhat misunderstood. I say when you check the Infobox of a university in Wikipedia, you can quickly find its education size by the number of students; you can quickly get the education level by the ratio of graduate/undergraduate students. You can get a glimpse of history by the year of establishment, an overview of fundraising by the amount of endowments. However, you get absolutely no information on how much the university is research-intensive. I suggest three numbers: (1) the number of publications, (2) the number of publications in prestigious journals, and (3) the number of citations.MojoDiJi (talk) 11:18, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Let me answer possible criticism. These numbers should reflect a general overview of the research output of a university, not an absolute representation. No metric does. The sale of a music album does not represent its art, even the box office does not represent the success of a movie. The same rule applies to almost any metric provided in the infoboxes throughout Wikipedia. When you see a university that has 100 publications and the other 100,000; you can quickly guess which one is research active. It is statistically unlikely that the former has published 100 cutting edge research in Nature, and the latter 100,000 papers in fake journals. The number of citations is evidently a measure of how the reset of the community used the research. There are many discussions about manipulating bibliometrics, but it occurs at the author level, not the institution level. It is very unlikely that a university systematically plans to do so.MojoDiJi (talk) 11:18, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

There has been a question of a credible source. These numbers are publicly available through various databases and cross-checked. I can extract the numbers for a typical university and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia article, but it does not help. These numbers are meaningful only for the sake of comparison. They are useful if you add them to all research institutions/universities throughout Wikipedia.MojoDiJi (talk) 11:18, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

I believe these three numbers are interesting for most users of Wikipedia. Nature Index is a fraction of the second number I suggested. Not only does its Wikipedia page report the sort of ranking I highlighted, but also there is a dedicated website for this commercial index, which is quite common (as can be judged by the Alexa ranking). Therefore, the question is not if we need these three numbers, but where should be the main reference for it.MojoDiJi (talk) 11:38, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

It's always great when Wikipedians argue against what is in documents produced by experts based on their own beliefs. It makes it explicit that what they are proposing is WP:OR. There is no reliable metric for research output, so this proposal is a non-starter – the addition of bad statistics that are likely to be misunderstood does not improve the encyclopedia. Robminchin (talk) 06:46, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
Meh, I guess that reporting Nature Index isn't actually WP:OR, but I'm not convinced that it is WP:DUE. (It is a proprietary number from a publisher, which may for example tend to emphasize numbers from that publisher.) We sometimes add some similar indices to articles on academic journals, but the numbers that are worth including are better established and less proprietary. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 07:32, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
"There is no reliable metric for research output", can you name a reliable metric for education? The amount of endowments of Harvard University as mentioned on its infobox is 10 times of Berkeley or Oxford. What does this metric represent? Are they "good statistics", causing no misunderstanding? The latter institutions are state-funded and their windfall fundings are not categorized as endowments. The statistics report facts through numbers. It is not the decision of an encyclopedia to judge what they represent or do not. An encyclopedia can only decide if a number is important or not (not if it represents this or that). If you wish to oppose my suggestion, the correct way is to claim the number of papers/citations is not important and nobody count them. I believe the three numbers I proposed are among the best metrics in the whole Wikipedia, because they are absolute numbers. People can easily verify them, as opposed to other metrics such as the number of students, which are reported by the university (and universities have different methods for counting students). Your attitude is not uncommon; you oppose anything new while defending what already exists. Sooner or later, Wikipedia will report the three numbers I proposed, because there is a general demand for them. That day, you will defend the number of papers/citations as established metrics while opposing new ideas.MojoDiJi (talk) 12:39, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

IPEDS data import

 You are invited to join the discussion at wikidata:Wikidata talk:WikiProject Higher education § IPEDS data import. This will be helpful for when we improve our infobox to integrate with Wikidata. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:41, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Feedback on higher ed bio

I'm interested in compiling bios of leaders in medical education. I posted a bio about a month ago I am hoping to get some feedback on soon. I apologize if this is the wrong place to request this. If so, please let me know a better place to request such feedback. Thank you! https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft:Ara_Tekian — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mededbios (talk • contribs) 00:49, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mededbios, I made some very quick fixes, but the main thing you need to do to get the draft accepted is demonstrate notability, via either the general notability guideline or the academics guideline. Any source from an institution with which Tekian is affiliated does not count toward that. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:40, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
@Mededbios, generally it is a good idea to check notability first to save your own time and the reviewer's. If you can establish notability under GNG or NPROF, then you can help the reviewer and potentially speed up the review by adding a section on notabilityb to the article talk page. An essay called WP:THREE suggests quoting your three strongest sources so the reviewer doesn't need to search for them. You could also read Help:Referencing_for_beginners and fill in your references with the RefToolbar to make it easier for the reviewer to assess them. TSventon (talk) 12:06, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Are honorary degree recipients alumni?

There is a dispute at University of Massachusetts Amherst about whether honorary degree recipients can be included in the article as "alumni." Additional input from other editors would be welcome. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 17:10, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Showcase article nomination: Pomona College

Our first new featured article for an existing educational institution since 2010 just passed FAC! Per the instruction to raise new additions to the showcase article roster here before adding them, I'd like to formally propose that we add it. There's only one other article currently listed for the United States, Georgetown University, which is a very different type of institution (large university vs. small liberal arts college), so I think the case for the addition is pretty clear. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:28, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Good idea; I added it. ElKevbo (talk) 17:11, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

RSN discussion on academic ranking sites.

This discussion may be of interest to this project: see Academic ranking sites (AcademicInfluence.com, EduRank.org, OneClass.com) at the Reliable Sources noticeboard. Cheers, --Animalparty! (talk) 23:57, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

RfC on capitalization of buildings

There is an RfC going on on whether the names of two buildings, the South Houses and North Houses at Caltech, should be capitalized. The question is whether these names are proper nouns, and whether the amount of sources capitalizing them is a "substantial majority". Your comments and !votes are appreciated. Antony–22 (talk⁄contribs) 03:45, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

FAR for The Green (Dartmouth College)

I have nominated The Green (Dartmouth College) for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Bumbubookworm (talk) 12:49, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

It seems like many of the FAs associated with this project have been pushed through a review recently. Is this just confirmation bias, weird timing, or what? ElKevbo (talk) 02:34, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
@ElKevbo, I suspect it's because WP:URFA/2020 is getting to them. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:14, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks! I agree that many of these articles, particularly those that were promoted many years ago when the standards were different and have not been well maintained, need to be reviewed and likely delisted, but it's disheartening to see it happening to so many articles so quickly. ElKevbo (talk) 03:38, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree. It's important to have FAs to use as models for the project. If there are some that are mostly good but just have a few flaws, it may be worth it to try to save them, but most of the ones so far have at least one big issue. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:04, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Bumping this. It's now moved to a FARC, but there haven't been many issues identified. If anyone wants an easy FA star, this shouldn't be a hard article to save. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:19, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

List of researchers at the Racah Institute - NOTDIRECTORY?

Should this even exist? The ones with articles can be listed at The Racah Institute of Physics. I think WP:NOTDIRECTORY covers this but don't want to take this to AfD if I'm wrong. Doug Weller talk 12:49, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

It can just be merged with the article on the institute, keeping only those few people who are notable enough for their own articles. Like any other small HE institution. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:57, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
@Doug Weller, most institutions can have an associated "List of [institution] people" list with notable alumni, faculty, and institution presidents. It appears that List of Hebrew University of Jerusalem people doesn't exist yet, so what I would do would be to expand the scope to that, take out all the presumably non-notable redlinks, and add an {{empty section}} for notable alumni for others to fill in over time. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:23, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
I've done a merge. No time for anything else, sorry. Doug Weller talk 08:31, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Lists of (University name) people

I've created a general guideline for "Lists of (University name) people". Here is the link: Wikipedia:Stand-alone_lists#Lists_of_(University_name)_people. Ber31 (talk) 17:49, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Harvard University § Proposed merge of The Harvard Gazette into Harvard University

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Harvard University § Proposed merge of The Harvard Gazette into Harvard University. There's plenty of other highly questionable articles for university PR publications/Alumni magazines, but starting with Harvard since it's unavoidably where many newcomers look and therefore has some power to set precedent. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:49, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

A pair of unregistered editors are engaged in prolonged edit-warring at Bachelor of Technology, Bachelor of Computing, and Bachelor of Information Technology. Assistance and intervention from other editors would be welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 23:41, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Listing Academic Presidential Salaries

Editor Graham87 requested that I come here for a judgement call, from the broader community.

