Talk:Adliswil

IP's (propably same 'user') repeatedly replaced images and/or removed image descriptions without any comment, Roland 00:16, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Untitled

Not done: requests for changes to the page protection level should be made at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. --Jnorton7558 (talk) 01:58, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Private schools and Adliswil (WP:SOAP)

Discussion began here: User_talk:ZH8000 see diff

ZH8000 believes that the senior high school campus of the Zurich International School should not be listed in this article. I strongly believe that it should be listed, since it is a full-time school and it is not undue weight for an article about a city of 18,216 people (a very small population: in a city of that size all schools can be listed). WhisperToMe (talk) 14:04, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi! I took a look at this edit and promptly reverted it.

It is normal practice to list full-time schools, especially if they have senior high school divisions, unless there are too many of them and/or if the city is too big. Not only is the international school serving all Americans in the Zurich area, but this particular campus is also a senior high school. WhisperToMe (talk) 13:56, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

This edit. It is 100% justifiable to revert an edit you don't agree with once and immediately notifying you why I disagree. That is not warring. That is properly being WP:BOLD. It is also incorrect that private institutions cannot be listed. Both private and public schools should be listed, and this is true of any city worldwide.

I strongly oppose the removal of this information in the article, and I will be happy to take any and all dispute resolution measures.

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:00, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

First of all. Such messages have not to be posted on my private talk page, but on the respective talk page of the related article.

Secondly, WP:SOAP clearly says, SOAP is Advocacy, propaganda, or recruitment of any kind: commercial, political, scientific, religious, national, sports-related, or otherwise. As you try to list it on as much as possible articles, it is nothing else than a soapbox.

Thirdly, it does not matter what "normal practice" is, but what the policies are, whether they are applied or not.

Forth: as WP:SOAP clearly says as well: "External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they identify notable organizations which are the topic of the article. ... Those promoting causes or events, or issuing public service announcements, even if noncommercial, should use a forum other than Wikipedia to do so."

-- ZH8000 (talk) 14:07, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

@ZH8000: Firstly it is 100% acceptable to begin a discussion with an editor on his or her talk page, and to question his or her edits there. I do this, and I continue to do it. It is up to the other person when/if the discussion should be moved.

Listing schools in articles does not count as WP:SOAP. In order to do that, I would have to say it is the best school, and/or that people should be enrolling their children there. I am not doing that, and therefore it's not SOAP. Trying to say that mentioning the existence of any private school is SOAP would be skewing the balance of many articles around the world.

"Thirdly, it does not matter what "normal practice" is, but what the polcisies are, whether they are applied or not." Please quote and cite policies and explain why they apply here.

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:10, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

I have notified the following WikiProjects: Cities, Schools, and Switzerland, as well as the WP:NOT talk page of this discussion. WhisperToMe (talk) 14:16, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

see above. -- ZH8000 (talk) 14:19, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Alright. So look carefully at this edit. Where is the promotional language? Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox says: "An article can report objectively about such things, as long as an attempt is made to describe the topic from a neutral point of view." I can objectively say that this private school exists in the commune. That's all I say. It's not, then, SOAP. I don't think it's fair to say that mentioning a full-day private school is inherently promotional any more than listing a public school. People can write in a biased way about public schools too.

The portion about external links cannot apply here, because the edit in question is an internal link to another Wikipedia article!

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:23, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Firstly, "Firstly it is 100% acceptable to begin a discussion with an editor on his or her talk page, and to question his or her edits there. I do this, and I continue to do it. It is up to the other person when/if the discussion should be moved." No it is not. You start the topic on the article's talk page, nowhere else. If you think nobody take notice of it, you can leave a TB message at related user's talk page. That's the elaborated usage here on WP, nothing else, despite different behaviors by some. (You are free to search for the respective instructions on WP:Help by yourself, please).

Secondly, once again, I repeat myself, it says that "External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they identify notable organizations which are the topic of the article". A. these schools are commercial, B. and are not the topic of any of a (Swiss) city. You can easily create a page for your international schools as you like – and as you already have done – but the above statement is very clear and not contradicting. -- ZH8000 (talk) 14:37, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

"it says that "External links to" - It is clearly not talking about links to other Wikipedia articles. It cannot apply in this instance.

