Wikipedia:Peer review/Aquinas College, Perth/archive2

Aquinas College, Perth

Article has undergone major renovations - new sections - more pics, please leave comments below, and post new comments at the bottom of the page, thanks Smbarnzy 10:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Peripitus

Nice article with lots of good work gone in... does need some more work and appears to have grown a bit out of control.

Dates should either be unlinked or completely linked - I found 31 January 1894 which should be 31 January 1894 for date preferences to work. Don't use leading indefinite articles for dates, the 31 January 1894 should be 31 January 1894
~~needs non-breaking spaces between numbers to prevent linewrap so 165 acre should be 165&nbsp ;acre~~
In places the article is overreferenced. A sentence like The Brothers were invited to the new colony by Bishop Matthew Gibney who knew of the work of the Brothers in Australia, Ireland and England. only needs one reference rather than the 6 I can see...lots more examples in the article. Pick the most reliable reference and remove the rest, leaving only one reference per sentence(or paragraph) unless there is a compelling reason for more.* References for websites all seem to go to the same page - they cannot be easily checked as the reference needs to point to the page being referenced.
Repeating Hesperian's comments from the last peer review; ask your local public library to get you a copy of Massam, Katharine (1998) On High Ground: Images of One Hundred Years at Aquinas College, Western Australia. And while you're at it, see if you can track down a copy of Florey, Cecil (2000), Canning Bridge to Clontarf: An Historical Journey Along Manning Road. Printed references are king and for a subject like Aquinas college available and far more useful than weblinks.
Per Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout the last few sections are in an unusual order. References should be before External links and usually the school infoboxes near the end of the article are placed after the external links section.
The Building Program, Educational facilties and Sporting facilities sections should be converted to prose as much as possible rather than the current dot point list form. I also think that much of the information in these sections should be dropped and just significant points, buildings and programs left, there are too many lists detailing minutae. College uniform is probably a section the article does not need at all. At most a sentence or two on the uniform unless there is something especially noted about it.
Some wording that needs culling and sentences rewriting for clarity. Better to have less words with the same meaning

Originally all of the staff at the college were Christian Brothers, but gradually over time they have been replaced by lay-teachers should probably be

~~At its foundation all the college staff were Christian Brothers, today many of them are lay-teachers.~~

A large number of the buildings and sporting fields at Aquinas are named in tribute to notable and significant people in the College's foundations and history. should probably be

~~Many Aquinas buildings and sporting fields are named after people significant in its foundation and history~~

~~many projects -> projects, The college offers a wide range of academic subjects and courses for students to participate in -> The college offers a range of academic pursuits for students~~

sentences need to be combined into flowing paragraphs. In too many sections there are one/two sentence paragraphs.

- Peripitus (Talk) 12:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Rob Lindsey

Thanks to smbarnzy for inviting me to put in my two cents about the Aquinas College article. On the whole, this is an extremely well-researched article that smbarnzy and a small group of wikipedians can be quite proud of. This article was getting way out of hand a couple of months ago (too long, and too many related pages), but there’s been a lot of great work done to get this under control. Everything I’ve written below are expressions of personal preferences, and apart from my first suggestion, none of them are major issues.

On first sight, the most obvious problem is the referencing, where a statement is followed by up to six endnote numbers. I think I understand why this happened (that is, to back up the article’s claims as much as possible). However, if the sources cited are indeed reliable, this should not be necessary, and honestly it looks a little ugly. See my suggestion for rectifying this below.

The History section is fine, but could do with some refinement (mainly due to the ‘playful’ nature of history-telling in some of the sources – for example, WA was certainly not a ‘new colony’ in any sense of the word, even in 1894). First up, while the first picture (the plaque) is entirely appropriate, I feel that the plaque tells us nothing that the text doesn’t cover, whereas another picture might throw some extra light on the subject. If an image from the school’s earlier days could be sourced (an early sports team/class group perhaps), it’d bring this section to life.

The chronology of Aquinas’ foundation is not presented in an optimal manner. I worked it out, but was quite confused initially, because the paragraph is side-tracked by the foundation of Trinity College. Keep all the content, but Aquinas’ foundation and Prendiville’s quote need to be moved up to the end of the sentence “In 1937…Salter Point”.

