Talk:GEMS Education

Deletion of list

I have removed the notability tag. This is an important chain of schools. The article was previously nominated for deletion and the overwhelming consensus was that it should be kept. I have restored the list of schools. This is an important chain of schools. Most of these schools will require a standalone article, and the list serves as a useful navigational aid and a guide to editors who wish to develop these articles. Also there are redirects which are targetted at this page, and if there is a redirect then the target of the redirect should be mentioned on the main article page to avoid confusing the reader. Dahliarose (talk) 10:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

According to the article, this company runs over 100 different schools. Given that Wikipedia is not a directory, this list shouldn't contain all of them. WP:Source list says that lists "are encyclopedic content as are paragraphs and articles, and they are equally subject to Wikipedia's content policies such as Verifiability, No original research, Neutral point of view, and others."

My preferred criteria for inclusion on the list is that the school has an article. What are your criteria? It's not clear based on your edits. For instance:

• You turned:
  • GEMS Wellington International School

    into:

  • GEMS Wellington International School, Al Sufouh, Dubai
  • GEMS Wellington International School, Melbourne, Australia

—even though these are one and the same school (the one in Dubai)

• You kept—but unlinked—Cambridge International School, Jumeirah College, and GEMS World Academy

I was going to add Abbotsford Preparatory School and Our Own High School today, but I can't tell if they'd meet your criteria for inclusion, or inclusion but no link, or ?

And in general:

• I had alphabetized the list by school name, and you reverted to the previous unsorted list. Why? (at first I thought it was sorted by location, but then Melbourne wouldn't be in the middle of Dubai)
• Per WP:OVERLINK, "a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, links may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead." That is, Dubai should not be linked 15 times in one list.
• By past consensus, some schools simply aren't sufficiently notable to have their own article. Two examples: GEMS Jumeirah Primary School and GEMS Wellington Primary School. How do these differ from, say GEMS World Academy – Tianjin Eco City?
• Your comment on this edit of GEMS American Academy, Abu Dhabi said, "this is a verifiable secondary." Instead of just making a statement, can you instead please include your sources? My source for calling it a primary school is GEMS themselves—if you go to their Student registration form and choose "GEMS AMERICAN ACADEMY - ABUDHABI", it says they're currently accepting students for grades K-8.
• You wrote "if there is a redirect then the target of the redirect should be mentioned on the main article page to avoid confusing the reader"—can you tell me where you saw that? It's not from WP:Redirect, and Google couldn't find it. It's a very common outcome (see WP:WPSCH/AG#N) for articles on primary schools to be redirected to their village or town, and I've never seen a rule that such an article must contain a list of all local primary schools.

I'd be happy to work with you on improving the GEMS schools articles, but let's stick with past consensus and guidelines, ok? Dori ☾Talk ⁘ Contribs☽ 03:09, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for the muddle. I hadn't finished looking at this article, and I was editing in a hurry. I hope I've now corrected everything. I couldn't make any sense of the order before but I've sorted it into alphabetical order for now to try and work out what's what. I've split the schools into two sections. This is the section of the Redirect page which provides the relevant guidance Wikipedia:Redirect#What needs to be done on pages that are targets of redirects?. Normally a school is redirected to the locality article, and the normal practice is to mention the school in the article for the relevant town, village, etc. Two of the schools where I reverted the redirect state on the Wikipedia page that they teach the IB. The Abu Dhabi one for instance goes through to age 18 [1]. The Chinese one says on the Wikipedia it teaches the IB but on the website I can only find a statement that it teaches up to age 13 http://www.gemsworldacademy-tec.com/contents.php?pageid=3127&parentid=100. It could be that these schools are so new that the first cohorts haven't yet worked through the system. While most primary schools don't merit a standalone article it is not true to say that all primary schools are inherently non-notable. Consensus at AfD has shown that some primary schools and prep schools are kept. This is of course only when significant sources can be found. This usually applies to the older schools and the private prep schools that tend to have lots of notable alumni. As regards the list, we do have quite a few lists of schools which effectively serve as navigation aids (eg, English schools by county, English prep schools, etc). For western schools it would be appropriate to insist that each school has an article, but there are not yet so many articles for schools in the Middle East. WP:Systemic bias is still a big problem and I think some leniency is required in situations like this. All the GEMS secondary schools will in the long run merit an article so it makes sense to list them all here. It's difficult to know whether or not they should be listed in alphabetical order or by country. Obviously references are needed, and I'll see what I can find when I have more time. Dahliarose (talk) 22:09, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Country sections

