User:GeeWikiWiz

Hello! My name is Elizabeth, I'm a student at Everett Community College and I'd like to thank you for visiting my page! I love to sing, write music, and play piano; I don't currently have any music out but I'm hoping to release some in the future. I live in the Pacific Northwest but no, I don't like coffee. I love to rock climb and kayak during my free time, which I have a very minimal amount of so I'm not able to do these as much as I'd like.

My main goal in using Wikipedia is to learn more about the site itself and be able to utilize it to learn more about various topics. In the past, most instructors have tried to steer myself and other classmates away from Wiki so I'm still in the dark about it all. Going forward, I hope I will be able to help contribute to some pages I already have information about and possibly make a page or two of my own, but I would like to learn more about the encyclopedia first.

Article Evaluation

In middle school and high school, I experienced really bad depression and anxiety. I remember reading and writing projects as something I feared being so difficult I'd never be able to do either well; then I found a book called It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. It quite literally changed my life, I started seeing the world as a happy place with some rough spots in between, but overall, not too shabby. Recently, I visited the It's Kind of a Funny Story page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: missing/incorrect citations, citations done well, and lack of theme content.

Missing/Incorrect Citations

The "Major themes" section of this article starts out by stating "Critics recognized many themes in..." but we do not actually see who these critics are or where they come from or work for. There is one critic mentioned but this is for a completely different topic. Toward the end of the article, there is an external link for the Ned Vizzini official website, which is used as a source throughout the article, but this link takes you to an Asian website of sorts which looks like it is not in fact the Ned Vizzini site.

Citations Done Well

This article, aside from the minor citation issues mentioned before, does a really good job of not only citing all facts and people mentioned. It also uses credible sources, and seems to be kept fairly up to date (within 1 year of present). Most sources are coming from either The New York Times, people close to Vizzini, or Ned himself.

Theme Content

In the section of this article labeled "Major themes", I firstly went and capitalized the T in "themes". I then noticed that this section doesn't capture the essence of the book for what it really is. The book is about a young man absolutely struggling to not kill himself and finding a way to learn to love himself through hospitalization and meeting new friends, where the article makes it seem like loving yourself is the key to curing your depression.

Summary

As a whole, I would rate this article as a good one. There are a lot of citations, some are incorrect, but most are done well. The theme is vague and slightly off (at least in my perception of the book) but other than that there isn't a lot wrong with this article and it does explain what the book is about pretty well.