Wikipedia:Peer review/List of schools in Northland, New Zealand/archive1

List of schools in Northland, New Zealand

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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 May 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I intend to nominate it for featured list. The main list is comprehensive for all schools currently open and recognised by the Ministry of Education. The rolls and decile ratings change each year. I last updated them in January and intend to update them once a year. For each school, the information in the table can be verified using the MOE link, and very occasionally if the MOE website is not up to date, using the link to decile updates in the references section. Very few of the schools on the list have their own article; the links are redirects to the local town, suburb or community, which includes a paragraph on the school. I created 72 articles on such communities, some of them stubs, most start-class, and a few B-class.

It is not practical to add a photo of every school, and attempting to do so would greatly increase the size of the article while adding little value. I believe the map of secondary education locations is sufficient to illustrate the article. I had planned to produce a map of all localities with at least a primary school, but the number of locations would have necessitated a much larger map, or much smaller text, and the present map seemed like a suitable compromise.

I'm not sure whether the incomplete lists of closed schools should remain in this article or be split off. I am not aware of any comprehensive and reliable source which lists closed schools for before 1999, so I have pieced these lists together from the lists that are comprehensive for schools closed since 1999, and the material in several books written on local history of the communities.

Thanks, gadfium 08:35, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a good start. But, why not leave the names of schools unwikied unless they have their own articles. For instance, Kaitaia College, Kaitaia Intermediate and Kaitaia School are all redirects to Kaitaia the town which is not really helpful if you are looking for info on any of those schools. Might prompt people to actually create articles about each school tho! Cheers. Kaiwhakahaere (talk) 09:11, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Kaitaia has a section "Education", which does contain information on all those schools. Would it be better if the redirects went directly to the section? The redirects for secondary and composite schools are marked as {{R with possibilities}}, but we don't want people to create articles on primary and intermediate schools unless there is something particularly notable about that school.-gadfium 09:54, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think putting a link somewhere to each of the districts might be a good idea, casual readers might not know what area the Far North etc covers. Maybe highlight on map too. - SimonLyall (talk) 11:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a link and a brief explanation of location to each district. At present, there is no separate article on Whangarei District, which is a redirect to Whangarei, but I'll separate them out tonight.-gadfium 19:32, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Whangarei District now done.-gadfium 05:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A map showing district boundaries would be good, but I'm not good with graphics. If anyone would like to edit a copy of Image:NZ-Northland plain map.png to add the boundaries and upload the copy (preferably to commons) with a new name, I'll change the article to make use of it.-gadfium 05:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

From Shudde edit

Hey it looks pretty good. I'll try and give constructive feedback where I can.

You use the term "Far North region" in the lead, is it possible to either link this, or add a footnote to give a more precise description of where that is?
I think the two single sentence paragraph's in the lead (the second and fourth) could be merged with the third paragraph.
Could you link primary and secondary schools? Definitely the correct terms to use but not all English speakers will know what the difference is?
See you describe Far North further down, hmmm, not sure how to have that info earlier.
Should the 1-8 be using ndashes? (1–8)?
May want to have footnotes explaining difference between state, state integrated and private.
MOE? Explain.
How do the figures for the roll work? Could it be displayed somewhere when they were update. Those figures must be fairly dynamic, so this is important.
I hate red links. I wouldn't oppose a FLC nomination because of them, but maybe a post to the NZ Noticeboard could speed up creating those articles.
For curiosities sake, why are there no private schools in Northland?
To really top the article off, maybe a photo of a school from each region? Again, maybe a post to the NZ Noticeboard could help with this.

Anyway apart from those things (which are all quite minor) I think the list is great and should meet the FL criteria. - Shudde ^talk 06:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added the links you suggest in the lede, and combined paragraphs. I've changed the year ranges to use ndashes (except in the school name "Hukerenui School Years 1-8", and in the titles of books).

I'll explain state/state integrated/private tomorrow (although I have made an attempt to explain state integrated in the lede), also MOE and roll.

The only red links are in the sections on closed schools. Should I remove the links, since these are localities which are not large enough (or isolated enough) to have their own primary schools by current government standards, and are very low priority for Wikipedia articles?

I had thought that if I moved the closed schools to their own article, I'd use a table format to display them. I don't want to do that in this article because the tables would be too similar to the formatting of the current schools.-gadfium 10:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed links to localities which no longer have schools and don't have their own article, ie redlinks.-gadfium 22:01, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I point out in the lede that there are two private schools in Northland. It would be original research to try to explain why there aren't more or less than this.

I certainly could provide a photo of a single school in each district. However, the photos would constrict the tables on smaller screens. I'd have to expand the introductory paragraph for each section to be as long as needed to cover the photo, and I don't think there's enough to say without waffling.-gadfium 09:58, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've now added footnotes to the table column headers to explain the meanings of MOE, Years, Authority, Roll and Decile .-gadfium 02:22, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Brian NZ edit

Nice Article really, I believe. However, perhaps the terms MOE and Decile could be explained; a Kiwi, should know the terms, but the international readers of pedia? Just food for thought! :) Brian | (Talk) 22:15, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added footnotes to the table column headers to explain the meanings of MOE, Years, Authority, Roll and Decile .-gadfium 02:22, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]