(This is a psuedonymous account. I need to be up front about that. I'm aware that that puts initial judgment against me, but I'm in a position where edits can have a very negative effect on my job and my family. I do have another Wikipedia account, with which I've made numerous good-faith edits through the years. I am also a donor, for what it's worth.)

I spent part of today looking into publicly available tax returns (everything is very well sourced), to find the salaries and compensations of various college and university presidents. Executive salaries have been increasing in the last generation. I edited several pages of colleges and their presidents, not with harsh editorializing, but adding their salaries in as close to a natural and neutral tone as I could manage.

I honestly believe that this information is encyclopediac, and of interest to the public. It's already a part of the public record, and isn't "original research." I used the publicly available tax returns for this information. Nor do I believe that I'm trying to "right a great wrong." The mainstream media has already covered this information in depth, and I'm following their lead. Here are just a few links from reputable sources: Survey: Pay for private university presidents climbs 10.5% (AP)Executive Compensation at Public and Private Colleges (Chronicle of Higher Ed), Chief Executives (Chronicle of Higher Ed), College Presidential Pay Makes No Sense: Little Relation To Excellence (Forbes), 15 college presidents who've been paid millionaire salaries (Business Insider). There are many more, as well. This information has been reported on, but the information is still hard for most people to find. I think families would like to know this before deciding to send a kid there, or to make a generous donation.

I also think that salaries are certainly relevant information on the biographical pages of presidents. It is a sign of someone's success (or infamy), and certainly of interest to anyone researching that person. That's true of celebrities, so why not academics? (So long as it's all well sourced. That's crucial, of course.)

Perhaps an idea would be to create an entry in the sidebar template for a school, listing the president's compensation? If it's thought that this information constitutes "trivia", there's certainly already a lot of trivia there.

I hope you will consider giving me your blessing on this project. I believe that it will help give these Wikipedia pages a fuller view of our colleges and universities.

Reynard15 (talk) 04:10, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for writing here. See my comments at User talk:Reynard15. In addition to those, I see it as another it's just another thing that gets out-of-date really quickly and would need to be constantly updated. Graham87 04:55, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@Reynard15, I could support adding it to the biographical articles for college presidents (which are all notable per WP:NPROF #6). I don't support it for the college/university articles themselves, since I think the most that's due there is a presidents' accomplishments' in a college's history and their name in the infobox/governance section.
One thing that you could do that would be very helpful and where you wouldn't have to worry about due weight or datedness would be to import the salaries to Wikidata. I've done an example here. If you managed to compile the data into a CSV spreadsheet format, you could use OpenRefine to import the salaries in bulk. Best, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:27, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
  • I would oppose this in general. We are aiming to write bios that stand the test of time: in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years someone's 2020 salary will have no meaning. Also, unlike say, a birthday, just a plain number here imparts almost no information/context on which to be informed. In addition to being ephemeral there is WP:BLPPRIMARY. If there is RS controversy around a specific president (and what about officers of public corporations, or anyone else's current salary, there is no limiting principle) then discussion somewhere could be due, but one would think it would go to the university's article before thinking of going to the bio, depending on the coverage. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:55, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
    The concerns about enduringness are valid. But to look at it from the other side, we do include other information that needs annual updates, e.g. endowment sizes. And there's FA precedent for including salary information at e.g. List of presidents of the University of Illinois system. If we updated Wikidata in bulk and then drew information from it, as I demonstrated at G. Gabrielle Starr, there's even a reasonable possibility it'd stay up to date. So I don't feel strongly about this for people pages, but I lean a little toward it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:46, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Featured article review for Georgetown University

I have nominated Georgetown University for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:06, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

On a more personal note, this is a big one. Having one FA for a major U.S. research university is the absolute bare minimum this project needs to be able to set an example, and this is our last one. I hope many folks from this project will join in to help get it back in sparkling shape so it can continue to be one of our showcase articles. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:06, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Neutrality dispute at Golden Triangle (universities)

There is a neutrality dispute over the inclusion of differing opinions on which institutions are considered members of the Golden triangle (universities). Additional input would be welcome. Robminchin (talk) 07:45, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Dispute over inclusion of "Public Ivy" in lede of University of Arizona‎

There is a dispute over the inclusion of "Public Ivy" in lede of University of Arizona‎. Additional input is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 23:55, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

This dispute is still ongoing and additional help is requested. ElKevbo (talk) 23:31, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Criticism and accusations at University of North Carolina School of the Arts‎

A lengthy section of criticism and accusations of unethical and criminal activities has been recently added to University of North Carolina School of the Arts‎. It would be helpful if a few editors could look at it and help edit the material further. (I don't care to touch it myself because I get worn down by constant accusations - in Talk pages, edit summaries, and e-mail messages - that I'm constantly editing to either promote institutions or denigrate them; someone else can take this one on.) ElKevbo (talk) 23:34, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:UT Arlington Mavericks § Proposed merge of University of Texas at Arlington Rebel theme controversy into UT Arlington Mavericks

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:UT Arlington Mavericks § Proposed merge of University of Texas at Arlington Rebel theme controversy into UT Arlington Mavericks. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 23:56, 18 February 2022 (UTC) 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 23:56, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Rochester Institute of Technology Croatia#Requested move 8 February 2022

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Rochester Institute of Technology Croatia#Requested move 8 February 2022 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 17:57, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Getting article reviewed and published for a university in Nigeria (Mewar International University and 19 more recently approved and launched by the Nigerian Govt)

In April 2021 the Nigerian government approved 20 new universities and their wikipedia pages are not get created for many of them. Here is one such University for which a draft article/page is created waiting for review and approval https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft_talk:Mewar_International_University — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nidamalik13 (talk • contribs) 04:34, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, India needs to be reviewed for High Importance in Higher Education

All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur was established under AIIMS Act (Amendment) 2012 through a Gazette Notification. autonomous institutes under PMSSY The organization is also an Institute of National Importance (INI) as mentioned under Ministry of Education Institutions of National Importance. The wiki page also mentions the Institute [[9]]

Genesguy (talk) 19:57, 27 February 2022 (UTC) Genesguy (talk) 20:02, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

As far as I can see, no or very few individual institutions are rated as "high importance" in this WikiProject. Yale University isn't, for example. I do appreciate that the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences are very important institutions, not just in India but internationally. However, there's a lot to do on our article on the Jodhpur institute. Grammar and style need to be checked. The article doesn't yet conform to our guidelines for structure. An easy first step would be to add something about the campus(es), and some photos. Itsmejudith (talk) 21:00, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Template talk:Universities and polytechnics in Uusimaa#Requested move 24 February 2022

There is a requested move discussion at Template talk:Universities and polytechnics in Uusimaa#Requested move 24 February 2022 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 19:23, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Featured article review

I have nominated Royal National College for the Blind for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:30, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Dispute at Franciscan University of Steubenville‎

Two editors - me and an unregistered editor - are having a dispute at Franciscan University of Steubenville‎ about a recent court case that has been decided with negative implications for the university. Additional input from other editors about how best to handle this would be appreciated. ElKevbo (talk) 19:16, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

U.S. showcase articles

With Georgetown University sadly now delisted, we no longer have any U.S. research universities. Besides Pomona, there's United States Military Academy, so we could list that, but it's a pretty non-standard institution, so not the best model, and I suspect it has many flaws that will become apparent once it gets reviewed. Instead, we could maybe add University of Mississippi, which is only a GA, but at least a recent one. Thoughts? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:26, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

No, the University of Mississippi article must not be promoted as a model for other articles as it makes gratuitous use of the institution's racist nickname. The article should have never been promoted to "Good" status and the editors involved in editing it and promoting it should be admonished. ElKevbo (talk) 19:28, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Wayfinding Academy --> Wayfinding College?

