User:Joker56652

Bio

Welcome to my user page. I am currently a freshmen in college, and I'm working through getting my general ed credits done before transferring to a university. Even though school does take up a lot of my time, I do enjoy music and hiking. I currently play lead trumpet in the college jazz band and I hope to major in music education. The most memorable hike I went on was a 50 mile backpack hike over the course of seven days on the Olympic Peninsula with Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts has given me many great opportunities, from high adventure outings, leadership training, and becoming an Eagle Scout.

Since I am fairly new to this site as a member I am not entirely sure what I want to focus on contributing yet. Seeing as how music is one of my interests and something I plan to be a part of for the rest of my life, I may help with the writing of pages related to music. This could be contributions to broad pages such as ones about Jazz, Trumpets, and Music. I could also contribute to smaller pages about jazz artists, such as Wayne Bergeron or Louis Dowdeswell.

Article Critique

Thesis

Wikipedia has grown considerably since its creation in 2001. When it started out, there were issues with the information being accurate and reliable, but as time has passed articles have improved with accuracy and reliable sources. However, this doesn't apply to all articles. There are some that haven't been revised or updated in a considerable amount of time which has lead to the sources and articles no longer being as reliable as it once was. I visited the Eagle Scout Service Project page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: there were several dead links, all but three of the sources were from 2012 or earlier, and not all of the sources used are entirely reliable.

Dead Links

An article may appear to have many sources, but upon closer inspection it may reveal that several of the sources linked no longer exist. This happens to be the case on the Eagle Scout Service Project page. While the majority of the sources used are still accessible, there are three that are now dead links.The first, tenth, and eleventh source cited are all dead links, and only the tenth source has a note next to it explaining that it is a dead link. A short term solution for this would be to put a dead link note next to all three sources, but eventually the article should be edited to include sources that are accessible and not inaccessible ones.

Current Sources

When reading an article, it is always important to check how current and up-to-date the sources cited are. There are several sources used for the article, but only the fourth, fifth, and seventh sources were from the year 2018. The rest of them range from the years 2000 to 2012. This doesn't inherently mean that the sources used are unreliable, but it should be noted that it would help if more current sources were used for the article to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

Reliable Sources

While an article may have several sources making it look reliable, when these sources are viewed it is revealed that not all of them are as reliable as previously thought. Arguably the most unreliable source used in the article would be the sixth one. The source cited is the website Flickr, which is a photo sharing website. Additionally the sixth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth source are all commercial websites instead of organization, education, or government websites. While there are other commercial websites that are considerably more biased or unreliable than these, it is helpful to have the sources used be ones that are not commercial.

Conclusion

While the Eagle Scout Service Project page on Wikipedia does have some good information and sources used, there is a lot of room for improvement. Sources should be updated if they are dead links, old, or commercial websites. It should be noted that the scouting and NESA websites would be a good source to use since it has information about Eagle Scouts and Eagle Projects, and the latter is specifically about Eagle Scouts. These websites are also non commercial and are geared towards scouting.