Talk:West Exe School

Controversy section

This section appears to be dated, has undue weight and the citations are mostly dead links. It is also not best practice to even have a controversy section. I almost deleted the whole thing. I'll leave it a while with citation requests but would support any other editor who wishes to just delete it. I think the WP:ONUS would be on editors seeking to retain it to show how this is relevant for an encyclopaedic page page. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 16:07, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Drplent and WikiDan61 I noticed a back and forth over this section. This is the place to have a chat about it. I think there is a case to remove it, but we can't edit war when another editor has objected to the removal. I do agree that the information is dated, and I don't think a food fight 8 years ago is really due for the article. However if there are secondary sources showing it was underperforming, we might make mention of those. Thoughts? Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 19:51, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

@Drplent and Sirfurboy: I'll agree to the removal of the controversy section. I was not willing to let it happen without a discussion, but I agree with the points made here. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 20:25, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

 Done WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 21:03, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 22:20, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

November 2024

I have been through the material added yesterday and I am afraid I have reverted quite a lot of it. I have included edsums to all my edits (autocorrect messed up one of them. Edsum "ban" should read "BCN". i.e., Better Citation Needed). However as the additions were substantial and the reversions likewise, I thought I would raise some issues here in talk.

1. Some of the references added led nowhere. I reverted those as unsourced. They were also re-assertions of material that had been removed per the above discussion.
2. Lots to say about sources
   • When we are talking about living people, we need secondary sources. Newspaper reports are primary sources. There was controversy some years ago, but if that controversy is due for page about the history of a school, it will be covered in secondary sources. Those are what we need to write about that.
   • All schools general a lot of primary news coverage over the years. Petitions and food fights are no more due than fetes and sports wins, or top of the form wins or students meeting the Queen etc. However if a secondary source talks about a culture of the school that had become problematic, then yes, we should follow that. But we should not be curating primary sources to make our own thesis. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, so we cannot do that. That would be writing a history, a secondary source. We are not writing a history, we are writing an encyclopedic article. Someone else needs to wrote the history and then we can use it.
   • A lot of what I removed was from a secondary treatment: a BA thesis (Stapleton, 2024). Now I removed a lot of that, because the consensus view is that an undergraduate thesis is not a reliable source. But the undergraduate work is quite interesting, and it contains material that is both primary and secondary. The extent of the addition here, and the extent of the knowledge of the thesis, especially considering how recent it is, along with the fact that the work itself cites edit history of this page, including a single edit that persisted for 1 minute,[1] does lead to a question in my mind whether it has been added by someone intimately involved in its creation. Please note, I am not asking. You need neither confirm nor deny. It is certainly very plausible (likely even) that this was just found with a google search, and read carefully. But if someone were citing their own thesis, that might look like a conflict of interest. Interesting as the work is.

Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:59, 11 November 2024 (UTC)