Talk:Lists of schools in New Zealand

from Vfd
On 20 Feb 2005, this article was nominated for deletion. There was no consensus. See Votes for deletion/List of schools in New Zealand for a record of the discussion.
 * Can't see why this should be deleted. Is there a better page with all NZ schools listed?  & what is so special about Invercargill? GrahamBould 08:55, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Why changed?
BTW Moriori, why was Napier Girls' High School removed? Is it a school or not? If it is, it should be in the list, surely? Pedrocelli 01:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Good question. I deleted the Napier Girls' High School article, and then its name from the list. I'll restore it to the list forthwith. Moriori 02:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Invercargill?
I'm just wondering, but what is so extraordinarily special about Invercargill that its schools need a section all unto themselves (albeit at the end of the article)? Nonagonal Spider 05:59, 13 May 2007 (UTC)


 * There is no good reason why only one area should be singled out. Can someone who knows these schools please work on merging them back into the main lists in the right place?  I would but I don't know which is a Primary/Intermediate/Secondary school etc.  Otherwise it becomes a laborious task of researching each one to determine the correct sublist to place it in.  Nevertheless, it needs to be done for the page to make sense. Pedrocelli 07:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * On starting to place the Invercargill schools appropriately, I found that Bluff Community Scool and Bluff School appear to be one and the same - they have the same address. Some websites refer to one and some refer to the other but none seem to refer to both separately.  What is the official title? Pedrocelli 02:27, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

the f*ck is west park aka johnsonville west?? - mephistan 17:52, 15 May 2007 (+12)


 * Let's keep it clean or my web filter blocks this talk page! Pedrocelli 07:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Page reorganisation
The organisation of the page at present is a mess. I've sorted out the table of contents, which at least allows us to see what the current organisation is.

Should the main division be, as at present, Secondary vs Primary and Intermediate vs Various less common age divisions, or should it be by geographical area?

Whether geographical area is the main division or the secondary one, do we want to make it by Island, by Region, or by district (as the Ministry of Education site does; see for example their page listing schools in the Far North?

Should this be a simple list, with the name of the school linking to the article on that school if it exists, or do we link to the school website if we don't have an article, or do we link to both the article and the school website? Under what circumstances do we include the school email address?

My suggestion is:
 * Organise the list entirely by geography, using the district scheme that the Ministry of Education uses. Do not subdivide by secondary, primary etc schools.


 * Use a table format to list each school with the following information:
 * name linked to an article if it exists, and a redlink for secondary schools if no article exists. We don't want to encourage the writing of articles on primary or intermediate schools as these are rarely notable, so I suggest a standard of not redlinking primary/intermediate school names.
 * links to the school website and the MOE page for the school. No link to the email address is necessary. The MOE page is enough to show that the school exists.
 * Some basic information about the school: the years the school covers, e.g. 9-13; whether the school is boys/girls/coed, and perhaps whether it is state or private. The address should not be included, but perhaps the town/suburb should be. I'm not sure whether we should include the decile or the school roll. The latter might lead to excessive churn as people update their school's roll; if included we should add a comment that this is the MOE-given roll and should not be updated unless that site changes.
 * Listing of principals, mottos etc is definately not appropriate - we need to leave something for the articles.

An example for the first few Far North schools:

Suggestions would be welcome.- gadfium 01:40, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * This is excellent. One small tweak - suggest link all school names, whether article exists or not. Automatically indicates if article exists, & where it is lacking. GrahamBould 12:26, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I've reorganised the article, and have completed the table for more than half of the Far North schools. I can see that the size of the article will be excessive when I'm done, so I think I'll have to split off each region into List of schools in Northland, etc, and link to them from this page. I hope to complete a district a day for the next couple of weeks.- gadfium 05:21, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Further improvements
I'm about to start phase two, which will involve creating a redirect from each school article that doesn't already exist to the local community, and add a paragraph on the school to the community article. For secondary schools with a substantial history or third party sources, I will create articles on the schools as well. See New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board for an earlier discussion of this proposal.- gadfium 22:34, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

I have now implemented "phase two" for all the school in List of schools in Northland, New Zealand. Before I started, there was one school in this district with an article - Northland College (Kaikohe). Now, there are no redlinks in the list. I didn't actually create any school articles - all the other schools are redirects to the nearest community or town. For secondary and composite schools, I marked the redirect as R with possibilities.

I used fairly crude bot-generated text to add information about each school to the community and town articles. Where I could find a little more information, I added an extra sentence or two about the school. When there was more than one school in a particular town, I mixed up the bot-generated text a bit to make it flow a little better.

For communities without articles, I wrote stub or start articles, and in a few cases articles which might be B-class. That's 33 new articles about the smaller communities of the Far North district, and they're all referenced and many are illustrated. Two of these made the main page DYK section: Whangaroa Harbour and Houhora, although I didn't nominate any myself. I separated out Category:Far North District from Category:Northland, New Zealand.

Any feedback would be welcome at this point.

This is the first of 73 territorial authorities, and it took me almost four weeks. I don't intend to proceed strictly from north to south - I'll tackle Thames-Coromandel District next - but it's going to be a while before I get down to Southland. Some areas will be quicker than others, because for some areas, such as Taranaki and Otago, we have a greater number of articles on the small rural communities already.

Once I have finished all the districts in a particular list, I'll consider putting the list up for featured list status. I thought adding a clickable map of all the communities and towns in the region which have schools (red dots for communities with only primary; blue dots for communities with composite or secondary schools) might be a worthwhile addition to the lists, but I haven't yet investigated what facilities Wikipedia provides to allow me to do this. This might be a map for each district, or a map for the region as a whole.- gadfium 00:25, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Now finished List of schools in Waikato, New Zealand, with 12 start or stub class articles on communities created (I'm counting Opoutere as a new article because the stub that was there before was so minimal) and improvements to several existing articles. That's 2/73 in five weeks.- gadfium 03:19, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Completed List of schools in Northland, New Zealand, with 11 start or B class articles written on communities, and substantial enlargements to 4 existing articles. There was a single school in the area with an existing article which was slightly improved. Progress so far: 3/73 in two months.- gadfium 01:53, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Completed List of schools in Northland, New Zealand, with 28 articles written. This completes the Northland list, which I'll put up for peer review shortly with the aim of getting it to featured list status.- gadfium 05:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)