Wayfinding Academy is part of WikiProject Alternative education. Should the WikiProject Higher education template be added to the talk page as well? I've submitted a move proposal but the article needs significant improvement. Thanks for any assistance or discussion participation. ---Another Believer (Talk) 15:30, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

United States Military Academy FAR

I have nominated United States Military Academy for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:06, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Kharkiv National Academy of Municipal Economy → Kharkiv National Academy of Urban Economy?

Or another title? Currently, the article is confused, titled one way, talking about the other. Please see, and comment within, Talk:Kharkiv National Academy of Municipal Economy. Thank you. -- Hoary (talk) 03:23, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Now moved. -- Hoary (talk) 12:43, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

Should country always be included in the lede sentence?

LessHeard vanU has objected to a few articles about universities in the United States that do not explicitly include "United States" in the lede sentence. This is not required or recommended by our current advice about college and university articles. In my experience - limited almost exclusively but quite extensive - articles about colleges and universities include in the lede an explicit link to the specific town, city, or county in which they are located but they omit the country. Should this practice change? Should we explicitly include the country in the lede sentence of each article about a college or university?

For what it's worth, I would support this change to our advice. I am not particularly bothered by the current practice as readers are always able to view lots of information about the institution's location simply by clicking on the link to the location's article. Moreover, the country is specified in the infobox. But this is a pretty small change that may be helpful for many readers. With that said, I do worry that some editors would perceive this as unnecessary information and would specifically object to linking the country as overlinking.

This change would affect several thousand articles; an RfC would probably be the best way to go if there is some agreement that this change should be made. That would also help get clarity on some important details such as (a) should the country be linked and (b) would this be done for every single article or would exceptions be made for locations that we generally believe are globally recognizable e.g., Boston, London, Paris. ElKevbo (talk) 15:58, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb: You've done work with featured articles in this area. How is this handled and viewed by editors and reviewers in that part of the project? ElKevbo (talk) 15:59, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
To clarify, I objected to the removal of my edit adding the name of the nation to an article per WP:Revert. I then argued that adding the nation to any place or person specific is of general benefit to the encyclopedia as it helps algorithms when people are searching for relevant subjects. My reasons are laid out in my comment to ElKebo's talk page here. I further noted in a subsequent comment that there are eight examples of California in the UK per the wp subjects disambig page. I am a fastidious inclusionist of the name of nations to relevant articles, and would be pleased to learn of the consensus within this area so I may not go against same. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:14, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
  • This is an issue I've pondered before, and I have a few thoughts. First, it applies to any geographic entity, not just colleges, so this may not be a wide enough venue. Second, there are actually three separate questions: do you include the country in the short description, do you include it in the first sentence, and do you include it in the infobox? I think the argument is perhaps strongest for the infobox, because putting it there doesn't interrupt the flow of text or cause a length overflow if it ends up being unnecessary.
    Onto my actual opinions. I've brought this up before in this discussion, and the standard I proposed for SD's there is one I think we could also adopt here. Generally, locations should be included up to the narrowest geographic region widely recognizable on an international scale. So for Columbia, New York City alone is sufficient, for Pomona, Claremont, California, and for Brown, Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Of course, "widely recognizable" is highly subjective, but I think we're okay leaving that up to editorial discretion. It's hard to make set-in-stone guidance for things like, since a lot of contextual factors come into play. For instance, you could argue that in a borderline case, a school with a very large international student population should list the country, whereas a community college with only local students next door should not. How does that sound, ElKevbo and LessHeard_vanU? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:41, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
    Looking at a selection of British university articles, it appears almost all already include country information (most often the constituent country but sometimes United Kingdom), including the London institutions (where ElKevbo's suggestion wouldn't require it). Robminchin (talk) 04:32, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
    Continuing for a moment with the example of London, I can't believe that anyone looking at an article on a university in London (the British one) wouldn't know that London is in Britain. (Except perhaps very young inhabitants of London, Ont.) Pointing out that London is in England or Britain or the Youkay either insults the intelligence of the readers or suggests that the writers are bonkers, or both. London aside, this summary of indices of economic and other prominence is perhaps usable as a rough guide to which cities are best known. I wouldn't specify the nation for any of them, or for any of a bunch of others (Buenos Aires, Hamburg, Jo'burg, Lagos, Milan, Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Zürich...) that somehow don't get into that summary. Just link any where they can be beneficially linked (example, São Paulo). -- Hoary (talk) 09:24, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
    If we go down this road, I strongly prefer consistency i.e., we include country for every article. But I understand that it's common practice in many venues to omit country when there is an assumption that readers probably know it and I would not be surprised if that were the consensus here, too. ElKevbo (talk) 14:04, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
    For myself, per my understanding of the function of an infobox, I would prefer that the inclusion of the nation is in the lead, as the infobox should only contain data that is in the article. Using the infobox only, especially as it does not render in all media, defeats this. LessHeard vanU (talk) 12:30, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for your thoughts, Sdkb. I agree that this line of questioning should apply to any physical or geographic entity, not just colleges and universities, but that is much broader than my experience, my expertise, and the remit of this project, so I would like to keep this focused on colleges and universities.
I agree that we could operationalize this in three separate questions: (a) Should country be required in the short description for each article about a college, university, or other postsecondary education institution? (b) Should country be required in the first sentence for each article about a college, university, or other postsecondary education institution? and (c) Should country be required do you include it in the infobox for each article about a college, university, or other postsecondary education institution?
The first two questions seem to be straight forward. There are several institutions that have a presence in multiple countries so we would need to account for that. I think that there should there be some consideration for the size and scope of the presence for that country to be included e.g., only include countries for which the institution has a significant, meaningful, and ongoing presence.
I'm not sure that question c about the infobox is necessary as it already appears to be the common practice. But it could not hurt to include it to firmly document this practice and make it a recommendation supported by a clear consensus.
Should we address whether the country should or must be linked? In my experience, there is not consistency. I typically remove links to "United States" with WP:OVERLINKING as my rationale. But I would personally prefer to include the link and make this consistent across all of these articles.
How do we address the other levels of geography e.g., state, province? ElKevbo (talk) 14:29, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
There is no need to link to the US, per WP:OVERLINKING, and have removed wikilinks when editing. My short rationale is that when searching for an educational site on google individuals may be uncertain what State a place may be in (obviously if the state name is included in the institution, then this is moot) and ignorant of the city or town. However, searching by name and nation will provide a quick result. I realise that not all subjects that are peculiar to a country has the name of the nation in the lead, but in my experience that is because the contributors are unable to comprehend that a reader will not know what part of the world they are inferring. When you have seen as many articles as I have that only mention a large town or city without reference to a larger geopolitical area or nation, the lack of doing same is not a matter of consensus but conscientiousness. LessHeard vanU (talk) 12:30, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Dispute about inclusion of recent lawsuit in Shawnee State University

There is a discussion about whether a recent lawsuit should be included in Shawnee State University. You're welcome to join the discussion in the article's Talk page. ElKevbo (talk) 16:20, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Dispute about including costs at Montgomery College article

There is a discussion about whether information about costs should be included in Montgomery College, per WP:UNIGUIDE. You're welcome to join the discussion in the article's Talk page. CUA 27 (talk) 15:18, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Dispute about material in the lede sentence of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

Multiple editors disagree about material currently included in the lede sentence of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Additional input is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 01:55, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

User script to detect unreliable sources

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like

  • John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.

Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.

