Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Stuyvesant High School/archive2

Stuyvesant High School
After many problems with previous revisions were addressed, I would like to resubmit this article for featured status - it is definitely up-to-par.--Zxcvbnm 03:36, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Link to previous nomination is here.
 * Object. 1) Lacks an explicit references section, and the embedded HTML links need to be converted into full citations as per WP:CITE. 2) The article has multiple single sentence paragraphs that need to be combined with each other or other adjacent paragraphs. 3) A single paragraph lead is too short. WP:LEAD recommends three paragraphs for an article over 30K in size. 4) The list of alumni killed during the September 11, 2001 attacks needs to be reworked to comply with Wikipedia is not a memorial. 5) The external links not being used inplace of footnotes need to be thinned as per External links. --Allen3 talk 03:57, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Any comments on the content? Pcb21 Pete 16:18, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Done, following suggestions by Tito below. RossPatterson 05:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 2) Zxcvbnm has cleaned up several of these. The others appear to be standalone thoughts that probably bear expanding rather than coalescing with other paragraphs. RossPatterson 01:46, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
 * There are still a number of examples of single sentence paragraphs left in the History and Academics sections. --Allen3 talk 17:20, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 3) Agreed. I have rewritten the intro and I think it does a better job of summarizing the article. RossPatterson 02:30, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Object, per Allen3. RyanG e rbil10 04:57, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment: I don't want to offer a vote either way, but regardless how the nomination goes (and, if the last two are any indication, it may not go so well) I think the Stuyvesant article is the best high school article on Wikipedia, and, perhaps with some work, will definitely become a FA. --DanielNuyu 06:07, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment Why does the school have two different newspapers? Шизомби 06:46, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * It has had more than that at times, they tend to take different perspectives and serve different readership groups. RossPatterson 05:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment: Years (as opposed to full dates) and decades are linked; please delink them, as per WP's policy. Tony 11:29, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. RossPatterson 13:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Object due to the needs-fixing reference section and linked years. As an aside to Daniel, I'd personally swing towards Caulfield Grammar School currently as it's the only FA thusfar. Staxringold 11:56, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Year links done. RossPatterson 13:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * References done, following suggestions by Tito below. RossPatterson 05:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Stax: Caulfield's article is indeed impressive; I was not aware of that article (or school for that matter). Thanks for the info. --DanielNuyu 05:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I've just finished reading Caulfield Grammar School and the comments from its successful FAC nomination and the previous failed attempt. Frankly, I don't get it.  Both articles look pretty good to me, and I'm at a loss to see why CGS succeeded and Stuyvesant appears to be failing.  I do see that the advocate (Harro5) was pretty agressive at pressing commentors to make their objections actionable, but that doesn't seem very WP:CIVIL to me. For my own education, and for the next time this article goes up on the ballot, can someone give me the short version of why CGS works for you and Stuy doesn't? RossPatterson 04:01, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll take that as constructive criticism shall I? Water off a duck's back. But the article does look very good; people are surprisingly fickle when it comes to passing schools at FAC. See Hopkins School for the prime examples. Harr o 5 11:16, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Most of my issues are dealt with, now this is just a matter of citation, I'm guessing. I'm happy to support this, as its promotion would be a good sign for Hopkins' eventual FAC. Some examples of things requiring citation:
 * "Stuyvesant High School is named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Netherland before the ownership of the colony was transferred to England in 1664. The school is also commonly referred to as "Stuy," an abbreviation of Stuyvesant."
 * "The school was established in 1904 as a manual training school for boys, hosting 155 students and 12 faculty. In 1907, it moved from its original location at 225 East 23rd Street to 345 East 15th Street, where it remained for the following 85 years. Its reputation for excellence in math and science continued to grow, and the school had to be put on a double session in the early 1920s to accommodate the rising number of students. In the 1930s, admission tests were implemented, making it even more competitive. During the 1950s, a $2 million renovation was done on the building to update its classrooms, shops, libraries and cafeterias."
 * "In 1972, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant High School, and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts were chosen by the New York State Legislature as specialized high schools of New York City. The act called for an uniform exam to be administered for admission to Brooklyn Technical High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Stuyvesant High School. The exam would become known as the Specialized Science High Schools Admission Test (SSHSAT) and tested students in math and science."
 * "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stuyvesant was stricken by the AIDS epidemic, with at least four teachers dying from that disease."
 * The facility and basic class information don't need a lot of citation, as they are things observed and known simply by being on campus (like not needing to cite the sentence "Jesus Christ is a key figure in Christianity"), but things like all these history quotes definetly need sourcing. Also, if you're keeping Stuyvesant High School student body as a split-off, it could use a clean-up. Staxringold 00:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment Some formatting is required with the positioning of images especially the centenary and maths survey images which are positioned past the actual section and into the following. Aside from that I read the Caulfield Grammer School article and the Scotch College article currently nominated. Of the three this one reads better, more informative and well laid out(except as stated)  Gnangarra 15:45, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. I never realized how jarring some of those image/text flows were until you pointed it out. RossPatterson 05:50, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Support This article should be considered the standard for any school wanting to get FAC. It should also be noted as How to operate when nominating for FAC well done. Gnangarra 06:07, 9 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Object, due to the references only. Add &lt;ref>&lt;/ref> around the bare URLs, then add a &lt;references/> tag in a separate References section to get them all in one place. Afterwards, convert them to cite web. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 02:15, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. Thanks for the tips on technique! RossPatterson 05:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment. This is a malformed nomination: it was created by erasing and overwriting the previous nom, as can be seen in the History. Please read the project page instructions for how to renominate while preserving the old nom as an archive, and fix this. It's quite important for the archive to exist. Reviewers need to be able to read the previous nomination, and preferably not by digging into the history of this one. I, for instance, made major objections which were ignored, and I'd be interested to see if they've been fixed now. Also, please put back the recently erased facfailed template for the old nom on the talkpage (and make it link to the archive, when you've created that). Bishonen | ノート 02:22, 9 March 2006 (UTC).
