Talk:Mendota Township High School

Two high schools in town

Looking at this line: Before Mendota High School existed, there were two high schools in the city of Mendota, East Mendota High School and Blackstone High School., I am rather surprised. There were plenty of towns in the state bigger than Mendota with zero high schools in the 1870s, when it is claimed these were established. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that it looks like potential bullshit. I will remove it if, after a decent interval, there is no supporting citation. HuskyHuskie (talk) 01:54, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Two High Schools, re.

Though there were other towns much larger than Mendota that had only one high school, the east and west sides of Mendota were very different, and are divided by busy train tracks, which in the 19th century provided a travel and safety concern. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.174.96.200 (talk) 21:22, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Mendota's conference affiliation

Gtwfan, I don't know you from a hole in the ground, but your year and 10,000 edits on Wikipedia has left you still wanting in terms of some everyday understanding of how Wikipedia works.

First of all, let's get this out of the way: YES you are technically correct in asking for documentation.

Fine, I get that. Now let's talk about the real world? Do you document every change you make to every article? If you do, you're one of only two or three out of tens of thousands of us who do. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that not every edit is sourced. There is a time to insist upon documentation and sourcing, and this is not one of them. Let's consider a few possible concerns:

• Is this an article touching upon BLP issues?
• Is this an article dealing with a contentious subject?
• Was this a suspicious edit, inserting a statement or statements that were likely false?
• Was this an article regarding which you have personal knowledge?

The answers are no, no, no, and no.

Furthermore, I did insert a wikilink into the article which very clearly supported what I was placing in this article. If you doubt the veracity of my edit, and consider it unacceptable information to include in this encyclopedia, then you should go to Big Northern Conference and take out the references to Mendota's membership and while you're at it, go to North Central Illinois Conference and excise all mentions of that conference's dissolution.

Again, I repeat, you are technically correct. But you could spend every waking minute of the rest of your life reverting non-sourced edits to Wikipedia, and 99% of your time would do nothing to improve the encylopedia's content. Learning to tell the difference between when to make a stink and when to just let it go, is an important skill. Now your first revert was, I guess, excusable. But your second revert, after which I pointed out (in my edit summary ) that you should follow the wikilinks, is just inexcusable. I provided an explanation, you shot back with rules, undoubtedly, without checking things out as I had requested.

My edits were 100% accurate and can be sourced. Your edits (your reverts) inserted demonstrably false information. I thought the fact that I linked to articles that sourced those facts was good enough, and if you had taken a few seconds to click on one or two links, you would have seen that you were actually making the article worse.

So what happens now? If I revert you now, that's my second revert. If you then revert me again, you will be in violation of WP:3RR. If I was a rules monger like you, that's exactly what I'd do right now, which is tantamount to challenging you to risking a block. But I won't do that. And it's not because I don't particularly care about this article (although it's true, it's hard to care about an article that is not cared about by the people who should care about it). It's because I believe in extending good faith, especially to someone who's been around for a whole year. So I'll not revert your pointless revert. Instead, I'll ask you again to look at the wikilinks and recognize that my edits were perfectly reasonable. I'll come back later and see what you have to say. More importantly, I'll come back to see who you are: a wikilawyer who shoves the rules in others' faces just because you can, or someone who actually has the spirit of Wikipedia and wants to work hand in hand with others. I'm actually curious. HuskyHuskie (talk) 06:16, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

So if they can be sourced, source them. That should take a whole lot less time than this diatribe explaining how since you have been around Wikipedia so much longer than I that I have no business telling you to follow the rules about verifiablity. I spend a whole lot of time pulling unreferenced garbage out of high school articles. I have recently finished cleaning up this one. And while I agree that the conference affiliation is not a very contentious thing, I asked for references because I had just removed a bunch of stuff for not being referenced. It would be somewhat hypocritical of me to remove the unreferenced claim of some sort of forensic championship and allow the insertion of something that by your own admission would be easily referenced. How does a verifiable reference hurt the encyclopedia? Pretty much, anything anyone would change in any article is because they read or in some other way came to know something different than what was in the article. Again I ask you, how is the encyclopedia hurt by requiring that they provide the source of their knowledge? I can think of several areas (eg the BLP issues you mentioned above) where referencing should be required period. But some long time editors will fight about the inclusion of references even for that. It is a cultural shift, and one that by all signals is going to continue. Newer editors feel referencing should be more complete. Not all, and not all older editors disagree. But that is pretty much where the line is drawn on verifiablity. I don't Wikilawyer, and don't appreciate the accusation. I just think all changes should be referenced and I am not alone in that contention. I would really like to see a ref on that info change, not because I can insist, but because it provides a good example for newer editors, which is mainly who edit high school articles. I would, but because as you pointed out, I have no direct knowledge and apparently you do, you are in a better position to find one. As I said before, that should sure take less time than all this writing. Gtwfan52 (talk) 20:41, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your measured response. If you read the end of my post, you will see that I did not yet accuse you of being a Wikilawyer, but rather, I posited that as one of two possible identities you might actually have. Happily, you appear to be the latter and not the former. I particularly appreciate your observation that high school articles are particularly problematic; if this is an area in which you spend much time, you have both my sympathy and appreciation.

I have no issue with sourcing, per se. My thinking is, however, that sourcing 100% of the statements in Wikipedia--or even aspiring to do so--is simply impractical, and such an insistence may lead to our missing of more critical shortcomings (e.g., WP:NPOV, WP:BLP) My practice (and maybe this is typical of the generational difference to which you have alerted me) has been to not revert an edit unless it is highly unlikely to be true, but if I have doubts, to tag it with a "citation needed". Of course, I'll be the first to admit that there are far too many such tags within our articles, so I'm not saying that's the end-all of solutions to this concern.

I also believe that with the current way Wikipedia is presented as a webpage, that readability is not helped by excessive footnoting. This will likely change, but I think that a Wikilink to an article that does provide a source for the fact at hand is more than acceptable. If someone had reason to question the accuracy of the information I provided, a link to either NCIC or BNC would have provided verification.

The one statement you make that puzzles me--strike that--makes no sense to me at all, is I just think all changes should be referenced. . . My question Gtw, is, why do you think changes should be held to this standard, but not the original text? You appear to think that somehow the first editor on the scene should be given the benefit of the doubt, but no one else. I find that a very strange position.

With that one exception, your thoughts appear to be reasonable, and I have no quarrel with you. I shall go ahead and provide the sourcing that no one in Mendota seems to be able to do (but why should they--they don't even care if their article is up to date) before placing my edits back in the article. Happy trails. HuskyHuskie (talk) 22:41, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

And that is just semantics. I view the creation of an article as a change also; As a matter of fact, I am pretty tough on AfC one of my activities around here. Gtwfan52 (talk) 23:03, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification. See you around. HuskyHuskie (talk) 02:17, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

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