- Headbomb {t · c · p · b}

This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:01, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Galgotias University Campus One#Requested move 16 April 2022

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Galgotias University Campus One#Requested move 16 April 2022 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 13:01, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

LGBT Prohibition Article Sections

There is a member who has been adding LGBT Prohibition article sections to many US Christian universities. This is not a standard section according to the Higher Education article template. I have recommended putting specific incidents in a university's history section where it is significant and trustworthy but the user keeps adding entire new sections to the articles. See for example Concordia Irvine, Malone University et al. Boyerling3 (talk) 13:27, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

I think this could belong in the history section or perhaps elsewhere but I agree that a separate, dedicated section is probably not the best place for this information in most articles. Feel free to move the information or propose moving it in the articles' Talk pages.
Additionally, I've noticed that one or more editors added information to multiple articles about institutions listed in a ranking of "Worst Colleges for LGBTQ Students" or something along those lines. That information, like any other ranking or categorization, needs to be accompanied by the date on which the ranking was made; this helps readers and editors understand if the information is current or outdated. ElKevbo (talk) 00:50, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Recent edits to professorship articles

I've been mucking about on-and-off with some admin related to professorship articles over the past week. (Starting with Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and then expanding in scope...) I thought it might be useful to write down somewhere what I'm doing in case anyone is wondering what the rationale for these changes was, and also to socialise some of the decision I haven't made.

  • Article titles
    • Format: There was lots of different formats for these, (e.g. "Title Chair of Subject", "Title Professorship of Subject", "Title Professor of Subject"). In general, the last format was the most common so I've been moving some pages over for consistency. It also follows precedent for e.g. President of the United States (not Presidency) and Duke of Norfolk (not Dukedom).
    • Disambiguation:
      • I've again been standardising towards the most-common existing practice: adding the name of the University/institution in parenthesis, omitting the words University of and University as redundant in context (same precedent as for constituent colleges and sports programmes). Some generic titles are pre-emptively disambiguated in this way, e.g. Professor of Gaelic (Glasgow), which seems reasonable so I've left them alone.
      • Some professorships are currently disambiguated by year only, e.g. Professor of Astrophysics (1909). This strikes me as unhelpful, as the year of foundation is probably one of the more likely things a reader might be trying to find out and is likely to be less obvious than the institution. I'd suggest moving these to "Professorship (University)" where possible (or "Professorship (University, Year)" if not, though I doubt there's any need for multiple articles in that case). I haven't done this yet, but I might in future.
  • Categorisation
    • Set theory: Done some little work trying to disentangle categories for people who hold professorships from categories for professorships themselves, but this is nowhere near complete.
    • Sort keys: There was pretty much zero consistency here (articles variously sorted by subject, title, year or with no key), so I've been bold and eventually settled on a convention of my own that works well:
      • The template for a default sort key for a professorship is "Professor of [Subject], [Title], [Institution (if needed)], [Year (if needed)]". For general-interest categories, that results in professorships being found under 'p', then sorted by subject, then title, then university, then year.
      • For more specific categories, omit as much of the template as appropriate. e.g. for a category holding professorships at a specific university, the template would become "[Subject], [Title], [Year (if needed]".
      • As above, omit the words University or University of from institutions.
      • Normal sort key rules about names and numbers apply within these blocks, so use "Professor of Executions, Charles 1, King" for the King Charles I Professor of Executions.
      • Last wrangle: for untitled professorships, I've included a * in place of a title – this means all plain "Professor of Subject (Institution)" articles get sorted together above titled professorships, rather than being jumbled together alternatively sorted by title or institution.

Most of the above is half-done, so I'll continue to get on with it. I don't think any of it is too contentious, but thought I should offer the opportunity for objection anyway. Also tbh a lot of these articles probably ought to be merged into others by the letter of the Wikipedia rules, but I haven't done that because it's effort and I don't like deleting articles. Charlie A. (talk) 13:15, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Note that for the Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the University of Cambridge the "1909" isn't a disambiguator on Wikipedia, but rarher part of the title of the position. It's actually a local disambiguator there to distinguish it from the Professor of Astrophysics (2009) and the Professor of Astrophysics (2011), but forms part of the title as used by the current holder [10]. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 16:08, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't think I would agree that the date is a part of the title of the position per se, the title is precisely "Professor of Astrophysics" [11], as it is for the 2009, 2011, 2016, and 2018 establishments [12]. They all appear in Ordinances Ch. XI as "Professor of Astrophysics. Year. Institution". But so does e.g. "Regius Professor of Divinity. 1540. Divinity.", and 1540 isn't part of that title – it's just the year of foundation.
What I think is true is that, within Cambridge, years in parenthesis are used to disambiguate identically titled professorships (unless multiple identically titled professorships are established in the same year, where they use the specific date and number of the grace establishing them to disambiguate, though that's only the case for a couple of vestigial 1960s establishments). There might be an argument for using dates per WP:COMMONNAME, but I wouldn't argue that they are anything more than a convenient custom to distinguish between otherwise identical titles. Obviously within the university/on university websites, it's pointless to disambiguate by university(!)
What I would argue is that for a global Encyclopaedia it's significantly more likely a reader would think "there's an old professorship of astrophysics at Cambridge, I wonder how old?" than "there's a professorship of astrophysics dating from 1901, I wonder where?". So for our purposes disambiguation by date is less useful than by institution.
I'm aware that this is very much angels on the head of a pin territory... For that chair I wouldn't move it to "Professor of Astrophysics (Cambridge, 1901)" but rather would move it to "Professor of Astrophysics (Cambridge)" and include in the same article information on the several chairs sharing the same title at the university, as I did for Professor of Political Economy (Cambridge) (see also Professor of Engineering (Cambridge)). As I mentioned, many of these pages don't have sufficient content/notability/third-party references to warrant an article on their own so it makes sense to agglomerate slightly. What do you think? Charlie A. (talk) 21:48, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
I'm relying on Schedule C(vii)1 at page 89ff of the 2021 Statutes and Ordinances [13], where the Astrophysics Chairs are listed as "Astrophysics (1909), Astrophysics (2009), Astrophysics (2011), Astrophysics (2016), Astrophysics (2018), Astrophysics and Cosmology" and the Divinity Chairs as "Divinity (Lady Margaret’s), Divinity (Norris-Hulse), Divinity (Regius)". So I continue to claim that 1909 is part of the title here. However I would be happy with moving Professor of Astrophysics (1909) to Professor of Astrophysics (Cambridge) as long as the article is changed to explicitly include all the chairs and to mention the date issue. I hadn't noticed the amazing "Engineering (1966, Grace 5 of 1 December 1965)", so thanks for that! Jonathan A Jones (talk) 10:59, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
I think the world has greater pleasures for us than debating whether (1909) is an official part of the title or merely the university's standard disambiguator, and I'm happy to make an agglomerated article which makes the matter moot! The grace thing is charming, you can almost hear the implied "that'll have to do". Charlie A. (talk) 22:17, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Proposed move: Category:Professors of the University of Cambridge to Category:Professors at the University of Cambridge

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2022 May 10 § Category:Professors of the University of Cambridge. I have proposed standardising towards a convention of using at for institutions and of for subjects, in category names of the format "professor(ship)s [at/of] [institution/subject]" and "[sociologists/historians/etc] [at/of] [institution/subject]" (at least within the Cambridge category tree). I am cross-posting this here as it may set a precedent that would effect other category trees which include professor(ship)s and academics by subject, and we require more input to reach consensus. Charlie A. (talk) 17:58, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Dispute at UC Berkeley School of Law‎

There is disagreement between editors about recent edits to UC Berkeley School of Law‎. Input from additional editors is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 02:00, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Dispute about inclusion of honorary alumni at Gustavus Adolphus College‎

