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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. MBisanz talk 00:03, 5 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hope Academy of Bishkek

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Hope Academy of Bishkek (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Non-notable foreigners' school in Kyrgyzstan. No non-trivial coverage in reliable third-party sources, so no hope of writing a proper article which is anything other than a summary of the school's brochures. cab (talk) 16:36, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that "it is one of the few schools in the country with articles in the English wiki" demonstrates perfectly the real systemic bias in our coverage of Asia:
  1. We have so much coverage on topics which only a few thousand Anglophone expatriates might care about: international schools they send their kids to, bars they go to, and marginal anti-foreigner political groups which piss them off. All of which reliable sources in both English and local languages mostly-to-entirely ignore because they're so unworthy of attention, while people associated with them create Wikipedia articles for them precisely in an attempt to draw more attention.
  2. We have so little coverage on topics which matter to millions of local people: the schools they aspire to send their kids to, their members of parliament, the pop idols who sing in their languages, etc., which Wikipedians ignore because they're not in English
  3. When we try to delete worthless articles in category #1, people claim that retaining them would help us fight "bias" against topics in the country in question
And by the way, the directory listing you linked to is for the Bishkek International School, not this school. They are two separate schools. That one is a secular school founded in 1994. This one is a Christian school founded in 1998, as their own website states [1]. Regards, cab (talk) 03:44, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 01:17, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete, unless a non-trivial third-party source can be found (I was unable to find anything myself). --Delirium (talk) 02:13, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep All secondary schools are notable. There may not be any online references for this school online because people in Kyrgyzstan do not have as much Internet access as the Americans, the British, the Canadians, etc. There are probably many offline newspaper articles — third-party, reliable sources — written in Kyrgyz about this English-language school. There is simply no need to delete one of only two English language schools in Kyrgyzstan. This school and all other secondary schools are notable and worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia. Cunard (talk) 03:08, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. I don't myself disagree that the school may be notable, but this article is nonetheless inherently unverifiable due to the low likelihood of reliable sources appearing in the forseeable future. I would of course be amenable to recreation if someone did find such sources, perhaps some Kyrgyz newspaper articles as you suggest. --Delirium (talk) 03:27, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Comment The argument that Kyrgyz newspapers (either in Russian or Kyrgyz languages) would be scrambling to write articles about an evangelical Protestant school which none of their Muslim or Orthodox readers can either afford or would be interested in enrolling their children, strains credulity. Foreigners' schools, if they get coverage anywhere at all, get it in their home country newspapers, or in local newspapers aimed at foreigners. Rich Anglophone foreigners in Kyrgyzstan are quite enthusiastic users of the Internet, and the newspapers aimed at them all have a good online presence [2][3][4]. None of them have bothered to mention this school.
In the .kg domain, "school" gets 13.5k GHits, Russian "школа" gets 30k, and Kyrgyz "мектеп" gets 1.5k (a relatively deflated number because Google search knows how to do stemming for Russian and English, but not for Kyrgyz). Among these hits you can find much discussion of the actually notable schools of Kyrgyzstan: the ones which Kyrgyz people are likely to send their children to, and as a result which newspapers find it worthwhile to write about because it will interest their readers. cab (talk) 04:29, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. First of all, we are allowing articles on every secondary school in the United States, regardless of notability (I have even seen articles on American junior high schools). So the fact that it's a secondary school should mean it is inherently notable (though I must add that I actually disagree with what we're doing with normal secondary schools, but what's done is done). But even if that were not the case, this school would be notable for exactly the reason that User:TerriersFan points out. It's a school in Kyrgyzstan using an all-English curriculum! As far as I can see, the only objection would be if someone doubted its existence, which one must always consider in this day and age and what all can be done with the internet. I've looked it up, and I found a bounty of references to it, and not ones mirroring this page. (Though really, the source that User:Victuallers added should have been enough to begin with, IMO). I've added some sources to the article, and I think this should clearly be kept. Unschool 05:36, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep All secondary schools are probably notable, but an english language secondary school in that country certainly is.Evidence of the existence and the nature of its program is sufficient to show notability in this case. DGG (talk) 05:53, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • A school for foreigners which operates in a language which the foreigners actually