Talk:Delphi Schools

An essay re Delphi

Placing here the link to an essay removed from the main article but which may have some value to editors wanting to research this topic to expand this article.

• Case study of L. Ron Hubbard's education: The Delphi Academy in LA by Steve Keller

Grorp (talk) 03:45, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Advert tag?

@Hipal: Could you please elaborate on why you think the article needs an advert tag? What would you like to see done with the article (additions, subtractions, changes, etc.)? Grorp (talk) 03:49, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

The references and their use.

I'm still getting up to speed on the larger situation here. You have a WP:COI?

I've updated their official website link and removed twice now the link for Heron Books. This article is about Delphi Schools. See WP:ELOFFICIAL. --Hipal (talk) 21:04, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Hipal: No COI, just a disagreement on the tag and the removal of the external link. You says you are still getting up to speed on the larger situation here. What do you mean by that? You aren't new to Wikipedia with over 100,000 edits, so what "situation" are you referring to?

The reason I added the external link for heronbooks.com is because I'm the one who merged the article Heron Books into this Delphi article. Per the Oregon Secretary of State business search, Heron Book, Inc. was a separate corporation until 2005 when they dissolved it and made it an assumed name for Delphi Schools, Inc.. So this article is where the Heron Books content should go. (Both articles were practically stubs, so why not merge them.)

Delphi is separately notable both for being a school and for the line of books it publishes under a separate label (Heron Books), so it fulfills WP:ELOFFICIAL's requirements. But I never positioned it to be a Template:Official website but merely an external link. Per WP:EL, External links in an article can be helpful to the reader, but they should be kept minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article. It is all of those things.

There is no reasonable Wikipedia guideline that would exclude adding a link to heronbooks.com in this Wikipedia article, and trying to remove it here is just being pedantic. It is appropriate to put it here. In my opinion it is of interest to see what sorts of books an Applied Scholastics affiliated school is selling for the teaching of students. Like this link https://www.heronbooks.com/learningandlifeskills or this one https://www.heronbooks.com/educators; both represent all the core Scientology subjects.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Ultimately, the target audience is the reader—someone who is curious about a subject and wants more information. What about people who get ahold of book and it says "Heron Books" inside. Maybe they want to use Wikipedia to find out more about it and there it is! What about homeschooling parents who are being suggested to buy Heron Books for their child's education? Or parents considering sending their child to one of these APS-affiliated schools? Many of those schools use Heron Books instead of the older books that were published by Applied Scholastics, printed using Bridge Publications print machines, and whose titles still have bad public relations because of the many investigative news articles that were written exposing the charade (the hiding of the Scientology connection). Wouldn't such parents want to know the affiliation? The Church of Scientology is going to extreme lengths to distance themselves with exactly this type of promotion of "Hubbard study technology" to make it harder for people to notice the connection on their own.

What I find odd is that a corporation, not owned by Scientology (such as Delphi Schools, Inc.) is publishing these Scientology/APS topics at all, rather than Delphi buying the books from APS. A google search turns up this warning from Mike Rinder and then there's this promotion from a homeschooler promoting Heron Books for homeschoolers, and this interesting article. I'm sure there are more, but investigative reporting has dwindled with the collapse of the newspaper industry and I doubt Heron Books has attracted the interest of the remaining hired journalists; everything is going freelance, influencers, and social media these days. There's no shortage of coverage by these sources, which Wikipedia assigns a lesser value on the RS scale.

Could this article be expanded more than the barely-a-stub it is? Sure. What else do you think needs to be done here? If something needs doing, then I can try to make some headway on it, but I'm not a mind reader. Grorp (talk)

Sorry for the COI question. I was confusing you with another editor. I was looking at the history of this and some related articles, as well as WP:ARBSCI. I tend to avoid Scientology-related articles because of the problems Wikipedians have had with such articles. The special sanctions have been rescinded, but I'm treading with care regardless.