Two editors are disagreeing about the inclusion of honorary alumni in Gustavus Adolphus College‎. There is a discussion open in the article's Talk page; additional input is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 02:16, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, commented over there.Jahaza (talk) 20:38, 21 May 2022 (UTC)
As this seems to be a recurring issue, perhaps we should hold an RfC or similar to settle it and have something firm to point to whenever it comes up. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:59, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Terri Givens Political Scientist

I have been trying to get the Wikipedia article for Terri Givens approved for several months. What's the problem? She is obviously worthy of inclusion.[3]--CollegeMeltdown (talk) 14:46, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/carlos-iii-university-madrid
  2. ^ https://cwur.org/2018-19/Carlos-III-University-of-Madrid.php
  3. ^ https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft:Terri_Givens. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
Did you mean to submit it to Articles for Creation? (It doesn't seem to be so submitted.) It's a bit undersourced and overpromotional. See WP:PRIMARY in particular. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 19:06, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Geology Hall, New Brunswick, New Jersey Featured article review

I have nominated Geology Hall, New Brunswick, New Jersey for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:06, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

There is a dispute over the inclusion of a link in the "External links" section of Wichita State University. Additional input in the Talk page is invited. ElKevbo (talk) 04:34, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

Assistance requested at Whitworth University

Can someone else please weigh in to the recent edits to Whitworth University? I have some concerns about the content but the editor who has added them is engaging in an edit war to retain the material in the article. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 03:03, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Issues with NPOV?

I'm working on Teachers College of Indianapolis which in 1930 merged into Butler University as part of their College of Education. Are either of the following problematic for NNPOV?

  • A 150th anniversary book about Butler University written in 2006 by a retired History Professor of Butler University
  • A Thesis/Dissertation for a Masters degree from Butler University in 1946 about Teachers College of Indianapolis.Naraht (talk) 13:08, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
Naraht, the 150th anniversary book is published by a university press so it should be reliable, a Dissertation for a Masters, rather than Doctorate, degree is probably not reliable per WP:SCHOLARSHIP. As for NPOV, you can probably judge for yourself. There may be further potential sources used in Eliza Cooper Blaker. TSventon (talk) 13:30, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
TSventon Yeah, I'm definitely leaning toward the 150th as the better, but the Master's Dissertation appears to have a lot of useful information as well, that I can at least try to crosscheck. Note the Eliza Cooper Blaker article also has a Master's thesis in the additional references section. :) Naraht (talk) 14:04, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
I'd say that, in both cases, some judgement is required. For the book, search JSTOR for some reviews to see if reviewers note any missing elements (such reviews can also be a good place to find reliable statements about the school's academic reputation). For the dissertation, it depends on what information you're trying to source. They're definitely not the strongest type of source, so if the information is available elsewhere or is at all controversial, I would try to find it elsewhere. But if it's only available from the dissertation and relevant to the article, it may be okay. When I was writing an FA on a college, I wanted to include something on the religious demographics of the student body, but the college did not collect or publish that information in any official capacity, so I ended up using a thesis for it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 14:33, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
Sdkb For the book, the review in the Indiana Magazine of History seems to feel that it occasionally too comprehensive and could use some trimming. Not the worst review for a book to be referenced on Wikipedia. https://www-jstor-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/27792845?searchText=%22butler+university+a+sesquicentennial%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%2522butler%2Buniversity%2Ba%2Bsesquicentennial%2522%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A4b0ea5e3b06342c1c514d75edc39a43e#metadata_info_tab_contents
For the masters degree Thesis, it is the only place that I've found information on degrees offered and accreditations at various times by TCI. I've looked at the references for Eliza Cooper Blaker. Almost inevitable that there would be crossover in sources, it was basically her entire life for her last 30 years.Naraht (talk) 18:07, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
That sounds reasonable. It might get challenged if you took the article all the way to FAC, in which case you could defend it as I did at Pomona's FAC, but for general editing, some reference is far better than no reference. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:13, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
I'd be fascinated to know if any closed college had made it to FAC. If someone wants to take a crack at extending it to FAC after I get the basics, they can have fun. :)Naraht (talk) 18:56, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
Does Law school of Berytus (closed in 551CE) count lol? If not, you're stuck with some old GAs, e.g. Briarcliff College, Mackinac College, Georgia Baptist College. Given how awful the FAs from that period were before we delisted them, I hesitate to even look haha. The pickings are very slim, which (at the risk of touting my own work) is why I was so glad for this project to finally have a new institution FA with the pass last December. Writing about a defunct institution could make it trickier to find some sources, but at least you have the benefit of historical hindsight and don't have to worry about updating. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:01, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
Skdb Yes it does! Yeah, updating would be a lot easier for a school that closed in 1930. I'll try to push on with the article over the weekend.Naraht (talk) 23:46, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek — given that the Berytus article is mostly historical, and that it also may not be totally up to par as it hasn't been reviewed since 2013, I'm not sure how useful it'll be. But glad to hear you're pushing forward! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:52, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
"House histories," histories of institutions that are typically commissioned by them and often written by a current or former member of the institution, are often not very good sources in my experience and in my professional opinion. They typically don't have information that is outright wrong but because of the inherent conflicts of interest involved in their writing they are often overly positive and shy away from critical analysis of the institution. In my experience, they are often very detailed accounts of limited parts of the institution (presidents, particularly prominent faculty, buildings, etc.) without the kind of synthesis and analysis that is the mark of high quality history. So in general they tend to be of very limited use for writing an encyclopedia article.
I would be very wary of citing a master's thesis especially one that is that old. A master's thesis does not receive as much review as a doctoral dissertation and other kinds of peer-reviewed, published scholarship. If the only source you can cite for something is this obscure then perhaps the information doesn't merit inclusion in an encyclopedia article. ElKevbo (talk) 03:12, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Input requested at Template talk:Infobox university about the use of sources for the endowment parameter

Multiple editors are disagreeing about - and beginning to edit war over - what sources can and cannot be used to support the endowment parameter of the university infobox. This is occurring across multiple articles and involves multiple editors so your input is requested to resolve this disagreement. I've opened a discussion in the template's Talk page. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 00:50, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Brooks College scam website

The Brooks College Wiki page has been modified to assist with a scam. A Chinese company is pretending they have a college in California. The fake website is brookscollege.org [14]. The Wikiedpia page modified by a user with a specific purpose. See Special:Contributions/University12. Travelmite (talk) 09:01, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

University Name Change - Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University - Discussion at WP:Canada

As a note, WP:Canada is discussing the name change of Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University. In particular changes to the names of categories and links. As the Wikiproject for higher education, I am not sure if there are any standards for name changes or suggestions that could be made to help the discussion. Caddyshack01 (talk) 16:46, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Florida International University

Florida International University has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 21:40, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Proposal reviews for Jim Johnsen article

I proposed a few updates on the talk page for Jim Johnsen Talk:Jim_Johnsen#Proposals For James Johnsen Article, the former president of University of Alaska, addressing balance and neutral point of view issues, as well as poorly sourced edits made by a singular editor. Is an editor from this group able to take a look at the proposals? I have a personal connection to Dr. Johnsen and I don’t want to violate Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies. Thank you.92ranger (talk) 19:07, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Dispute over addition of and content in "Controversy" section of Carnegie Mellon University

Two editors disagree about the addition of and content in "Controversy" section of Carnegie Mellon University. Input from others is welcome; there is a section in the article's Talk page devoted to this discussion. ElKevbo (talk) 15:08, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Disagreement over the lead sentence of Oregon State University

Two editors disagree about the contents of the lead sentence of Oregon State University. Input from others is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 02:48, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Honoris_United_Universities

I am engaged as WiR with the subject organisation and am obviously conflicted. I would like any motivated person from on here to assist and take a look at the draft and provide a review.