speak is hardly unusual enough to warrant bold italics, let alone an automatic presumption of notability based on "gee isn't that so exotic". Every country on earth—even Turkmenistan and North Korea—has expatriate foreigners of various nationalities living in their capital. Some of these foreigner have kids. Neither the foreigners nor their kids bother to learn the local language to any real degree. English is far and away the most likely common language of any group of expatriate foreigners of various nationalities. So guess what language a school for foreigners is likely to use as their medium of instruction? cab (talk) 06:30, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, first of all, on the over-fontinization, I appreciate the correction. (I've been fighting a delayed onset of maturity for over three decades, and well, that's the occasional result.) Look, I understand what you're saying about the ubiquity of English as the lingua franca (would it have been okay to italicize that?) of, well, of the world today. So you're right, this isn't a bizzare, freak occurence. But it still strikes me as no less notable than Delphi Community High School or Natchez High School or Greybull High School, and the existence of it is certainly to me a lot more interesting (not that that's our criterion). Unschool 07:09, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
MuZemike, your comment makes me realize that there may be something of a subjective element to notability. I don't have the answer; I am largely inexperienced at this AfD stuff. But let me ask you: Could you find something to establish notability on the three schools I listed in my comment to cab above? And if not, would you be willing to start the AfD on them? Unschool 07:12, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Wikipedia's guideline on notability is subjective and is open to interpretation (that's why we have so many of these arguments at AFDs - lots of them boil down to notability issues). I interpret WP:SCHOOL differently as a guideline and not more transparent to the general guideline. With that said, there is no inherent notability; sources must exist out there to establish it. More likely than not, the three American high schools you have mentioned have likely received plenty of coverage in many papers, whether it be local, regional, or even national in some cases; those three are probably notable. Non-American schools, particularly those in countries without a high presence from other English-speaking-countries like Kyrgyzstan are much harder to find sources for notability than, say, those with a high presence like Germany or Korea or some smaller Arab states. That's how I see notability as far as schools are concerned, but then again, I do not really focus on schools that much. MuZemike (talk) 20:33, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
the guideline is subjective, sure, but there are some established patterns--its not a pure argument from first principles every time. Schools devoted to education in a non native language have often been held especially notable--schools teaching in French or Chinese in NYC, schools teaching in English in France or China. In this case, schools in a country somewhat out of the general mainstream, that teach in a world language, especially when they are the only or first ones in a country, are reasonable considered notable. DGG (talk) 06:02, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A topic is "reasonably considered notable" only if you can demonstrate that whatever heuristic you're using to decide "reasonably" is a decent proxy for "having actual non-trivial coverage in reliable, independent sources if you just look a bit harder". "Gee whiz, that's neat-o!" asserted by a bunch of technically literate internet users from high-immigration societies reading an English-language debate about a school is sometimes a decent proxy for "American newspapers have covered this school". It's far less likely to be as reasonable a proxy for "Kyrgyz newspapers might have covered this school", for reasons I mentioned above.
Not every country focuses the same amount of academic or journalistic attention to foreigners/minorities living in their midst. (Which is precisely the factor you're relying on when you assert without evidence that an English-medium school in Kyrgyzstan is "especially notable" as compared to a regular old Kyrgyz/Russian-medium school). Chileans, for example, write papers and even whole books on minute groups like the 250 Russians or 1,800 Koreans they have living there. Thais, less so --- I've been trying for years to gather up enough sources to write an article about the ~30,000 Koreans in Thailand, but there's simply not enough material out there. cab (talk) 07:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I found the school listed on several databases for international schools. They're also a member of the Association of Christian Schools International, an organization you'll quickly recognize if you've attended a (protestant) Christian school. I added a couple of refs to this effect. More third-party sources would be nice, but that warrants an "expand" tag, not a delete. There's certainly enough here to meet notability standards. Otebig (talk) 03:05, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Well, the consensus is quite clear to me here; we plan to keep this "article" on the basis of:
  1. A directory entry which quotes from school publicity materials
  2. A single-sentence mention about a staff member in the newsletter of a parent organisation
  3. A blog entry
  4. The school's own website
  5. Extremely hypothetical Kyrgyz newspaper articles
If we're going to ignore WP:N by this wide a margin, maybe I should change my last name to "Academy" so I can get a Wikipedia article about me too. cab (talk) 06:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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