The ‘Recent Years’ section feels a little stilted, and requires a re-write. The 2005-06 events are unreferenced at this point, and the 2005 sentence is vague and non-descriptive (what construction took place, what is this ‘masterplan’, and why is it significant?). I’ve noticed the ‘Building Programme’ section below: as a list (as opposed to the preferred Wikipedia prose), this could be deleted, and used to fix the ‘Recent Years’ section. The other option is to remove this masterplan reference in the ‘Recent Years’ section, but write up a similar prose paragraph for the ‘Building Programme’ section.

Something about the other two lists doesn’t sit right with me either, but I couldn’t suggest a better way of doing these sections at the moment. Lists do have their place in Wikipedia articles at times, I suppose.

Nothing else stands out, although I couldn’t spot any comments on the nature of the school community itself. The $10,000-a-year fee makes Aquinas look like a fairly elite College to me, and I’m wondering if there’s been any commentary on its place within the WA education system. Related pieces of info would include: where does the College get most of its students from (nearby suburbs, well-off families, Catholic families)? Also, has the College’s reputation and/or sources of students changed throughout its history (ie. did it used to be a more ‘working-class’ school, for example?)

In general throughout the article, I have spotted quite a few awkward sentences and minor spelling/grammatical errors, and I will correct some of these.

Summary of possible ‘To-Dos’ (and a couple of extra thoughts):

~~fix the over-referencing. Exactly what Peripitus said above.~~ ~~For each reference with multiple-cited sources, choose one and stick with it (perhaps the most publicly available source would be appropriate).~~
~~include a bibliography.~~
rewrite the ‘Recent Years’ section.
Perhaps find an old photo (preferably with people, not more buildings). Copyright use for such photos may be obtained by the College itself (the Katharine Massam book referenced in this article, “On High Ground”, sounds perfect for this purpose), but you’ll have to ask another wikipedian about how best to go about this.
Perhaps more info on student demographics, and/or the school’s reputation or status in the WA education system.
Remove the ‘See Also’ section – The linked list is covered by one of the categories for this article (Schools in Western Australia). Also, I’m sure you can put in the words ‘Tertiary Entrance Exam’ or ‘TEE’ somewhere in the ‘Senior School’ section, and Wiki-link that.
~~Notable alumni: there are a lot of notable people here. I’ve noticed some schools split this up into categories (sportsmen, politicians, religious, etc.), and this might be an option here.~~

Rob Lindsey 12:18, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Automated Review

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.^[?]]
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 1500meters, use 1500 meters, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 1500 meters.^[?]
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), please spell out source units of measurements in text; for example, the Moon is 380,000 kilometres (240,000 mi) from Earth.^[?] Specifically, an example is 11 km.
When writing standard abbreviations, the abbreviations should not have a 's' to demark plurality (for example, change kms to km and lbs to lb).
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), avoid capitalizing words in section headings unless they are proper nouns or the first word of the heading.^[?]
Please make the spelling of English words consistent with either American or British spelling, depending upon the subject of the article. Examples include: honour (B) (American: honor), meter (A) (British: metre), metre (B) (American: meter), recognise (B) (American: recognize), isation (B) (American: ization), enrollment (A) (British: enrolment), program (A) (British: programme).
Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “~~All~~ pigs are pink, so we thought of ~~a number of~~ ways to turn them green.”
- “In ~~the year [of]~~ 2000”
As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]^[?]
Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Smbarnzy 14:27, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Automated Review 2

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.^[?]
Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 50 metre, use 50 metre, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 50 metre.^[?]
~~Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), when doing conversions, please use standard abbreviations: for example, miles -> mi, kilometers squared -> km², and pounds -> lb.^[?]~~
When writing standard abbreviations, the abbreviations should not have a 's' to demark plurality (for example, change kms to km and lbs to lb).
Please make the spelling of English words consistent with either American or British spelling, depending upon the subject of the article. Examples include: honour (B) (American: honor), meter (A) (British: metre), metre (B) (American: meter), recognise (B) (American: recognize), isation (B) (American: ization), enrollment (A) (British: enrolment), program (A) (British: programme).
Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
- “In ~~the year [of]~~ 2000”
As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]^[?]
Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Smbarnzy 12:42, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]