How many students go to Hogwarts?

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C6196
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: How many students go to Hogwarts?
Reply To: [Yahoo! #6174] Re: How many students go to Hogwarts?
Date: 8/8/00 1:48 am  (ET)

> Catlady, deciding on pure speculation that there are 800 to 1000
students at Hogwarts.

If I were some of the people who used to be on hpa, I would now announce
that you had flamed me and I would therefore unsub from this list. I was
going to tell you that in a private message, but you kept your private
@dress off your profile so I can't.

> And this would be based on . . . ??? what, what you want it be? It
makes no sense. There is not one shred of evidence in JKR's books to
support the contention that there are that many students.

There are at least two shreds of evidence, which various people quoted
in exact words with page or chapter numbers in previous posts. One
is the big Gryffindor/Slytherin Quidditch match, where the audience is
discribed as 200 people in Slytherin green and the other three-quarters in
Gryffindor red, which adds up to 800, which divided by 4 Houses is 200,
and divided by 7 years is 114.28etc per year (so I rounded a little,
so sue me). The other is when Harry first entered Hogwarts Great Hall
to be Sorted, there were 'hundreds' of students in the Great Hall.

More recently, a further shred of evidence was posted, dealing with
the number and seating capacity of the boats and carriages that convey
students from the Hogwarts Express to the castle.

Already this evening I unsuccessfully scrolled through over 1000 posts
on the archive looking for the message in which I had posted the URLs
for photos of two castles in Scotland that Nick on hpa had suggested
were models for Hogwarts. (I ended up getting them from hpa, which is on
e-groups which has a Search function.) I am damned if I am going to go
through 6100 of them looking for old messages about How Many Students
in Hogwarts. That's what the FAQ committee, which I much regret that I
do not have time to join, is for.

> The only information that goes in a FAQ is that which is directly
derivable (even if disputed)from the Harry Potter books,

As I am not on the FAQ committee, I don't get a vote, but in my opinion,
the FAQs should list the message numbers of ALL the popular answers to
a question, even if there are disagreeing answers.