 * It appears that Zxcvbnm did what the rules say - there's a Featured article candidates/Stuyvesant High School/archive1 that was created by him/her before he/she started this re-nomination. As noted in the previous nomination, there doesn't seem to be any record of the one before that. RossPatterson 05:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I've put the facfailed back on Talk:Stuyvesant High School and updated it as you suggest. RossPatterson 05:29, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I think you'll find your objections were heard and acted on. Looking over the archived comments, I see the following from you:
 * the nickname right in the first sentence,
 * That's still there.
 * Zxcvbnm has moved this out of the lead where it is no longer quite so prominent. RossPatterson 01:49, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
 * the humorous claim that the building is sinking,
 * Gone.
 * the old prank made obsolete by the swimming pool.
 * Gone, although there's a side-reference to it in the Pop Culture section (the joke was incorporated into a feature film involving the school).
 * "large glass [yeah..?] windows",
 * Gone.
 * "computers for work or play",
 * Gone.
 * "a popular hangout",
 * Gone.
 * "hundreds of square feet of carpet for sitting and socializing",
 * Gone.
 * "being caught in the elevator without a pass guarantees one a trip to the dean",
 * Gone.
 * "when the escalators do break down, groans can be heard as Stuyvesant students grudgingly clamber up the steps".
 * Gone.
 * RossPatterson 06:04, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Ross. Those were just examples, so I'll take a look a bit later. I've put a link to previous nom up top for ease of location. Bishonen | ノート 08:09, 9 March 2006 (UTC).
 * I should have pointed out last night that the changes I mentioned above weren't made just now - the article has been cleaned up a lot since the last nomination, and all I did was check to see if the items you mentioned were still present. Anyway, thanks for the critique - it's a tighter article today than it was then, and criticism helped make it better. RossPatterson 14:08, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * About the "nickname in the first sentence" thing...the thing is, it's not just a nickname, even the administration refer to it as "Stuy," and the website is stuy.edu. So it should remain in the article. Also, a reference section was added, so there should be no objections due to lack of references.--Zxcvbnm 00:41, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I'd like to acknowledge that the article is a whole lot better than last time. However. You need to try harder to avoid speaking to a US audience exclusively. By "speaking to", I mean things like assuming US practices to be default, or failing to explain or link American cultural specifics ("varsity") or, say, acronyms for government bodies (EPA). For instance, there's a section about "feeder patterns" (a non-obvious phrase to most non-Americans, surely, but that's a side issue), which turns out to be about the fact there there are no such patterns. At least remove the first "paragraph" in this section. But preferably the whole, because it's weak:  it's too short to be a top-level section, and consists of too short paragraphs, and the claim that students "often" use deceptive pracices to get into the school is simply impressionistic—how on earth can I verify it? Source it, please (not from somebody's blog). Altogether it's very easy in a school article to fall into the trap of excluding readers by assuming they'll know what an American student knows; I'm not really blaming the authors, but it should be fixed. What is "the international FIRST competition"?  What's PSAL? Feel free to link or explain words like varsity etc, preferably at first appearance (I just found FIRST linked further down, but that's sort of unhelpful). These are nits to pick, and I'm certainly not opposing over them, but here's the big one, over which I am opposing: the many dead or irrelevant links in the references section. The authors seem to be aware of them, dubbing them "Unknown, offline", but, uh, you can't source things in the article to a dead link just because there was one there in January 2005. Links are going to always keep deteriorating, and the idea is that you keep updating them, if you want the article to be one of Wikipedia's best. Please find the new URL, if it exists, or another source, or remove the info in the text. Or at the very least remove the null "reference", but if you take the last option, I think the Reference Police will get you. Oh, incidentally, the account of the centennial celebration is incredibly uninteresting to the general reader. Please keep Stuy Struts and gala dinners and their guest speakers  to the inner circle, don't put them in an international encyclopedia.  There is such a lot about this school that is of general interest, after all. Bishonen | ノート 11:41, 11 March 2006 (UTC). (P.S., the movie Hackers should only be mentioned in one place.)
 * Support - as if there was any doubt from my comments and actions so far. RossPatterson 04:03, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Support - This article is an exemplary piece of wikipedia's collaboratory efforts and a model for other school pages abulanov 13:56, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose. As much as I love to support high school articles on Wikipedia, I have to support what Bishonen is saying. He did great work to help get Caulfield Grammar School up to scratch, and should be listened to here as well. Harr o 5 21:55, 16 March 2006 (UTC)