Talk:Doreen Bird/Archive 1

Notability seems borderline at best. I'm tempted to propose deletion... --Jaysweet 20:26, 9 July 2007 (UTC) I've since been convinced of notability, and the cleanup effort seems to be going well. --Jaysweet 15:58, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Removal of {unreferenced} and {cleanup} tags
Moved from article page:

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PAGE IS CURRENTLY BEING RE-WRITTEN AND EXPANDED TO INCLUDE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF DOREEN BIRD (Dance Teacher). MY KNOWLEDGE OF WIKIPEDIA IS VERY LIMITED SO ANY ASSISTANCE IN IMPROVING THE PRESENTATION OF THIS PAGE WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crazy-dancing (talk • contribs)

Move from article page: All information laid out in this article can be sourced directly from publications or other sources authored by both the University of Greenwich - (click here for an example)and The Bird College of Dance & Theatre Performance - if you have any doubt concerning the accuracy of any information featured in this article, please contact the college on 020 8300 3031 or via info@birdcollege.co.uk. It is the full intention of the contributor to find suitable reference material for all this information and add these into the article text in due course. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crazy-dancing (talk • contribs)

Today's edit and a couple questions/pointers for Crazy-dancing
Well. In an attempt to prove that, if nothing else, I'm willing to do more than tag a page and armchair quarterback editing, I made some to this article today. Here's a summary, mostly for Crazy-dancer's benefit.
 * ISTD article already exists. I linked it.
 * Cleaned up some language.
 * Removed comment about the junior school closing; more appropriate for the article for the school itself, likely broken into a history section.
 * Added links to other Wikipedia Articles.
 * Moved external links into a section at the bottom of the page.
 * Cleaned up some language and a typo or two.
 * Cleaned up the links and titled them.
 * Added some uncited tags; I'm by no means an expert at this.
 * Question: she was appointed an examiner of the branches of what? The ISTD?
 * Article still needs to be broken into sections and fleshed out. Section suggestions (when you have the information to fill them) - Early Life, Career (including any stage career she may have had), the school (with a link to the main article placed inline with this article), personal life, awards and honors, references.  See: Gene Kelly for example.
 * I removed the "Miss Bird"'s as well. To me, that impacts NPOV.  Recognizing, however, that I'm not an expert on British English, perhaps there is some significance in calling her Miss more than the fact that it's a mild (and unnecessary) honorific?
 * Suggest you reference the Doreen Bird Charitable Foundation IF you can cite it and it's notability. I see mention of it in the press release.
 * Some web sources I found:
 * http://www.istd.org/about/autobiographys/dbird.html - as an autobiography, probably a questionable reference point


 * http://www.mamma-mia.com/london/cast_NIAFISHER.asp?sec=cast - this is more for your work on 'notable people' for the school article.


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Lee - notable person...maybe?


 * It really appears to me that the school is far more notable than the woman herself. This isn't a sleight against your friend, but I think it would be rough for anyone to argue against the school's notability after looking through all the Yahoo! hits that it gets.
 * Reformatted some numbers. See Manual of Style: Dates & Numbers.
 * Removed the cleanup and wikify tags that I placed this morning. If any other (more experienced) editors are reading this, I'm curious as to input.  With my edits, did they need to remain?  I'm looking for feedback.
 * The flow of the article, small though it is as the moment, still doesn't read well to me. But I'm at a loss for what to do about that at this point.

Ciao! Douglasmtaylor 01:48, 13 July 2007 (UTC)


 * It is definitely an improvement with the Wikify and cleanup. The ISTD heading still looks weird, maybe it should be a section header instead?
 * In any case, I applaud you for getting involved! Too often, I am guilty of just "tag[ging] a page and armchair quarterback editing," as you eloquently put it ;D  It still needs more references, though, of course...  But good work! --Jaysweet 15:57, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
 * The ISTD heading wasn't my work. ;)  But I did rearrange things today.  Crazy-dancer, if you're reading this...I'm as new an editor 'round here as you are, trust me.  What I do to figure out how to do things is read the links you've been given to some extent...but also....really, I just find a nicely formatted article, pull up it's edit source and then mock it.  So, when I linked Gene Kelly above, that's sort of what I'm using as a basis for this.  I think that the article has a much better flow as I've reformatted it currently.  So, for instance, you used a horizontal line.  But if you place a section header, it already throws one in for you.  Also, you should avoid linking section titles.  Makes a prettier article.  Douglasmtaylor 20:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Assessment
Excellent photos, the sections that are there are good, but a bit too much missing for B-class. Things to look into or add: Born or grew up how, where? Family: parents, siblings? Early life - how did she decide to go into dance? Studied where? Personal life - married, children? How did she become so respected; what was "her work in the field of dance"? Was it mainly founding the studio? Then write a bit more about that, how did she do it, how did it grow, why is it respected, etc. Side note: "one of Sidcup's most notable residents." ... err ... have you ever heard of "damning with faint praise"? ;-) --AnonEMouse (squeak) 20:36, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your assessment, I'm really pleased that you have given me some positive comments and that I've at least provided enough information to be classed above a stub, especially considering that much of the information I have is very sketchy and too unreliable to include. Is a shame that there's very little else that I can add at this stage as I need to do a lot of research before I can take this much further. Will try and tweak the current article as much as possible to improve it in the ways you suggest. Also, again, just to thank the people who have given lots of help with the article, the end result as it stands is fantastic and the article represents a great tribute to a wonderful woman who lots of people respected and loved. Thanks! Crazy-dancing 12:04, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 14:58, 9 November 2007 (UTC)