Talk:Education in the Middle East and North Africa

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this message is to all those interested in helping improve the quality of this new article entitled:Education in the Middle East and North Africa. The author welcomes your comments and suggestions for further additions. As the article is in its early stages of development, every editing contribution will be beneficial. More pictures and other illustrations are also needed.

Thank you for this insightful article. In order to further improve the article, I would suggest the following:

• Completely rewrite the lead section. Currently the lead section reads like an introduction. A proper lead section should be a succinct summary of the article, focusing on key aspects that are currently buried much further down in the article, such as poor quality of education.
• Take out all content that belongs to other more generic articles. For example, the definition of which countries belong to MENA is already in the MENA article. This is where the section on common identity could also go. Much or all of what currently is in the lead section should also go into a more general article about education, since none of it is specific to MENA only.
• The structure of the article could be improved. For example, there are bits and pieces on history under various headings, none of which is called "History of education in MENA". It may be useful to arrange all these pieces chronologically under such a heading. Overall, the historical part is long compared to the part that deals with current issues.
• It may be worthwhile to think about what are the four or five key issues in education in MENA today and structure the non-historical part of the article accordingly.
• It would also be interesting to have specific sections on various parts of the education system, from early child development to primary, secondary and tertiary education and vocational training.
• There is very little information on school systems and education policy, i.e. about the public and private instituation in charge of education in various MENA countries and how they interact.
• There is also no information on investment in education and how it is being financed.
• It would be very helpful to include tables with data on literacy and enrolment by country.
• There are already a number of Wikipedia articles on education in specific MENA countries. It would be useful to link to these articles from this regional overview article. That means that every time Tunisia is mentioned the hyperlink should lead directly to "Education in Tunisia" instead to the general Tunisia article.
• The sections on "Quality of education" and "Problems of education quality in the MENA region" should be merged in a single section.
• In the references, the term "ibid" should be avoided, because the location of references will change once other references are added, which will make it impossible to find out to which reference "ibid" referred. By using the refname= function the problem can be avoided, having all footnotes in the text making reference to the same publication link to one and the same footnote at the bottom of the text.
• Some sections of the article would benefit from editing by a native speaker.

The changes are too wideranging for me to actually implement them and I hope the original authors or someone else knowlegeable in the topic will make the changes.--Mschiffler (talk) 03:12, 28 February 2008 (UTC)