WP:EL tends to be followed very strictly. Can we put it aside and focus on the article content?

I wrote, This article is about Delphi Schools. Heron books was deemed not notable. We shouldn't be using this as a coatrack for it.

The article should be rewritten from independent sources. If there are only a few, or none with any depth, then it will be difficult to expand beyond a stub article. --Hipal (talk) 01:26, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Apology accepted (about the COI). I'm aware there was an ARBCOM and aware it's a hot topic. However, anyone looking at my edits in this area could easily see that I edit pretty neutrally and I try very hard to stick to RS.

Heron Books was not deemed not notable. I made a judgment call that it would fit better in this article. (Honestly, it happened as tangential work because I was working on a citation of a book that was published by "a" Heron Books and it was not this Heron Books, and was looking for a wiki article to link the publisher to.) Here is the last version of the article before I turned it into a redirect. Would you prefer I put it back? I think it belongs here... with its EL. I'm quite sure there are plenty of reliable sources that could be quoted... if someone put in the work. I have other things I consider more important than to spend any more time on this particular subject (and couldn't care less if it never expanded beyond stub-like). Grorp (talk) 02:16, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

It's not notable with those refs. Best to find some WP:CORP refs first. --Hipal (talk) 16:37, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Merge proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was merge.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 03:04, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

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I propose that Delphian School be merged into Delphi Schools. Both articles are rather short, and the two organizations are closely/intimately connected. It doesn't make sense to keep them separate.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 17:39, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

We don't typically merge schools into school districts, even for non-descript smaller schools and school districts in the US such as Riverside High School (Lake City, Arkansas) and Riverside School District (Arkansas) -- these are all typically supposed to be separate articles, and it's useful to have them stay separate instead of merged. Please refer to the main discussion at Talk:Delphian School#Suggestions. Nevertheless it does make sense to improve citations in both articles. Cephalopodas (talk) 18:03, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

• • There are also some other reasons for not rushing to merge just yet. Mochmarcuz (talk) 21:38, 10 June 2025 (UTC)
• I have no clue how you came to the conclusion we don't merge small schools into school district articles. We've done exactly that as an ATD for the entire time I've been around here dating back to 2011. Granted, the merge usually only includes a redirect and insuring a listing of the school, which I would Support wholeheartedly. 4.37.252.50 (talk) 03:23, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
• I don't think we can reach a consensus for merging these two articles at the moment. Based on the citations given and the amount of press coverage for both, I believe both Delphi Schools and Delphian School are notable enough to stand on their own as separate articles. Neither article is short, and it's much better to separate articles to avoid confusion between the two entities. Plus, the School campuses section lists multiple academies across the US that could potentially have their own articles. Mochmarcuz (talk) 21:21, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Mochmarcuz, that's borderline ref bombing from directory-style websites. Cephalopodas (talk) 20:27, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

• • So you basically added a bunch of refspam, to an article that didn't need any duplicate/extra refs. None of the sources you added produced extra content. Note that just because Delphi Schools and Delphian School are separate corporate entities, doesn't carry any weight to make the articles separate when the locations, owners, managers, etc. are all the same people and places. It is common to add such closely-held corporate entities together into a single standalone article. And there is nothing notable for the other schools that couldn't be added into the same single article. Merging them together is simpler and more understandable for the reader.
    Back to the six refspams you added: the first is written by the school's director, the second is not a reliable source (just a bio, basically), the third is a primary source and off-topic, the fourth is copied data on a marketing website (non-RS), the fifth is a duplicate source used elsewhere in the article, and the sixth is just a school profile. None of these are necessary because each one was placed next to another citation which was adequate to verify the content that preceded it.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 04:39, 11 June 2025 (UTC)
    • Hey Grorp, thanks for pointing this out. Your suggestions make perfect sense. I've carefully thought about this again and have decided to go through with your suggestions. As a result, I've just merged the two articles. Thanks again! Cephalopodas (talk) 20:15, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.