Talk:Brisbane State High School

Notable alumni

I have removed Heather Ford (Journalist), since there was no article for her, and there are any number of Heather Fords who are journalists found online. Determining the notability of this journalist, without more to go on, is difficult to impossible. Thoughts? --TeaDrinker 16:13, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I'd say most people who live in Brisbane are aware of who she is, Channel 9 news every evening. ITool 11:24, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Gangs & Violence

I have removed the section on gangs and violence because this was clearly not real and writen by someone irresponsibly

Long list of former students

I just removed two extremely long lists of former students who seem to have held important positions in the school. Please consult Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools for a general overview of what not to do with articles regarding schools. Among them, remember that this is an encyclopedia and not a school website. Please make sure that all information is encyclopedic, and verifiable from a reliable third party source. Have a great day! LonelyBeacon (talk) 07:16, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

NPOV

This article is rife with peacock words, unreferenced facts the article almost boasts about and often lists achievements as 'great', 'exceptional records', etc etc. Someone either cite, fix this, or I will remove the content myself. JRA_WestyQld2 ^Talk 04:12, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Controversy section

Just to follow up on Daniel's recent removal of the "controversy" section, I noticed there has been a lot of edit warring over it and I'm a bit concerned about the judgement of people who have been blindly restoring it without even attempting any discussion. If the edit warring continues, I will protect the article and look at blocking people continuing to edit war.

Daniel noted in the edit summary that this school isn't actually named in the cited article which says instead "a Brisbane state high school". I've checked the original article in The Courier Mail ("Students filmed sex act on mobile phone", by Robyn Ironside, The Courier-Mail, 2 September 2009) and that, too, refers simply to "a northside Brisbane state high school", and not "Brisbane State High School". Please stop trying to restore this section because it is simply not supported by the cited source or the original source. Sarah 04:21, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi Sarah, I'd be the person 'blindly' restoring it, as well as the person to originally add it. I contribute to a lot of Brisbane education articles and usually do a quick Google News search to find any notable reports worth mentioning in the article and in this case when you type in "Brisbane State High School" into the search engine, it comes up with these articles, and at a glance it looks like the school name.

As for the edit warring, I simply put many high vandalism pages (like this one) on my watchlist and will as often as a couple of times a day revert section blanking without edit summary's or inappropriate content on these pages. When I saw Daniel's section blanking with the edit summary, I checked the references and found the Large Hadron Collider article does in fact refer to "a Brisbane state high school" rather than the school itself and left a note on the user's talkpage earlier today referring to my mistake.

I'm sure you'll understand this simple mistake and I hope it clears up anything that may come across as edit warring. Cheers JRA_WestyQld2 ^Talk 13:20, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for explanation. I can certainly understand and appreciate why you might have been confused by the source. You weren't the only person who was restoring the text without attempting discussion so please be assured that my comment above was a general comment to everyone and not directed specifically at you. I think it's important that when people keep removing a section about controversies that you try to start a discussion rather than just repeatedly restoring with automated tools and edit summaries (automated reversion doesn't help the person with the concern know why the section keeps coming back or the right way to deal with their concerns). Also, I had a look on Google and Google News as well as some subscription news databases such as Factiva and the Australian New Zealand Reference Centre and there really wasn't anything that would qualify as a "reliable source" other than the original Telegraph article and a couple of copies of the article about the Telegraph's article (like the one you used). Even if it were this school that was named in the article, with a recent scandal like this, you want to be sure you're getting it right and it's a bit of a red flag if you can only find one article about a very recent scandal. Also, there's really not much here that is so critical that it needs to remain in the article right now and can't be left out for a few hours, even days, while it's discussed. I mean, seriously, in this case we're only talking about four sentences and no harm would have been done by holding off for a short while while you clarify things, discuss it and get support from other editors or find out if there is actually a problem with the content and whether the other party has a legitimate complaint (often in these cases the anons aren't familiar with Wikipedia and don't even know about talk pages or how to address their concerns) and not just reflexively reverting with tools that don't even leave a proper or helpful explanation in the edit summaries. I'm grateful you're watching these articles as school articles can be really bad magnets for vandals and school bullies and I appreciate you and others were acting in good faith and trying to do the right thing, but in order to protect yourselves and the project it's important to take the time to try to discuss. No need for a talk back template as I have this page on my watchlist. Cheers, Sarah 02:01, 12 November 2009 (UTC)