Talk:Hastings High School (Minnesota)

Some ideas for improvement

 * 1) The lead paragraph is far too large compared to the overall length of the article. Things in the lead should briefly summarize later parts of the article - unfortunately, there is a large amount of info stuffed into the lead that is not described or expanded upon later.
 * 2) The tone is highly promotional. A more neutral tone would be desirable (ie, words like "incredible," "lively," "celebrated," etc, should be avoided, especially when they are sourced entirely from the school's website as described in #3.)
 * 3) All of the sources are the school's own website, which could betray WP:PRIMARY. If we take a look at Saint Paul Central High School, a comparably old MN high school, most of the references are from secondary sources like newspaper articles, which is desirable for a Wiki article. Also, some of the links are dead or have changed. The 1,800 enrollment figure, for example, appears to be less than 1,600 based on the latest data. We should also cite those enrollment and census documents directly (this is an example of when primary sources can be useful, though we could probably get those same figures from the state).
 * 4) The athletics table is disproportionately large. For an example, look at Cretin-Derham Hall High School (I know, I know...). If we include every single athletics championship at HHS over the last century as seems to be the case, it certainly appears that HHS has nearly twice as many state championships as CDH. I think we all know that is not true - because the CDH article has a very limited number of athletics programs on that table. Are Show Choir and Marching Band considered athletics programs? I'm not sure even HHS categorizes them as such.

I will say that this article is more developed than Park High School (Cottage Grove, Minnesota). However, there are parts of this article I would suggest removing entirely (participating in parades and having murals on the walls is not particularly notable, nor is the fact that art courses include band, orchestra, choir, painting, etc. The same could likely be said for the majority of high schools in the country... though again, mention of these programs in a newspaper would be helpful). For now I will restrict myself to some basic copy-editing, and we'll see where that leads. If anyone has any suggestions or objections, please raise them here. <> Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 17:51, 13 August 2017 (UTC)