Note: An earlier version of the article was deleted by User:Jimfbleak here. While i have no connection with the authors, I think it might aid your review. Thanks. OtuNwachinemere (talk) 11:31, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Order for university list

I am in the process of copy editing Fight Songs for the September copy editors drive. Now that all the song titles are property formatted, I have a general question about the order of the universities. Someone put a lot of work into alphabetizing this list by common name or sports name, rather than formal or full institutional name. Meaning, University of Alabama would get slotted under A for Alabama, but University of Alabama Birmingham get filed under U for University. Since this is a list, and not a sortable table, I don't really think it is user friendly. It means that the reader must know the nickname of a school--which can be tricky. For example, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is called UNC and Carolina locally and by its alumni. But it is called North Carolina in athletics to distinguish it from the University of South Carolina which is also referred to as Carolina. In addition, it is hard to scan the list for a given school because the first word in the title is rarely the way it is alphabetized. I know there are different guidelines for articles relating to athletics. Just curious if I am an outlier or if others find this list challenging. Eventually a table would be a good solution as colleges could be sorted by full name, nickname, state, or even fight song name. Rublamb (talk) 22:44, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

It's relatively normal for university lists to ignore 'university of' and trailing 'university' and alphabetise by the substantive part, so you don't end up with a huge number of institutions under U with some (e.g. Cornell University) coming before this block and others (e.g. Yale University) coming after it. By this method, University of Alabama Birmingham would be alphabetised as Alabama Birmingham, next to University of Alabama. It's pretty much the same principle as ignoring 'the' in names (although I have seen lists – not on Wikipedia – that have some universities as 'X university', some as 'university of X' and others as 'the university of X', and this is fairly annoying!) Robminchin (talk) 00:38, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

There is a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Linking#Implementation_in_infoboxes that concerns how place names should be linked in infoboxes. {{infobox university}} is one where common usage contravenes MOS:GEOLINK. MB 00:23, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Requested move of "Alumnus" to "Alumni"

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Alumnus § Requested move 27 September 2022. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:50, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Hartpury College

Editors with declared conflicts of interest for the article Hartpury College have asked over a couple of years for the article to be moved to Hartpury University and Hartpury College (currently a redirect). There is a primary source for this at the Office for Students, but secondary sources do not consistently use the title university. This has been discussed on the Talk page and there is no clear consensus. My own view is that this is a reasonable move to make, but I can see why other editors are wary of it given the several CoI editors who have been involved. Raising this here to see if it can be resolved. Tacyarg (talk) 00:31, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Where do Controversies belong?

I've just looked at a few university articles where there are Controversies. Often they are not notable, and should be deleted, as with the minor event involving students of Hartpury College. Sometimes they should stay in, but in which section? For example, I don't think the discussion of antisemitism sits well in the History section of SOAS (and if it stays it should also be balanced with the university's statements). Also in regard to the Carnegie Mellon University issue, if it is to stay. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:27, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

My feeling is that historically important controversies belong in the history section, while controversies that aren't historically important probably don't belong at all. There may be occasional exceptions for events that are active and are actually important enough to justify mention, rather than just being recentism, but these are few and far between, and will probably concern something that already has a relevant section (e.g. 'Rankings and reputation' if an institution was found to have been falsifying information to get improve its position in league tables). It's very, very rare that a separate section is justified. Robminchin (talk) 02:04, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I agree with that logic. I suppose other sections in which there might be a relevant controversy are Campus and Student life, and those sections could be a home for the information. Thank you. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:50, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
I completely agree that most noteworthy controversies belong in the history section where they can properly be placed into a larger historical context (what led to the controversy, what lasting impact did it have, etc.). ElKevbo (talk) 12:10, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
Agreed as well. Such sections may be tagged with {{Criticism section}} to engage organizational reworking. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:12, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Student accommodation

I am planning to go through UK university articles, checking that their structure follows the project guidelines. One thing I will be doing, unless there are any objections, is to move details of student halls of residence into the Campus section. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:34, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

The only place where residences are mentioned in the current guidelines is that 'residence life' falls under the 'student life' section, so many articles have student housing under student life. The campus section is supposed to give the overall size and layout of the campus and to include important and historic buildings, but does not appear to be the place for details about student halls of residence. This would be the section to give information about where on campus the student residences are and what developments are planned, but details of halls of residence are relatively unimportant to most readers and so are probably better left until further down the article in the student life section where they are currently target than overloading an early section with information. Robminchin (talk) 02:44, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
The current guidelines are very US-centric and may not account for organizations, features, buildings, and other phenomenon that are important outside the US. So take a hard look at the guidelines to see if perhaps they should be changed. (But I also recognize that many articles about US colleges and universities have way much detail about their residence halls.) ElKevbo (talk) 03:41, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Taking my FA of Pomona College as an example, in the campus section the residence halls are covered as buildings, but most of them don't get individual mention — e.g. A row of four residence halls is south of Bonita Avenue, with Frank Dining Hall at the eastern end. In the student life section, the first subsection is on residential life, and the first paragraph of that discusses how the college's housing system works — e.g. nearly all students live on campus for all four years in one of the college's sixteen residence halls. All first-year students live on South Campus, and most third- and fourth-year students live on North Campus. Housing is offered in various configurations, including singles, one-room or two-room doubles. So there can be some mention in each section, but with a different focus, and never going into excessive detail. The level of detail warranted would depend on the size of the institution and whether it has many small residence halls or a few larger ones. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:24, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
From a UK point of view, it is quite an important feature of the university campus whether it includes halls of residence or not. It is what gives a complete different character to a university like University of Bristol, which is buildings concentrated in a particular area of the city amid streets, museums and shops, on the one hand, and University of the West of England, which is outside the same city on one self-contained campus, on the other. I can see the argument for including the residences in Student life though. I will hold back a bit on that, and concentrate on removing excessive detail. I've seen marketing departments paste in dross about the bus routes, for example. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:22, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
So after sounding off about University of Bristol I have bothered to look at that article, which is GA, and which we list as a model. The halls of residence are in Student life, and I am half-convinced, as the information in there mixes facts about the buildings and facts about student use of the buildings. The spin-off article just about the halls I would think needs to be merged back in. But it has a Controversy section, which could go into the History section, and will probably need to be shortened, although the student suicide issue was quite prominent in the UK media at the time. (Or maybe it needs to be in Student life?). Itsmejudith (talk)

Miami Herbert Notable alumni & faculty updates

Hello! I'm a University of Miami employee trying to improve the business school's page. I've proposed updates to the Notable alumni and Notable faculty sections. We've hired some professors over the past couple of years whom Wikipedia considers notable, and a handful of others have moved on. I also suggested adding a few alumni who have their own Wiki pages. Here's a link to my edit request. Any help or feedback would be deeply appreciated. Thanks! MT for University of Miami (talk) 18:45, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Help bringing List of medical schools in the United States to FL status

I'd like to improve List of medical schools in the United States to make it a featured list. I currently have a version of it in my userspace that I'd like to use. Any feedback would be much appreciated!  Bait30  Talk 2 me pls? 06:24, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Inclusion of university transportation

I am writting an article about shuttle buses, the article does present some coverage of university shuttle buses I found this wikiproject when I was looking for some wikiprojects that the article could potentially relate to. I am not 100% sure though whether the tag would be appropriate so I want to consult with the members of the wiki project before doing so NotOrrio (talk) 09:34, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

the article is in it's draft stage and can be viewed at Draft:Shuttle bus NotOrrio (talk) 09:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Hi @NotOrrio! It's surprising we don't already have an article on shuttle buses. University shuttles should definitely be included in the article, but I'm not sure they're quite central enough to the topic for it to make sense to add the {{WikiProject Higher education}} tag to the talk page. Overall, you want to think about it (and find sourcing for it) at the broadest level — what kinds of institutions tend to have shuttles? What countries? Do they tend to contract them out or run them in-house? Etc. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:13, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

College of Remote and Offshore Medicine

This article was highlighted as requiring additional work and moved to draft space, would anyone be able to cast an eye over Draft:College of Remote and Offshore Medicine and see what they think needs modifying before its good to go as a main page, I think it has good citation coverage. TMallinson (talk) 14:23, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

This article was submitted and rejected. Could anyone from this wiki project assist improving the draft? Tannim101 (talk) 10:37, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Category question.