The country sections are problematic for several reasons: (1) GEMS has 70 schools in over a dozen countries, so selecting only three countries is WP:CHERRYPICKING and violates WP:NPOV. (2) The sections are far too detailed; Wikipedia is not a newspaper. (3) The sections rely on a lot of WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH and WP:SYNTH, and a fair amount of WP:PRIMARY sources, which is not allowed. Please read WP:No original research. (4) The items presented are haphazard and incomplete in nature -- largely due to the fact that a 65-year-old company that is and has been involved in 100s of schools in dozens of countries cannot be summarized adequately by listing the events of a handful of schools. Therefore, as with any huge multi-faceted global company with over half a century of operations, what Wikipedia must do is simply summarize the overall history (preferably as reported in the major international press) in broad strokes, and state the current reality. To attempt otherwise is beyond the scope, practice, and policies of Wikipedia. Softlavender (talk) 06:57, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Taking your points one by one:

1. Re WP:CHERRYPICKING : GEMS may be a global company but it is certainly not homogeneous. It operates differently in different countries, and so has country-specific histories, some of which are longer than others. It is reasonable that people should want to learn about the history that is specific to their own country, as well as the global perspective. In many cases the GEMS parent company has set up subsidiary companies in those countries which have their own notoriety and so would potentially warrant their own page (e.g. GEMS Learning Trust in the UK which is setting up state funded schools). It would seem reasonable to have those histories collected together in one place, so that they contribute to the overall picture. Yes there are only 3 countries represented at the moment, but they are clearly annexed into their own sections, with scope for more sections to be added by others.
2. Re Wikipedia is not a newspaper : You have included this sort of detail in your own (commissioned? WP:NPOV) version. For example "In 2012 GEMS students in the UAE outperformed their counterparts in the UK on IGCSE/GCSE and A-Level examinations.[29] And in 2014, GEMS students in the UAE outperformed their peers in the UK on A-Level examinations". That would seem to be very specific, so perhaps you should remove it?
3. Re WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH and WP:SYNTH : Please can you give specific examples. From my perspective, historical events are documented, but no conclusion is drawn from them. Please can you demonstrate where conclusions are drawn.
4. As per point 1.

Wiltingdaffodils 07:29, 28 June 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiltingdaffodils (talk • contribs)

GEMS never acquired 3E's

I did a lot of Googling on this to figure out the facts, and:

• In early October 2005, 3E's founder and CEO Valerie Bragg told TES that 3E's "had rejected Gems' advances, even though the Dubai-based firm had already placed the 3E's logo on its website.": [2]
• The holding company GEMS-3E had dissolved by 3 August 2005: [3]
• Instead, 3E's was acquired by Faber Maunsell in 2006: [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]

-- Softlavender (talk) 03:40, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

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List of GEMS schools

Should a separate article be created listing all current GEMS schools? Homeostasis39 (talk) 21:47, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

No. Wikipedia is not a directory. - MrOllie (talk) 22:20, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I propose merging Varkey Foundation and Global Teacher Prize into GEMS Education. The content in the first two articles can easily be explained in the context of the third. a merge would not cause any article-size or weighting problems in GEMS Education. Varkey Foundation is the nonprofit arm of GEMS Education. The Global Teacher Prize is given out by the Varkey Foundation. Thenightaway (talk) 18:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. They are all separate entities and all independently notable. The GEMS Education article is already bloated enough and doesn't need an additional 40,000 bytes of tangentially related material in it. The Varkey Foundation is run by Varkey, not by GEMS. Softlavender (talk) 04:25, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• The articles themselves describe the Varkey Foundation as the nonprofit arm of GEMS Education. The articles are bloated because they're filled to the brim with COI-authored puffery, which you have just indiscriminately restored to those articles. Thenightaway (talk) 11:09, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• You're right. I just looked at the articles on Varkey and the Foundation. I have restored your deletions on the Foundation article. I think the Varkey article needs a more targeted cleanup: There's no reason for it to duplicate the entire history and structure and divisions of GEMS, so most all of that can go. The section on the foundation can be greatly trimmed as duplicative. The Varkey Group is not found elsewhere on Wikipedia so most of that can stay. The honors are all cited so they can stay. Softlavender (talk) 02:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)