VDL8

Hello, VDL8! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! LonelyBeacon (talk) 19:28, 23 August 2009 (UTC) Getting started A tutorial • Our five pillars • Getting mentored How to: edit a page • upload and use images Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Getting help Frequently asked questions • Tips Where to ask questions or make comments Request administrator attention Policies and guidelines Neutral point of view • No original research Verifiability • Reliable sources • Citing sources What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons List of policies • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Policy for non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism • List of guidelines Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The community Build consensus • Resolve disputes Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • No legal threats Community portal • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Writing articles Be bold in editing • Develop an article The perfect article • Manual of style Stubs • Categories • Disambiguation Pages needing attention • Peer review Miscellaneous User name • User pages • Talk pages Clean up: General • Spam • Vandalism Join a WikiProject • Translation Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

re: edits to Johnsburg High School

Greetings VDL8!

First, welcome to Wikipedia, and I hope you will enjoy editing! The large welcome template above has links to Wikipedia policies and other helpful hints on editing and where to get help if you need it.

Second, I reverted an edit that you made to this article, and wanted to explain why.

Articles about schools are overseen by the WikiProject Schools group, which is a group of editors interested in schools articles. Within the greater policy of Wikipedia, they obtain a consensus on what should bad should not go into these articles, in order to serve as a more specific guide to editors to avoid doing painstaking editing, only to see it deleted later. These guidelines can be found here. There are two points in particular:

• Lists of current teachers, pupils, administrative staff, school secretaries, etc.
• Trivia which is only of interest to pupils in the school.

While certain members of the school community undoubtedly are interested in the past band directors, the information is not considered encyclopedic for this website. In general, students and staff members should only be named if they have an article already on Wikipedia, or if they are eligible for an article (see: [WP:BIO|Wikipedia's policy on the notability of people]]).

I wish you the best of luck on editing! LonelyBeacon (talk) 19:28, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

LonleyBeacon, I see your point on current faculty members. So, I took out the current band director.

I hope you can see that the contributions of educators (at Johnsburg HS and everywhere) should be logged and celebrated. I highly doubt you'd find these contributions trivial!

VDL8 (talk) 19:34, 23 August 2009 (UTC)VDL8

I see we were exchanging messages. As a teacher myself, I can certainly appreciate the sentiment. The roles of educators shouldn't be trivial (if they are doing a good jobs) and certainly shouldn't be trivialized. However, the policies governing editing Wikipedia are the result of long time consensus among the editors, and one of the core principles of the site is that editing is a collaborative effort based on the consensus of editing. Please believe me: this is not me enforcing my opinion; I am just letting you know that this is how things operate. If you were inclined, you could go to the Wikiproject schools group and ask for an opinion on this, or you could request ask the editors if this is still the consensus.

I will tell you that there are many ways to improve that article on Johnsburg High School .... its history, its academics (just off the top of my head) could use some expansion. If you have access to local newspapers, student handbooks, or some such information that can verify information, that could do a great deal to improve that article. I also invite you to look at articles for other schools that have been improved and recently give relatively high ratings by independent editors, to give you a good idea what improved articles look like.

• Featue rated school articles
• Good rated school articles
• B-rated school articles

(for what its worth, while I teach physics, I was in the band as a lad, and have deep appreciation for band directors. Handling 28 students in a lab is one thing .... handling 200 out on a practice field or in a rehearsal borders on working a miracle five days a week).

Again, I wish you best of luck! LonelyBeacon (talk) 19:42, 23 August 2009 (UTC)