Should Category:University of Somewhere Presidents be a subcat of Category:University of Somewhere Faculty?? Naraht (talk) Naraht (talk) 15:04, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

I would say no. Presidents are not always academics (see, e.g., Universities hire politician presidents, Politico) and are not what most people would call faculty. Merriam-Webster has the definition of faculty include "those members of the administration having academic rank in an educational institution" – unless the president is also a professor, they are not part of the faculty by this definition. If the president is a professor, they should be placed in both categories.[15]
Looking at the WP:CATEGORY guideline, a relevant quote is "The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to Wikipedia pages in a hierarchy of categories which readers, knowing essential—defining—characteristics of a topic, can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics." I think, following Merriam-Webster as a guide to common US English usage, most people would not consider the president to be faculty (unless also a professor) and so would not expect to find presidents, as a group, in a sub-category of faculty. Robminchin (talk) 15:59, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
Agreed with Robminchin. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 17:22, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you. Naraht (talk) 20:07, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Third opinion requested at Talk:Lees–McRae College‎

Can someone please take a look at Talk:Lees–McRae College‎? I worry that our unregistered colleague has misunderstood the purpose of the article's Talk page and is posting a lot of information that is, at best, more appropriate for a sandbox or some other scratch document. They have reverted my attempt to collapse the section with that material and I'm engaging in a discussion in their User Talk page but I'd appreciate some additional opinions and advice for our eager colleague. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 22:46, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

University of Houston has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:28, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

GAR notice

University of Oxford has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:13, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Restoring older Featured articles to standard:
year-end 2022 summary

Unreviewed featured articles/2020 (URFA/2020) is a systematic approach to reviewing older Featured articles (FAs) to ensure they still meet the FA standards. A January 2022 Signpost article called "Forgotten Featured" explored the effort.

Progress is recorded at the monthly stats page. Through 2022, with 4,526 very old (from the 2004–2009 period) and old (2010–2015) FAs initially needing review:

  • 357 FAs were delisted at Featured article review (FAR).
  • 222 FAs were kept at FAR or deemed "satisfactory" by three URFA reviewers, with hundreds more being marked as "satisfactory", but awaiting three reviews.
  • FAs needing review were reduced from 77% of total FAs at the end of 2020 to 64% at the end of 2022.

Of the FAs kept, deemed satisfactory by three reviewers, or delisted, about 60% had prior review between 2004 and 2007; another 20% dated to the period from 2008–2009; and another 20% to 2010–2015. Roughly two-thirds of the old FAs reviewed have retained FA status or been marked "satisfactory", while two-thirds of the very old FAs have been defeatured.

Entering its third year, URFA is working to help maintain FA standards; FAs are being restored not only via FAR, but also via improvements initiated after articles are reviewed and talk pages are noticed. Since the Featured Article Save Award (FASA) was added to the FAR process a year ago, 38 FAs were restored to FA status by editors other than the original FAC nominator. Ten FAs restored to status have been listed at WP:MILLION, recognizing articles with annual readership over a million pageviews, and many have been rerun as Today's featured article, helping increase mainpage diversity.

Examples of 2022 "FAR saves" of very old featured articles
All received a Million Award

But there remain almost 4,000 old and very old FAs to be reviewed. Some topic areas and WikiProjects have been more proactive than others in restoring or maintaining their old FAs. As seen in the chart below, the following have very high ratios of FAs kept to those delisted (ordered from highest ratio):

  • Biology
  • Physics and astronomy
  • Warfare
  • Video gaming

and others have a good ratio of kept to delisted FAs:

  • Literature and theatre
  • Engineering and technology
  • Religion, mysticism and mythology
  • Media
  • Geology and geophysics

... so kudos to those editors who pitched in to help maintain older FAs !

FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 through 2022 by content area
FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 from November 21, 2020 to December 31, 2022 (VO, O)
Topic area Delisted Kept Total
Reviewed 		Ratio
Kept to
Delisted
(overall 0.62) 		Remaining to review
for
2004–7 promotions
Art, architecture and archaeology 10 6 16 0.60 19
Biology 13 41 54 3.15 67
Business, economics and finance 6 1 7 0.17 2
Chemistry and mineralogy 2 1 3 0.50 7
Computing 4 1 5 0.25 0
Culture and society 9 1 10 0.11 8
Education 22 1 23 0.05 3
Engineering and technology 3 3 6 1.00 5
Food and drink 2 0 2 0.00 3
Geography and places 40 6 46 0.15 22
Geology and geophysics 3 2 5 0.67 1
Health and medicine 8 3 11 0.38 5
Heraldry, honors, and vexillology 11 1 12 0.09 6
History 27 14 41 0.52 38
Language and linguistics 3 0 3 0.00 3
Law 11 1 12 0.09 3
Literature and theatre 13 14 27 1.08 24
Mathematics 1 2 3 2.00 3
Media 14 10 24 0.71 40
Meteorology 15 6 21 0.40 31
Music 27 8 35 0.30 55
Philosophy and psychology 0 1 1 – 2
Physics and astronomy 3 7 10 2.33 24
Politics and government 19 4 23 0.21 9
Religion, mysticism and mythology 14 14 28 1.00 8
Royalty and nobility 10 6 16 0.60 44
Sport and recreation 32 12 44 0.38 39
Transport 8 2 10 0.25 11
Video gaming 3 5 8 1.67 23
Warfare 26 49 75 1.88 31
Total 359 Note A 222 Note B 581 0.62 536

Noting some minor differences in tallies:

  • A URFA/2020 archives show 357, which does not include those delisted which were featured after 2015; FAR archives show 358, so tally is off by at least one, not worth looking for.
  • B FAR archives show 63 kept at FAR since URFA started at end of Nov 2020. URFA/2020 shows 61 Kept at FAR, meaning two kept were outside of scope of URFA/2020. Total URFA/2020 Keeps (Kept at FAR plus those with three Satisfactory marks) is 150 + 72 = 222.

But looking only at the oldest FAs (from the 2004–2007 period), there are 12 content areas with more than 20 FAs still needing review: Biology, Music, Royalty and nobility, Media, Sport and recreation, History, Warfare, Meteorology, Physics and astronomy, Literature and theatre, Video gaming, and Geography and places. In the coming weeks, URFA/2020 editors will be posting lists to individual WikiProjects with the goal of getting these oldest-of-the-old FAs reviewed during 2023.

Ideas for how you can help are listed below and at the Signpost article.

  • Review a 2004 to 2007 FA. With three "Satisfactory" marks, article can be moved to the FAR not needed section.
  • Review "your" articles: Did you nominate a featured article between 2004 and 2015 that you have continuously maintained? Check these articles, update as needed, and mark them as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020. A continuously maintained FA is a good predictor that standards are still met, and with two more "Satisfactory" marks, "your" articles can be listed as "FAR not needed". If they no longer meet the FA standards, please begin the FAR process by posting your concerns on the article's talk page.
  • Review articles that already have one "Satisfactory" mark: more FAs can be indicated as "FAR not needed" if other reviewers will have a look at those already indicated as maintained by the original nominator. If you find issues, you can enter them at the talk page.
  • Fix an existing featured article: Choose an article at URFA/2020 or FAR and bring it back to FA standards. Enlist the help of the original nominator, frequent FA reviewers, WikiProjects listed on the talk page, or editors that have written similar topics. When the article returns to FA standards, please mark it as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020 or note your progress in the article's FAR.
  • Review and nominate an article to FAR that has been 'noticed' of a FAR needed but issues raised on talk have not been addressed. Sometimes nominating at FAR draws additional editors to help improve the article that would otherwise not look at it.

More regular URFA and FAR reviewers will help assure that FAs continue to represent examples of Wikipedia's best work. If you have any questions or feedback, please visit Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/2020/4Q2022.

