Wikipedia:Peer review/The Avery Coonley School/archive1

The Avery Coonley School

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to continue to improve it and potentially nominate it for GA review if it has enough potential.

Thanks, Nasty Housecat (talk) 02:56, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is well-written, stable, generally verifiable, nicely illustrated, and seems comprehensive. I enjoyed reading about this fascinating school. I think the article is nearly ready for GAN and has a bright future. The main problems that I detect are a tendency to stress the honorific a bit too much and a tendency to use educational jargon here and there; those tendencies roughly correlate with the internal or self-published Avery Coonley School documents. (Many of User:LonelyBeacon's comments on the article's talk page express similar concerns.) I did a bit of minor copyediting (such as adding hyphens to compound adjectives) as I went along; please revert anything you thing was an error on my part. Here are some other comments and suggestions:

• Unless "The" is part of the formal name of the school, "Avery Coonley School" would be a better title for the article. One of the guidelines for article title formatting says, "Avoid definite and indefinite articles: Do not place definite or indefinite articles (the, a and an) at the beginning of titles unless they are part of a proper name (e.g. The Old Man and the Sea) or otherwise change the meaning (e.g. The Crown)." Since you refer to the school as "The Avery Coonley School" and "the Avery Coonley School" in the text, I wasn't sure which was the formal name.

Y The formal name is "The Avery Coonley School". The article is always used.

• The images need alt text for readers who can't see the images. Alt text should not simply duplicate the captions. If you imagine an audience of people who rely on a machine to read the alt text aloud, you will see how to write these. WP:ALT has details. The alt text checker at the top of this review page shows the alt text and the captions, and the pink boxes indicate that alt text is missing. I eventually noticed that you had written alt text but that the computer syntax was slightly off; it has to be alt= rather than alt = or it doesn't work. (This tripped me up too a month or so ago; that's how I learned to recognize the problem.) I fixed two of these and left the rest for you.

Y Done. Thanks. I would have never figured that out.

• The link checker tool at the top of this review page finds a dead url in one of the citations.

Y Fixed.

Founding and Cottage School (1906–1915)

• "Mrs. Coonley sought to enroll her four year old daughter in the Riverside School... " - Generally Wikipedia avoids "Mr.", "Miss", and "Mrs." WP:SURNAME has details. It uses full name on first use and last-name-only on subsequent uses unless it's necessary to use the full name to distinguish between people with the same last name. In this case, it makes sense to use Queene Ferry Coonley on the second use in "industrialist and publisher Avery Coonley. Queene Ferry Coonley had become interested... ", but after that "Coonley" would be preferred to Mrs. Coonley.

Y Done.

Junior Elementary School

• "Demolished in 1944, the land was sold and later donated to create what would become Fishel Park." - The land wasn't demolished. Suggestion: "The building was demolished in 1944, and the land was sold and later donated to create what would become Fishel Park."

Y Done.

Gifted education

• "The kindergarten reading program and was the first step in Avery Coonley's transition to a new focus on the education of the gifted." - Delete "and"? Or possibly a whole phrase is missing?
• "At the same time, the school began adapting the curriculum to the address the special challenges and abilities of gifted learners." - Delete "the" from "to the address"?

Y Deleted extra "and" and "the."

1929 building

• Wikilink ecosystem and Great Horned Owl and octahedron?

Y Done

• Academic program
• The capital letters in the Building Block paragraph seem overdone. I'd incline towards "building block", "appreciation of the individual" and so on, treating them as common nouns. Ditto for "drama program" in the paragraph above.\

Y Done

Technology

• Wikilink tablet computer and other technical terms like intranet in this section?

Y Done.

References

• Citation 12 should include the publisher, Avery Coonley School. Since the document cited is essentially self-published by the subject of the article, its reliability might be questioned at GAN per WP:RS. It's not certain that a document published by any school (or other entity) about itself will be neutral; university public-relations departments, for example, typically stress the positive and play down the negative. One possible way to head off non-RS objections would be to substitute RS sources for non-RS if you can.

Y Done. The book itself is well referenced to reliable sources. I will try to substitute some of the original sources as I obtain them.

• Citations such as citation 29 to books should include date and place of publication, the edition number (if multiple editions exist), and either the ISBN or OCLC numbers. You can find missing information via WorldCat.

Y Done. I had the impression this was optional. Is that not correct?

Date of publication is too important to omit; place of publication is probably less so. Depending on the reviewer, mention of multiple editions might not be noticed. At GAN, a missing ISBN will likely be noticed, though the OCLC question might not arise. If you ever take this to FAC, you can expect the scrutiny to be more thorough. I think it's wise (and helpful to readers) to routinely include all these little details even in stub-class articles. Finetooth (talk) 23:05, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. It is not clear from WP:CITE (and especially WP:CITEHOW) what is expected. But it is just as easy to do it as not. I will make it a practice in the future.Nasty Housecat (talk) 23:55, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Other

• Has the school ever been criticized as elitist? Too white? Too rich? If so, this should be included in the article.

YNot in any of the reliable sources I researched.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 20:38, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the very through and detailed review, and the careful copyedit, as well. Your comments were very helpful and have helped me better understand some of the nuances of editing good articles here. I certainly appreciate the time you put into it. I will ponder on how to address the "honorific" tone and come back to that later. I have strived to maintain NPOV, but it must not entirely read that way.

I feel the article should be ready for GAN at this point and have listed it for review. I hope a reviewer comes along someday soon. The backlog in Education articles is something like two months now.

Thanks again for your kind attention.Nasty Housecat (talk) 23:55, 23 January 2010 (UTC)