Talk:List of college and university student newspapers in the United States

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Higher education

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Journalism

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Alphabetization

I am alphabetizing many of the sections by school name becuase it is the first thing under each state. I assume this is the correct way to do it as most of the article is in that format.--DerRichter (talk) 19:29, 19 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

External links to newspaper websites

(I posted this on User:ElKevbo's talk page already, but to no response so far, so I thought it might get more resupplies here.) ElKevbo removed all the external links to newspaper websites, citing WP:EL. I don't agree. "List of" pages typically have external links, and I believe that this comment from the EL page is relevant: "[The avoidance of EL] does not apply if the external link is serving as a citation for a stand-alone list entry that otherwise meets that list's inclusion criteria." IOW, the links are effectively citations for each paper. I would favor undoing that change to bring back all the links. Note too that recent editors have included such links.--Eponymous-Archon (talk) 19:55, 16 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Such an action would also seem to violate WP:NOTDIR. Why can't editors of this list add real references (e.g., a paper's self-description, descriptions in other reliable sources) instead sloppily throwing bare URLs into the mix? It's unprofessional, shortsighted, lazy, and out of step with how we (strive to) edit the rest of this encyclopedia. ElKevbo (talk) 21:08, 16 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Which provision of WP:NOTDIR is being violated here exactly? I don't see one that applies.

I also don't understand why the last sentence of this excerpt from WP:EL doesn't apply to this article: "External link sections are not prohibited at the end of a stand-alone lists or at the end of articles that contain embedded lists. However, the lists themselves should not be composed of external links. These lists are primarily intended as providing direct information and internal navigation, not a directory of sites on the web. 'This section does not apply if the external link is serving as a citation for a stand-alone list entry that otherwise meets that list's inclusion criteria." IOW, if the article itself is acceptable, then it would seem to me that external links are effectively citations for those entries that do not have their own stand-alone articles. Note that the entires contain the school - always an internal link - and the paper. About ⅓ of those are also internal links, so we're not talking about an external link in every entry.--Eponymous-Archon (talk) 21:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

1. The specific provision of WP:NOT that appears to be an issue is "Wikipedia is not a directory." However, I concede that the connection is not as direct as I thought (I think the language there has changed some over the past couple of years).

2. It seems quite important that the quote you included from WP:EL begins with "External link sections are not prohibited at the end of..." (emphasis added).

I'd still appreciate an answer about why we should accept that editors are free to be lazy with this list and include bare URLs to vague, unhelpful webpages that do nothing more than establish the bare existence of the subject. Why can't we insist on useful, well-formatted, and directly-applicable references like we do in every other article? What makes this article or its editors special? ElKevbo (talk) 05:37, 18 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

2. Yes, the section I quoted is clearly referring to lists that might have the usual external links at the end. The sentence I highlighted I think provides a justification for using EL throughout the list itself. The alternative would be a very long list of external links in the very long list of citations for the entries. I suspect that the reason to allow the list entries to have EL is to avoid this kind of article which gets overrun by citations and external links. These list pages are a different beast from other kinds of articles.

I don't agree with your final point at all. I don't find it lazy and the EL are to the home pages for the newspapers, which are hardly unhelpful since they establish the existence of the paper being listed. That's the whole point of a citation and why I highlighted that sentence above: in this case the EL is replacing the citation. Ideally to my mind, there would be more WP articles on these papers and I suspect that there are more that have not yet been linked. Till then I don't have a problem with the EL. Perhaps a note of encouragement at the top?--Eponymous-Archon (talk) 14:45, 18 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't appear likely that we're going to come to a consensus between just the two of us so I recommend you seek out some additional input to resolve this stalemate. Maybe WT:EL? Of course, you could open an RfC. ElKevbo (talk) 05:43, 19 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]