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Category talk:Public schools in the United Kingdom

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Archived renaming discussion

[edit]

The following is the discussion from when "Category:Public Schools" was moved to "Category:Public schools in the United Kingdom".

Reason: Now redundant - replaced by Category:Public schools in the United Kingdom and it's subsequent sub-categories. Part of my attempts to clear up the UK education category. More detail here: User:GregRobson/Schools GregRobson 17:09, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. I was under the impression that the capitalisation used there was, indeed, the correct one, and that "public school" was incorrect (obviously, a mix of the two, "Public school", is evidently incorrect).
Thoughts?
James F. (talk) 18:02, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
More on User talk:GregRobson, but to summarise - As far as I know from Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) first word should be capitalised and school is not a proper noun and therefore does get capitalised unless part of the name of a school? GregRobson 18:26, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia capitalisation rules only apply when one is doubtful as to deviate from the way a sentence is habitually constructed, IYSWIM. In this case, I am querying about what is the correct capitalisation for "Public School"; the context of Wikipedia is irrelevent here.
James F. (talk) 23:55, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
If all else failes turn to the press! - At least they should know. After trying out some queries I found that Google news, BBC News and in nearly every case the following rules applied.
  • If part of a job title - capitalise. Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Claire Jackson Evidence
  • If part of the name of an individual school - capitalise. e.g. "Public School Students Welfare Association" Evidence
  • If part of normal text - don't. e.g. "Lord Patten said public school "yobs" made recruitment difficult" Evidence
  • If naming a specific school - capitalise.
  • Sometimes headline words are capitalised regardless - but that's just a matter of presentation for some news websites.
In conclusion - I believe that as you can't point to a specific instance of "public schools" then it should not be Public schools in the United Kingdom. 'Public' should be capitalised as it is the first word in accordance with Wikipedia's rules of category naming. Public school is not a proper noun. You can visit the 'Public Schools Superintendent', or attend the 'Public School Students Welfare Association', but people cannot write that they were educated at a 'Public School', it's non-specific.
Getting back on topic - all I wanted was to have the initial generalised category removed as it too general. What we call the category I'm happy to discuss below :)
GregRobson 09:38, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Category:Public schools in the United Kingdom is a bad category name anyway, as many English-speaking countries use the term "public school" to mean one funded out of government money - the complete opposite to what we use in the UK. I know "fee-paying schools" are not synonymous with "public schools" as they include "private schools" too - but wouldn't Category:Fee-paying schools in the United Kingdom be better? jguk 22:21, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Category:Public schools in the United Kingdom has a link in it's description to the correct article (public school (UK)), but I do agree that it is a point of confusion - many school articles have linked to the incorrect public schools (outside UK) article. Public/private/grammar are often interchangably, schools' names don't always reflect their type either. If Category:Fee-paying schools in the United Kingdom is decided on by the majority then I'm happy to change things over if Pearle bot cannot be used. For the moment though can we decide that the general label is of no-use now more specific categories have been created? GregRobson 22:49, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Indeed. Hence the use of PS, not Ps, to differentiate.
James F. (talk) 23:55, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't know what's the best answer, but "Fee-paying schools" gives the idea that the schools are paying the fees.
Also, at least in the USA, "grammar school" has no connection with either "public" or "private", but it means "elementary school." Maurreen 05:48, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I know. I'm 22 and I only realised a couple of years ago. Silly English language. However all the category labels give a one line description of what they contain and should point to public school (UK). I'd much rather that all the schools articles could be checked to ensure that they point to the UK article, even if they don't public school is effectively a disambiguation page. Some UK school articles read along the lines of "is a public school (UK) (that is, an independent fee-paying school)". If people are looking these things up, I think we should assume that they know about the UK system, if not they they obvious haven't realised that Wikipedia isn't perfect ;)
The context should provide the meaning. i.e. "Public schools in the UK"". Surely this is an improvement on Category:Public Schools which allows an school in the world to be listed - therefore this leaves us with ambiguity and confusion and should be removed. I'm happy to extend the category descriptions to avoid any possible confusion regarding what they contain.
GregRobson 09:54, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I think Category:Public schools in the United Kingdom is fine, for reasons given by GregRobson. But I also think it would be wise to have an explanatory note in the category page, to clarify the matter for people used to a different meaning of "public school." Maurreen 15:01, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I created "Public Schools" with the belief that there would eventually also be a category "Public schools" which would have "Public schools in the foo" sub-categories. If that does take place, and we end up with "Public schools in the United States", "Public schools in the United Arab Emirates", and "Public schools in the Ukraine" meaning one thing (state-funded schools), and "Public schools in the United Kingdom" meaning something rather different, despite being identically named, this will be rather a source of confusion. The idea in capitalising the 'S', as well as keeping with custom as I have experienced elsewhere, was to avoid this confusion. "Public schools in the United Kingdom" could then be used in the International-English meaning, or redirect to "State schools in the United Kingdom".
In most categories, "Foo in Bar" means a listing of Foos, a general concept, in Bar, a geographical area. This is nice and clean. If we go with the proposed change, "Foo in Bar" means exactly the same everywhere except one, the United Kingdom. This is a violation of the normal mental model, and highly inelegant.
Apart from all of this, both "Public schools in the United Kingdom" and "Public Schools in the United Kingdom" suggest that there are other such places not in the United Kingdom - in much the same way that we don't call the category "Playwrights" instead "Playrwrights who are human". "Public Schools" brooks no argument, it refers to all things which are "Public Schools". The disambiguation is not only unncessary, but unhelpful.
James F. (talk) 17:08, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I think I understand that... While it makes sense in the context of the United Kingdom, it doesn't make sense when considering all public schools (as the UK schools don't have the same semantics). So are you suggesting we need Category:Public schools (UK meaning) in the UK or something to that effect?
I do see that you may want a "Public schools" category for worldwide sub-categories :)
GregRobson 17:40, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Exactly. Except that Category:Public schools (UK meaning) in the UK could just be Category:Public schools (UK meaning) , as Category:Public schools (UK meaning) not in the UK is the empty set.
In essence, it's a bit of a mess, and what to do about it seems... unclear.
James F. (talk) 18:45, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