"No it is not. You start the topic on the article's talk page, nowhere else." There is no policy or guideline saying that I cannot use your talk page to raise questions about your edits to a particular article. I will not search WP:Help to back up your statements. In addition, the edits in question have affected multiple pages, and whenever that happens one has an expectation that someone who is challenging her/his edits will use a Wikipedian's talk page to ask her/him to discuss the edits.

"these schools are commercial" - The schools are listed even if they are "for-profit". In my country, the United States, private schools are almost always non-profit organizations, but I am aware that's not always true in other countries. I will do research on this school and check anyway, but even if it was a for-profit school I would still list it.

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:49, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

The ZIS governance page says (Archive): "ZIS is a non-profit foundation, governed by a Board of Trustees" WhisperToMe (talk) 14:53, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Another thing to point out. According to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cities/Settlements:_Article_structure#Education (yes, I am aware technically this is a WP:Essay) the article structure is supposed to mention schools. Since Adliswil is a very small municipality it means in all likelihood every full-time, accredited school within the town boundary should be listed. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:42, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

It’s interesting that you mention your nationality and your background. Yes indeed, the school system in Switzerland is thoroughly different from the US (how surprising!). You will hardly know this as a resident of Houston. E.g. less than 3% of pupils and students visit private schools in Switzerland. So it is an absolutely marginal service and mainly addressed to very wealthy expats.

Besides, ZIS services stay commercial whether they are accepted as school (of course they are, otherwise they could not provide their services), or whether they are for profit or not (whatever that means). Residents of Switzerland do not pay for compulsory school, neither for public gymnasiums (tertiary school level). ZIS however, ask for CHF 52-60’000 per year (0 vice versa 60’000 – don’t tell me , it’s not commercial)! The same is comparably true for universities (in fact, there are no private universities in Switzerland at all). BTW, ZIS is registered as a company in the central database for Swiss companies (zefix.ch).

This so far, just for your information.

But this brings me to another aspect. I am just wondering that someone from Houston is interested in schools in Adliswil, Kilchberg and Wädenswil, actually quite small communities. You probably hardly know how life takes place there or even in Switzerland in general, I suppose. So your completed tasks to add ZIS to this communities’ wikipage seems to have no other intention than to promote the listing of ZIS as far as possible. This behavior I would explicitly and without any doubt attribute as promotional behavior. Further you even added new sections called „Education“ to those articles. This would have been a good intention indeed, if you would also have started to list all major (public) schools first, which would be a many times larger contribution to the community than any listing of private, commercialized schools of marginal interest. But you didn’t.

So the conclusion about your intention is not to improve the quality and information of the articles, but just to promote ZIS.

Yes, as far as I understand, there is no explicit rule against this behavior than eventually the one about „WP is NOT a promotional tool“. So we will see what others have to say about it. -- ZH8000 (talk) 04:04, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

@ZH8000: 1. "This would have been a good intention indeed, if you would also have started to list all major (public) schools first, which would be a many times larger contribution to the community than any listing of private, commercialized schools of marginal interest. But you didn’t." - Every Wikipedian has the right to add as much or as little as he or she wants. The solution to the issue of the lack of public/government schools, then, is to add the maybe two or three public schools in this municipality in addition to the international school instead of removing the the section entirely and frustrating the editor(s) who added the private schools to advance the articles. The goal is to build the article.

2. The private school K-12 rate in the US is about 10% but I don't have updated stats on it. The vast majority of Americans also attend public schools, and private schools in the US also charge a lot of money. When someone thinks "commercial" they think the intention is to make something for-profit. (I am aware people do abuse non-profits but that's another can of worms for another day)

3. I am interested in the education of foreign expatriates in other countries, particularly the Japanese. If you take a look at my edit history I've been adding information on international schools of various countries around the world to their respective articles. The most common ones I've written about are the Japanese, French, and German schools. As the policy page said, writing about something neutrally doesn't count as promotion. The Zurich International School has campuses in three municipalities, and so it would make sense to link to this school from those three municipalities.

4. Wikipedia is an international project, so you will have users from one country editing articles about other places. These editors have the right to have a say in these articles. Even though input from locals/Swiss people is valued, locals do not automatically get the full say in an article.