FAs last reviewed from 2004 to 2007 of interest to this WikiProject

If you review an article on this list, please add commentary at the article talk page, with a section heading == [[URFA/2020]] review== and also add either Notes or Noticed to WP:URFA/2020A, per the instructions at WP:URFA/2020. If comments are not entered on the article talk page, they may be swept up in archives here and lost. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

  1. History of Texas A&M University
  2. Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  3. Vkhutemas

Additional input requested: Is John Brown University a "liberal arts college?"

Two editors are disagreeing about whether John Brown University should be described as a "liberal arts college." There is a discussion in the article's Talk page and input from other editors would be helpful. ElKevbo (talk) 05:59, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Input requested at Wikipedia talk:College and university article advice about draft proposal to clarify appropriate statements about prestige and rankings in the lede

At Wikipedia talk:College and university article advice, I have written a draft proposal to clarify appropriate statements about prestige and rankings in the lede. I would appreciate your input, suggestions, and reactions! ElKevbo (talk) 02:32, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Dispute about the lede sentence of Harvard Extension School‎

There is a dispute between two editors about the contents of the very first sentence of Harvard Extension School‎. A discussion has been opened in the article's Talk page; additional input is welcome. ElKevbo (talk) 03:48, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:Infobox university § Add Visitor as a field

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Infobox university § Add Visitor as a field. Robminchin (talk) 02:22, 5 February 2023 (UTC) Robminchin (talk) 02:22, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments. This proposes support for quality assessment at the article level, recorded in {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and inherited by the wikiproject banners. However, wikiprojects that prefer to use custom approaches to quality assessment can continue to do so. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:53, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

rankings/prestige statements in lead paragraph

Here's a very recent edit to Dartmouth College: [16]. The IP-editor's edit summary appears to be right: loads of articles on the Ivy-League/etc. include statements along these lines (it is "among the most selective and highly ranked universities in the United States", or the world, even). But: should our articles include these statements? For Yale, the only source is to the Times Higher rankings -- so, a primary source. Even with secondary sources, I'd prefer not to include these statements. It amounts to helping these institutions with their marketing. For the Dartmouth addition today, it is being done by someone at Dartmouth... Nomoskedasticity (talk) 18:46, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Nomoskedasticity, there is a 2020 WP:RFC at WP:HIGHERED REP, preceded by a lengthy discussion. The RfC was closed with a consensus against banning statements about prestige. TSventon (talk) 19:17, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
While there's no ban, such sources should – per normal Wikipedia policy – actually state what they are claimed to state. The THE ranking does not, for instance, support a claim of anything other than the current position of that institution in the THE ranking and does not support any claim to be "among the most selective and highly ranked universities in the United States". This needs a source that explicitly reaches and states that conclusion.
In this specific case, where such a statement is being added by someone at the institution in question, it's also likely to be a conflict of interest edit. Robminchin (talk) 19:32, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Further, "among the most selective and highly ranked" is also a classic example of MOS:WEASEL. To quote the MOS, "views that are properly attributed to a reliable source may use similar expressions, if those expressions accurately represent the opinions of the source. Reliable sources may analyze and interpret, but for editors to do so would violate the Wikipedia:No original research or Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policies." So if an editor is interpreting "being in the top 50 most selective" as "among the most selective", this is almost certainly WP:OR. Robminchin (talk) 19:42, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I had a look through the various Ivy League (and similar level) university articles. Only Harvard has a claim properly backed up with sources. The others should either have their sources improved or the claims removed. Robminchin (talk) 00:04, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm inclined to omit "ranking" or similar puffery in the lede. It can go in the rankings subheading per the MOS. Banks Irk (talk)`

Articles certainly terms to be better without it. But I think the important principle is that any such statements need to be properly sourced and not be synthesis, noting (per WP:SUBJECTIVE) that "it is sometimes permissible to note an article subject's reputation when that reputation is widespread and informative to readers". Taken together, these set a pretty high bar to inclusion, which (of the articles I've looked at) only Harvard potentially meets. Robminchin (talk) 02:46, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I've been adding to articles on colleges and universities information on the most popular undergraduate majors, as reported by NCES [nces.ed.gov] for each school's most recent graduating class. A couple of times, these edits have been reverted or modified by other editors. I don't propose to go to the mattresses over that, but I wanted to solicit input for this project on whether there is any consensus that my addition of this information is a problem or not. Thanks. Banks Irk (talk) 23:53, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for opening this discussion, @Banks Irk! I was one of the reverts, at Pomona College (FA). When I was building out the academics section of that article, I considered having a list of the most popular majors, which (as you laid out for the class of 2021) would have been Econometrics & Quantitative Economics (43), Computer Science (33), Political Science & Government (21), Mathematics (19), Research & Experimental Psychology (19), Neuroscience (17), Chemistry (17).
But looking at that list, I'm not sure it's actually as helpful as it seems. The core question that a reader looking at this sort of information is probably asking is, what is the academic focus of this institution? E.g. is it mostly a STEM school, or is it very artsy, or something else? That list doesn't really help answer that very well, since what it shows is just big departments. E.g. computer science is such a hot field right now, it's going to be a big department at any traditional college/university, and ditto for economics, which is a perennially popular since everyone wants to be rich really likes economics. So these are going to be similar across many schools, and to the extent they do change, it's often going to be reflective of things like whether or not molecular biology is separate from general biology and other quirks.
So the approach I went with instead is to use broader categories: For the 2021 graduation cohort, 21 percent of students majored in the arts and humanities, 40 percent in the natural sciences, 25 percent in the social sciences, and 15 percent in interdisciplinary fields. I think this gives a better overall picture. My one qualm is that, as you pointed out, these categories appear to have been institution-defined, so I'm not sure how easily comparable they'd be to others. If NCES or another government body has any very broad groupings like this, I think giving the numbers for those would be a good solution.
I'm curious to hear what you all think. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:34, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I've been adding this information mostly for liberal arts colleges so far, and there certainly are some common patterns. I tend to see a lot of schools with top majors (bio and psych) which I assume are pre-med, pre-dent and then various prelaw, and heavy business and econ. But others have different focus, some of which are quite unique and distinctive. So, I think it's useful and distinguishing information, and using the NCES data provides consistency across institutions. Banks Irk (talk) 04:26, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

How do we sync rankings data with the reference year?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Infobox US university ranking § Outdated. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Assistance requested at University of Delaware

Can someone please revert (some of) ElEditas's edit to the University of Delaware? They have clearly removed this edit in the hopes of goading me into editing my employer's article - the institution's Carnegie Classification clearly is not "ephemeral" as their edit summary claims. Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 08:28, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

I just undid the edit including NSF Funding, ranking etc. Please direct your objection to University of Delaware's Talk page instead of harassing me on unrelated page. For Carnegie Classification, see the constant changes referred in this article. ElEditas (talk) 08:48, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
Updates every three years is hardly "constant changes" and regardless, while they make updates every three years, most university's Carnegie classifications rarely change, it's just that there are a lot of American universities, so a small percentage of changes is still a decent number of changes. Jahaza (talk) 18:20, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
This paragraph deleted on University of Delaware page had NSF Funding, specific year of ranking (ranked#119) and Carnegie classifications, which itself is based on HERD. I raised objection to it, based on the same rationale from ElKevbo, but he claimed that he's powerless to delete that, since he never edits his own employer's page.
If you feel NSF Funding, specific year of ranking (ranked#119) and Carnegie classifications are relevant, that's totally a legitimate view too. People in the academia tend to be wary about Carnegie Classifications, as it does a terrible job of defining research, varies year by year, are based on a system that can be easily gamed. You can read up more about these stories surrounding the recent Texas public universities' push for R1 classifications. But again, you have a good point and I have restored the edit. ElEditas (talk) 01:19, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Category renaming

Category:Shippensburg Red Raiders has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. —ADavidB 13:01, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

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