What about Category:Independent schools in the United Kingdom - although I'm not convinced that "fee-paying" is ambiguous or confusing?, jguk 18:56, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Umm. Category:Independent schools in the United Kingdom is the superset of both Category:Fee-paying schools in the United Kingdom and Category:Public Schools; of these two, the latter is not wholly a subset of the former.
James F. (talk) 19:19, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Firstly (edit took place while replying). Independent schools are referred to as "not dependent on the government", so should we have Independent schools and State funded/Comprehensive? I don't mind whether we use either on the latter category. We will ignore any Private Finance Initiative schools for the moment, as that will only make things worse.
I'm in favour of Category:Independent schools in the United Kingdom - there's so much confusion over private/public(UK)/grammar in the articles that I would probably check each category if I was looking for an individual institution anyway. Most are public anyway - so grammar and private would hardly have anything in. It's not too specific and not too general.
So to come to some conclusion...
and so on...
Is it possible for admins to rename a category? If so then I would like all the Public schools in... renamed to Independent schools in... Would people be agreeable to that? Grammar schools in... would need to be deleted once they are all pointed to the Independent sections.
Is all that agreeable to community? GregRobson 19:29, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Two more points - do we really need to split them up between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? and isn't "State-funded" better than "Comprehensive"? After all, I wouldn't call a state primary school a "Comprehensive", jguk 19:42, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Seemed like a good idea at the time - there may not be enough to justify it as there seems to very few in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I'm sure many school articles have no stubs or catergories so they're hard to chase down. I'm happy to alter that. As I said on the "State-funded/Comprehensive" issue I'm happy either way - if I had to pick myself I'd probably say State-funded is easier for anyone to understand (including those outside the UK).
GregRobson 19:56, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Whatever you call UK-specific topics is fine by me. But it might not be feasible to have a universally clear name for "Foo schools by country". "State-funded" appears to be the best possibility. In the USA, this would apply to all levels of education (such as kindergarten through university). Just to check, does it have the same meaning elsewhere? "Comprehensive" in the USA would be vague at best, suggesting just anything that is not specialized. "Independent" in the USA would exclude schools supported by churches, if nothing else. Maurreen 20:48, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If they're aren't going to be lots of "Schools in Xland" categories, maybe "British schools" would be better. That way Manx and Channel Island schools could be included easily, jguk 21:05, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Crikey, I hadn't even thought of that. They're not countries in their own right, but then they're not part of the United Kingdom either. It's turning into one of those "I wish I'd never started..." projects! I might have to back to the drawing board on this. GregRobson 22:37, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Noooo, don't do that - we're nearly there! Category:British schools, then subcategories Category:Independent British schools and Category:State-funded British schools, maybe Category:Church-supported British schools too, jguk 09:04, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"Church-supported British schools" is almost a subset of "State-funded British schools", but not quite... and what Church? CoE? Where do RC schools go? What about Temple-supported schools, or so on? "State-funded British schools with religious support"?
And we still haven't found a good replacement for "Public Schools", as listed above.
James F. (talk) 18:15, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Note: Deleted by Neutrality, 07:30, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC).

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