My Wikipedia User Page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Drmm131
The article I selected is entitled “Benedictine Military School”, my high school in Savannah, Georgia. I selected it because over the past 5 years, the article has been in varying states of disrepair. This Wikipedia page started as an 18.9K byte entry, but the article had a heavy athletics leaning, particularly towards the Football team. Recently, the article has been improved and does not lean as heavily in an athletic direction. It is currently 20.3K bytes large.
What is Missing:
Taking the articles of Phillips Exeter and Phillips Academy Andover as the gold standard in high school articles, the article of my high school is clearly lacking. When compared to Exeter and Andover’s articles, the article for Benedictine lacks the following:
-Academics: teaching methods, off-campus study, there is no description of non-military faculty.
-Student Body: there is no description of the student types
-Finances: there is no amount quoted, and there is no talk of the size of the endowment
-Campus Facilities: there is no description of academic facilities, or athletic facilities
-Athletics: there is a description of historical opponents
-Student Life: dress code, extracurricular activities, Residential life
-Emblems: there is no description of the school seal, or the school ring
-Notable alumni: there are more that aren’t listed
-Other academic programs and sports programs, such as sports camps: there is no description
-The school fight song: there is a prose description, but there is no audio recording
-Visuals: Visuals are missing, as there are no maps indicating the location even though there are geographic / GPS coordinates. There are no pictures of the school, of the students, or of the campus grounds.
-Traditions: It covers some traditions, but does not cover “Ring Day”, which is a Junior year rite-of passage and leadership-change tradition.
The “Quick Facts” section lacks the following:
-Average class size, and student to teacher ratios
-Campus acreage
-Average SAT / ACT scores
-Endowment
-Tuition
-Sports: there is no description of which sports are going on which seasons
Sourcing:
The sources for this article are weak by any standard I can think of. One is a reputable news source – a local TV station, WSAV. Most sources are sports related, like baseball-reference.com – therefore, not very high quality. Of the ten citations, one is a local news station mentioned above (WSAV), three are sports statistics related, and three are the school’s own website.
Relative to what is currently available, the quality of these sources is not very high. No published book, Magazines, Documentaries or Scholarly journals are cited.
As a local high school, Benedictine is in the local newspaper – the Savannah Morning News – frequently. I searched today, and though many of the articles therein are reporting sports scores, several more are reporting happenings at the school that are not currently included.
Neutrality, Illustrations and Manual of Style Considerations:
The article is relatively neutral in tone. The article is readable for the most part, but a large part of the article is titled ‘Organization”, underneath the “Academics” section. This section does not describe the organization of the school, and is therefore poorly titled. It describes the organization of the school’s Corps of Cadets, the JROTC (Army) portion of the student body. Further, there is no description of the Faculty’s organization, or of student clubs and interest groups.
This article is not properly illustrated, because there are currently no illustrations. Ideally, I would include a map with a pin dot indicating the location of the school in Savannah, as well as some pictures of the grounds and different academic and athletic facilities.
This article adheres general to the Wikipedia Manual of Style, however some of the information could and should be sub-divided further for readability purposes.