5. The editors should learn about all strata of society, poor, middle class, and wealthy, of any particular country. People who read articles about the Zurich metropolitan area (these are suburbs of Zurich) would be curious about wealthy foreign expatriates, wouldn't they? I don't think they should be denied knowledge about wealthy expatriate life in the Zurich area any more than any social class/status.

WhisperToMe (talk) 04:45, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

There is one public primary school in the entire commune of Adliswil. There may be a public secondary school but it isn't listed. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:49, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

There are at least 8 different schools for primary and secondary level. And there are others as well. Why don't you start to list them? And yes, for tertiary level they commute to Zurich. -- ZH8000 (talk) 08:33, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

In the boundaries of Adliswil commune? I took a look and the official website points to five schoolhouses. Would these be treated as five different schools, or five campuses of one school? As for other levels, I got a list of the communal high schools and started a template here: Template:Zurich Canton High Schools modeled off of another one I started Template:Westchester County, New York High Schools WhisperToMe (talk) 08:51, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, that depends how you look at it. All of them are public schools coordinated by one communal Schulbehörde, but there are six different Schulen with their own Schulleitung and with one or more compuses. You do not have free choice of school, but will be assigned by the communal Schulbehörde based on your home address. There is also a public music school. And there are other publicly supported, but private schools, such as Montesori. Tertiary schools are coordinated by cantonal Behörden. ... Anyhow, I would you thoroughly advice you to dive into the schooling system first, if you really intend to take over this part. Or then leave it as it and eventually some local will take over this knowldge-intensive part?! And anyhow, it is futile since all necessary information is already publicly available. Why reinvent the wheel? By the way, do not call it high school, its very missleading. Anyhow the direct "trabslation" is not advised, if at all, use the local naming. And it is more complex than you probably think, if you want to handle all eventualities and specialities. ... You get the message? Thanks. -- ZH8000 (talk) 09:13, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Call them simply Cantonal Schools or Gymnasiums (these two terms are somehwhat synonym), or again use their local naming . And a Swiss Gymnasium is (sometimes) a mix of high school and colleage, or only a colleage, that depends. JFYI. -- ZH8000 (talk) 09:19, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

And the general German term for both, Gymnasium and Kantonsschule is Mittelschule. -- ZH8000 (talk) 09:23, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Should Category:High schools in Switzerland (it was created back in 2006 by another user) be renamed to "Mittelschule in Switzerland"? WhisperToMe (talk) 09:26, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

In the meantime I started Category:Upper secondary schools in the Canton of Zürich but I can change the name to something better. It's meant to include local Swiss-system schools and international schools using IB and/or French baccalaureate systems. WhisperToMe (talk) 10:03, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

I am not sure you should do this too rushed without consulting the rest of the WP/Schools/Swiss WP community. But as a proposal, Mitttelschulen in Switzerland" makes more sense to me. -- ZH8000 (talk) 10:07, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

I'll be happy to start a discussion at WP:Switzerland. WhisperToMe (talk) 10:15, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Switzerland#Change_name_of_.22Category:High_schools_in_Switzerland.22.3F WhisperToMe (talk) 10:21, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Edit Break

Non-profit schools are not commercial enterprises so the WP:SOAP about commercial links doesn't apply. Yes, people in countries with free public education still pay for their children to go to private schools. The goal of Wikipedia is to list all school options available to residences of a place, hence the encyclopedia part of Wikipedia. I personally tend to limit that to schools that are part of a WP:Notable organization or religion to avoid any WP:undo weight issues, but there is no hard and fast rule. Dkriegls (talk to me!) 05:34, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes. I think in a place this small, all schools should be listed. Including for profit private schools. Apparently no articles on (public) secondary schools. So too much info is listed here. Hopefully can be shortened to one bullet when articles are constructed.

I agree that some limitation has to apply for larger cities. Forked to a separate article, I suppose. I'm not so sure I can get enthused about listing a private, for profit school of 45 elementary students in (say) Tokyo, even in a separate article. Student7 (talk) 20:19, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

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this is my first entry in a dicussion page. But the part about the German spoken in the city sounds unnecessarily complicated. Could we not simply say that they speak Swiss German? This is the generic language spoken in all of Switzerland, no matter what the local variation is.