User:Swilson24

January 15th, 2019- Bio

Hello, welcome to my page! My username in Swilson24, I'm from the pacific northwest. I'm a current student at Everett Community College in Washington state. I'm currently unemployed to focus on school but I was previously a orthodontic assistant an a orthodontist office. I worked at that office 2 years and a half, now have decided to pursue a career in Dental Hygiene. Now that I'm not working my hobbies are art, music, and I'm trying to get back into martial arts. When I was in high school and middle I was a full time student, instructor, and competitor with the American Taekwondo Association. I received my 1st degree black belt in October 2015 and by the time I ended my taekwondo journey, in fall of 2017, I had multiple state, district, and national competition standings.

On Wikipedia I am looking forward to using this cite as a mobile "fact" book, although I am aware that some pages may not state the facts. I am also excited to learn how to tell fact from crap on this cite through the research tools provided by my English composition teacher. I'm excited about this because most people don't believe that Wikipedia isn't a reliable source of information due to the fact that anyone could edit the information on a page. But I believe that Wikipedia could possibly be the most useful cite for information for the same reason. If there are multiple authors/ editors than the more prospective and information can be connected to a page.

January 29th, 2019- Article Critique

]Wikipedia is commonly known to have an abundance of editors and not having credible information on various topics, however it can help us to receive a better understanding on the basic information of a topic, a reader can form skills to identify potential red flags for a poorly drafted article. That being said I visited the chupacabra page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the article is misleading, it does not have peer reviews, as well as not having enough citations for verification.

]After reading the first paragraph in the article introduction, I noticed that the article doesn’t include that the chupacabra is an urban legend until the last sentence in the second introductory paragraph. This may be misleading to some readers because if a reader doesn’t read the article in it’s entirety then they wouldn’t know the chupacabra isn’t real. The article’s structure also may cause misinformation because the reputed origin section is toward the end of the article and there was no information about it being reputed in the history section.

]When reviewing this article, I also clicked on the talk page and noticed that there wasn’t a lot of peer revision with in the article. I also noticed it was lacking in critiques and the suggestions & edits recommended by other editors were not completed. This prevents the article from being the best it can be and over time will make it out dated if new information gets released. I also noticed that the suggestions provided in the talk pages didn’t have a lot of suggestions from the past 6 months which makes me believe that the article hasn’t been edited in a while.

]Lastly, there were very few citations, there was even an alert saying the article doesn’t have enough citations to be verified. The advantage to using Wikipedia is that there are multiple different sources and editors critiquing article to remove bias, false information, and to allow an abundance of information on a article’s topic. If an article has sources but doesn’t cite them it takes away the legitimacy of the information the source provides. Altogether this article has cited 23 sources, and the information provided from the sources is saturated in the reputed origins and the In popular culture section. Other sections in this piece uses the same 2 sources all throughout the section. Which makes the article look like it may have be researched lazily.

]To conclude, Wikipedia is a great source of information but not every article is the most reliable. The Chupacabra article page on Wikipedia is a great article to use to practice searching for attributes of a well form article, because it really shows what an article shouldn’t have. This chupacabra article was misleading, lacked peer review, and didn’t have enough citations. Overall, the article does have room for improvement if the information was rearranged and certain parts flowed into the next section, past suggestions on the talk page were applied, and if there were more citations that weren’t already used to support the information provided in the article.

Article citation: “Chupacabra.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Jan. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra.