Talk:St Peter's College, Auckland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flag St Peter's College, Auckland is part of WikiProject New Zealand, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of New Zealand and New Zealand-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Low This article has been rated as low-importance on the importance scale.
Assessment comments
WikiProject Schools This article is related to WikiProject Schools, an attempt to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale.
Schools Portal
Low This article has been rated as Low-Importance within Schools.

[edit] Notes and references

Are the notes and references too long? I noticed they take up about half of the page. jj137 15:23, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Several of the notes quote extraordinarily long passages. For example, note 195 appears to quote pages 33–44 (or a substantial portion of those pages) from John Tamihere's Black and White. This is excessive in my view. --Mrwojo 22:43, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, footnotes should generally only be there to provide a cite, or to provide a couple of sentences of incidental information, at most. I've begun to remove many of the longer direct quotations, leaving the cites in place. Oli Filth(talk) 17:56, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi All. The article itself is not too long and is factual and unexceptional. The footnotes, firstly, verify all the factual content in the article. Secondly, the footnotes provide detail on interesting aspects of the school. The overall intention is to provide a balanced and well verified view of the school for those who really want to find out about it. Felix Donnelly and John Tamihere have written in some detail about the school as it was in different periods and from radically different points of view, each relating their own different family, social and cultural contexts to their life at the school. I have thought about transferring a lot more from the footnotes to the article itself. But the article would certainly then become too long, would be less objective, and would probably alienate those who want a more factual, superficial view of the school. I note that the wikipedia approach to articles seems to be that the article should be only the length necessary, but that much more latitude is permissable for footnotes. Rick570(talk) 21:31, 25 September 2007 (UTC).

Hi,
The article body alone is well over 70kB long, which is double the typical recommended length for an article. Even disregarding the footnote issue, the article really should be edited down to an appropriate length (see WP:SIZE). Whilst I don't doubt the effort it's taken to research all this material, simply dumping everything that you can possibly find into the edit box doesn't lead to a readable, useful encyclopaedia article.
As for the footnotes, there are several problems with them, which is why I took the opportunity to cull them:
  • They're very difficult to read - no-one is going to attempt to read the 200-odd lines of small-font text that some of the footnotes currently are.
  • They make the article body very difficult to edit.
  • Directly quoting huge chunks of text is probably a copyright violation.
  • Directly quoting huge chunks of text is really not necessary - a citation is more than enough in the vast majority of cases, quoting the original text doesn't make the material any more verifiable.
If readers want to find out more, then they can refer to the cited material - that is the purpose of citations. It isn't the purpose of an encyclopaedia to exhibit all material that exists about a particular subject; instead, it should be a neat, concise summary, with appropriate pointers for where to find out more.
Regards, Oli Filth(talk) 22:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Oli Filth that the footnotes are too long. The solution is not to delete them, but to move content. Some of the content is at least as suitable for other articles as it is for this one. Most of the material on the prison riot should go to Mount Eden Prison, and on the station to Boston Road Train Station. Some material should go to a new article, Congregation of Christian Brothers in New Zealand. In general, more of the content should be in the text and less in the footnotes because it is more accessible that way, although I take the point that the article may become less readable. Some of the very long quotes may have to be culled for copyright reasons.

Rick570, you are probably best placed to move the material, if you agree with the idea.-gadfium 01:40, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Once again, I've removed some of the ridiculously-long direct quotations, as there is absolutely no justification for them, and they are problematic, as described above. The non-quotation footnotes should be considered at some point, as User:gadfium has suggested. Regards, Oli Filth(talk) 17:17, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with most of the deletions made by User:Oli Filth because of the copyright issue. The contributions on the station and the riot are the school's view of the events and should remain as they are. The riot and the circumstances leading to the opening of the station could be very succinctly referred to in the other appropriate articles, Thanks, Rick570 (talk22:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree that a lot of the material can be cut out of the footnotes. I will do it when I get time, thanks to User:Oli Filth and User:gadfium. Regards, talk23.13, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Wonderful job on this article - very comprehensive. Simply rewording and moving some content to other articles (as mentioned above) would bring the article size down. Also agree with Oli Filth that the article should be a neat and concise summary. Goldfinger820 (talk) 01:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)