Wikipedia:Peer review/Davidson High School (New South Wales)/archive1

Davidson High School (New South Wales)

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for June 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I believe that it deserves a good ranking. It has no major problems and there is appropriate referencing for all sections. The History is clear and comprehensive. All sections are clear and written for an outside reader with no technical descriptions or badly written parts to them. The article itsef is an appropriate length and not too long for a reader and not too short so as not to leave the reader wanting. The article has requests for further assessment on Wikiproject Schools and Wikiproject Australia. There currently is no non-selective non-private School Article that has achieved a ranking higher than a 'B' class regardless of importance.

Davidson High School itself is quite notable for having done some controversial dance pieces in the Rock Eisteddfod several years ago. It also counts among its alumi as diverse a range of people as Nine Network Journalist, Tara Brown, former NSW Politician and Shadow Minister, Andrew Humpherson and two members of the 1980s/90s bannd INXS: Andrew Farriss, and Michael Hutchence, who actually met each other while at the school and formed their band.

I'd like to get some feedback on how the flow of the article is and how the sections are written. I would also like to see whether this article is referenced properly and whether some sections either need expansion or cutting down.

Even if this article still does not meet the requirements of 'GA' status, I feel that it is important to get some feedback and and some responses from more experienced editors on how we can give the article that rating some time in the future.

Thanks again, Stravin (talk) 07:51, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a start but has a long way to go to meet basic Wikipedia standards. Davidson seems to be an interesting school with students who do interesting things. I found the material about the satiric plays fetching and wouldn't have minded hearing more. I was curious about the changing motto; I'd like to know the reasoning behind these motto changes. On the other hand, I found the material about the senior staff and the student leadership to be boilerplate stuff without the kind of specific detail that would make it memorable.

Also, I must note that the Wikipedia Manual of Style at WP:MOS is a great resource, though it takes quite a while to master it. I see many places in the article that violate the Wikipedia style guidelines. I'll list a few of these below.

• WP:LEAD says the ideal summary of a Wikipedia article should be a summary or abstract of the rest of the article. A good rule of thumb is to at least mention the main idea in each of the text sections and to avoid including material in the lead that is not developed in any text section. The existing lead is an introductory paragraph rather than a true lead.

• MOS:HEAD says that unless a section head contains proper nouns, only the first letter of the first word should be capitalized. Thus "Senior Staff" should be "Senior staff". The style manual also suggests using heads that are unique within a page; thus "Season of Performing Arts" would be better as "Season" to avoid repeating "Performing arts".

• MOS:QUOTE says to use blockquotes only for quotations that take up four or more lines on a computer screen. Shorter quotations simply appear in the main text inside quotation marks.

• MOS:ITALICS advises against putting quotations in italics.

• WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists advises against using lists "if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs". The houses of Davidson High School, for example, could easily be included in the sentence about them rather than in a list.

• Instead of appending Mr. or Ms. to names, Wikipedia style is to simply use the full name; e.g. Chris Bonnor.

• Although I've learned a lot by studying the Manual of Style, I've learned even more by looking at examples of successful articles. You can find a list of education-related articles with Good Article (GA) status in the Education wing of WP: GA#Social_sciences_and_society. I see several articles about high schools in the list. Looking at several of these high-school articles will give you an idea of what's possible and what other editors have done to solve the problems of content, layout, and illustration.

I hope these few suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 23:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)