Talk:Auburn High School

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This article is part of WikiProject Alabama, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Alabama on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page to join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. GA This article has been rated as GA-class on the quality scale. This article is related to WikiProject Schools, an attempt to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page. GA This article has been rated as GA-Class on the assessment scale. Schools Portal Mid This article has been rated as Mid-Importance within Schools. Assessment: Hello all, and thank you for contributing to this school article. I'm part of the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools/Assessment team, and I'm reviewing this page. I'm currently giving it a grade of GA on the Wikipedia 1.0 Assessment Scale and an importance of Mid on this importance scale. For information on improving this article, please visit the WikiProject Schools Project Page. My reasoning is as follows: Fairly important alumni and a well-written and referenced article, might even be GA. Needs a little work on WP:NPOV and may need some trimming. Adam McCormick 22:40, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

	Auburn High School has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
Article milestones Date Process Result July 13, 2007 Good article nominee Listed July 25, 2007 Peer review Reviewed Current Status: Good article

The following user(s) are actively involved with this article and may be able to help with questions about verification and sources: Lissoy (talk • contribs • email) This in no way implies article ownership; all editors are encouraged to contribute.

[edit] Specific Advice

As requested, the following are some more specific suggestions on improving this article (Mostly regarding [[WP:NPOV] and WP:OR):

• Qualitative measures of goodness should be quantitative, specifically:
  • "one of the top public high schools in the United States." should be the rank (more towards the section later in the article) as "one of the top" has no real meaning. Remember this is NOT an advertisement for the school, but a factual reference.
  • "Auburn High offers nearly 30 college-level Advanced Placement, Technical Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate courses for college credit." should list each individually and give solid numbers if possible
  • "Auburn High School students have traditionally been among the highest scorers on standardized tests of any school in the state." The linked reference doesn't work and is (I think) only a ranking, which says nothing of "traditionally"
  • "Throughout the 1850s, the school flourished." Not necessary given the following sentences
  • "The school was especially strong in language offerings" state the fact, don't embellish
  • "...but economic hardships in the aftermath of the war and Reconstruction left the school closed for several years." Source it or just say the school closed
  • "The next few decades were difficult ones for the school" Once again, superfluous
  • "The last three decades have been marked with rapid growth of the school." No factual value goven the rest of the paragraph
  • "been one of Alabama's winningest high school teams" not substantiated and "winningest" isn't a word
  • Lots of weasel adjectives like "strong", "winningest", "considerable", and "particular" which don't add any factual value but portray a lot of WP:POV
  • "has been the preeminent team in Alabama over the past two decades" needs a source, I'd doubt it otherwise
  • "winning hundreds of gold, silver, and bronze medals." Needs a source and a specific number
• Needs quite a bit of formalization (Less colloquial phrasing, more factual information)
• There are a lot of wikilinks here that aren't particualarly necessary (basic subjects like Math for example)

That's most of what I've found. Let me know if there's anything else you need. Adam McCormick 03:56, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I have made modifications along the many of lines you have suggested. I am struggling somewhat with the last sentence of the lead--the previous line was, as you noted, too qualitative, but I feel the current one is not broad enough to fit the requirement that the lead explain "why the subject is interesting or notable" on WP:LEAD. This high school is notable not simply due to the Newsweek ranking, but due to a general recognition of quality by a variety of different ranking agencies. Inclusion of the statistics of all of the agencies, as in the Achievements and accolades section makes the lead far to unwieldy and deviates from a "clear, accessible style". Any suggestions on this, or any further suggestions on improvements to the article would be appreciated. Thanks. --Lissoy 02:47, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

My suggestion would be that the "Achievements and accolades" section justifies the notability well enough. If you would still like to include the notability of the school in the lead, merge the first paragraph of this section into the lead. Adam McCormick 02:20, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA On Hold

Hello. I've reviewed this article and, in my opinion, it's extremely close to to GA status and it's FA-like even. My only objections are similar to those in the section above, not NPOV issues left any longer, but citations lacking for non-trivial statements in sections Band and Student Body. Also, I think the lead is far too short and doesn't deliver the notability of the school as it should. The very last sentence is particularly not so good. I'd also recommend the recommendations above for improving it via merging with (or copying from) the Measures of Success section. Or perhaps using material in Curriculum section. That's about it and it's GA (I might think of something to do with the lead after this post).--Meowist 04:02, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and added citations for the Band and Student body sections per your suggestions, though I had to remove some sections of the student body section for lack of solid cites. I reworked the lead to include information from other areas to better establish notability. The lead length is now somewhere in the middle of the lead length of the three school FAs (Hopkins School, Stuyvesant High School, and Plano Senior High School). Thanks, and I'd welcome any other suggestions you have! -- Lissoy 19:19, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm pleased with the new lead and the citations added to the 2 sections mentioned above. I can't think of anything else immediately pressing as regards to GA criteria or anything to easily improve it...congratulations!--Meowist 21:36, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Thank you! -- Lissoy 21:51, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright

Can I just ask about the copyright status of the school songs which have been reproduced on this page? They all seem to have been written quite recently and I am therefore concerned that they might still be in copyright. The authors' names are not given and there are no references provided. One song states that it is in the public domain but there is no source to back up the claim. Dahliarose 14:52, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

"Glory, Glory, to Ole Auburn" - The lyrics are in the public domain, as they are a rewording of the chorus of Amherst's "Marching Song of the Alumni" which was published prior to 1923. See Amherst Graduates' Quarterly, 1911, p. 15.

"Alma Mater" - The lyrics were first published in The Tiger, volume 12 (1956) without notice of copyright on either the lyrics or the yearbook as a whole. Under the US Copyright Act of 1909 that was in force at the time, failure to include a copyright notice upon publication resulted in injection of the lyrics into the public domain.

"We're Loyal to You, Auburn High" - The lyrics are in the public domain, as they are a rewording of Illinois Loyalty, which was published prior to 1923. See Alpha Xi Delta, Vol. 3, No. 1 (November 1905), p. 58.

"Hooray for Auburn" - This is the only one I can't conclusively show to be public domain right now. Several years ago, I found a version of the lyrics dated 1917 or 1918, but now I can't remember where I found that document. The earliest I can currently find is a version of the lyrics is in a 1953 publication (Lucile Hasley's The Mouse Hunter) recalling a 1952 event. Hasley's description doesn't indicate any authorship of the lyrics; instead she merely quotes them from a cheer that she heard. My conversation with the author of the music to "Hooray for Auburn" indicates that at the time he wrote the music, he believed the lyrics to be in the public domain, or at least, freely available for use. I cannot find any evidence for anyone ever having claimed copyright on these lyrics at any point. I can say that in the precise wording used here, no notice of copyright was provided on the sheet music when it was first published, thus not attaching copyright to these particular lyrics. --Lissoy 22:06, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

You've done a brilliant job researching all these copyright issues and it doesn't sound as though there is a problem after all. It might be an idea to track down that 1917 or 1918 version of the Hooray for Auburn lyrics to be on the safe side. It might also be a good idea if you incorporate all the above-mentioned sources as references to the school songs just to be on the safe side so that the question doesn't arise again. Yours is one of the flagship articles in the Schools Project so it would be really helpful if you could set the standards for others to follow. Well done! Dahliarose 23:06, 3 September 2007 (UTC)