Talk:History of education in Brunei

GA review

This review is transcluded from Talk:History of education in Brunei/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Pangalau (talk · contribs) 13:12, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chipmunkdavis (talk · contribs) 11:58, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

I'll be taking a look at this over the next few days. Nice use of old images. My immediate concern looking through this article is about broadness (GACR3a). This article seems to be written as a History of education policy, which is a narrower topic than education as a whole. I would expect for example a history of education to cover not only how systems changed, but also how these changes were implemented and what the impact of these changes was. How have literacy rates changed? How has language proficiency changed? How many schools have there been over time and of what types? Are there any assessments of how the overall quality of education has changed? Was education impacted by factors outside of policy? There are a couple of wider non-policy details in the earlier periods, but few and later sections move towards policy exclusively. CMD (talk) 11:58, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: I’ll get to it once I have some time. Pangalau (talk) 05:46, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Regarding images, all seem plausibly public domain or licenced except for File:Castilian War.jpg in the sidebar. It is unclear what the original provenance, and date, of this painting is. CMD (talk) 07:52, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I have fixed this issue. Pangalau (talk) 15:39, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

• All the sources in the lead check out. However, they appear to be novel information, when the WP:LEAD should instead be a summary of the whole article.
• Something got truncated in the first paragraph of Colonial influence and formal education system.
• The second paragraph of Colonial influence and formal education system has a similar structure to the original source, not a direct copy but could perhaps be a bit more distinct.
• The third paragraph also follows a simialar structure to the source, and has "There are 38 students enrolled in this institution as of right now" which has the wrong tense.
• The fourth paragraph checks out per the first two sources (can't access the third). The structure seems unique, although it could use some copyediting and there is a broken efn tag.
• First source of 1954 National Education Policy roughly checks out, although perhaps the purpose attributed to the policy should be attributed to the wider plan.
• The mention of a "British Education Officer" has no introduction, and it is unclear what his statement has to do with the rest of the paragraph.
• It should be clarified that the PRB was an opposition party.
• "the current system was viewed as oppressive", "oppressive" may not be the clearest word, I am unsure what the meaning is.
• The "The 1972 National Education Policy planned to make Malay the default medium..." paragraph is a bit hard to understand. Some examples are it is unclear how it affected Malaysian students, and how English benefited the civil servants.
• Abdul Rahman Taib's political role (Minister of Education) should be included.

In the writing there are a few areas of redundancy and tense issues that could use copyediting. That aside however, this is a well laid out timeline of educational policy change. There is no original research. The two most used sources are in Malay, and while there does seem to be some structural similarities, I wouldn't say the items I checked were copyvios. Structural similarities would likely be less likely if there were a few more sources. Four is not a lot, and at a quick look there do seem to be a lot more sources on the topic [1][2][3], including dedicated book chapters[4][5]. It would be worth asking for some of these at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. As for similar articles, it appears the only similar articles with GA or FA are History of education in Wales and its subarticles. There was more on impact in this article than I saw at first glance, but it does still feel like more would be expected under broadness. History of education in Wales for example mentions differences between gender attainment at various points, the formation of educational ministries, changing literacy rates. The various other sources out there may help with this, although such research and expansion may take more than one week. CMD (talk) 06:51, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

It seems there are still many things left to do for this article. Thanks for the review, it may take some time for these changes to be implemented. Pangalau (talk) 15:40, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Closing this now, but do feel free to ping me regarding article development. CMD (talk) 03:07, 14 September 2025 (UTC)