User:TheTJSquire

Bio

I (1987-Present) identify as an avid consumer of pop culture and political history. After serving [poorly] in the United States Navy (2005-2013), I worked as a final test technician for a private semi-conductor company where I calibrated tools used in the process of building microchips. It didn't take long for me to realize that I didn't particularly care for the life I was living or how I was living it; as a result I made the incredibly well thought out decision to attempt to start over. Deciding that this was the age of reboots, and noting that I haven't aged terribly in twelve years, I quit my job, declared bankruptcy, and returned to the area I grew up in to attend college as though I hadn't just wasted over a decade with nothing to show for it.

Seemingly possessing two competing personalities, I find myself torn between a life of political activism and sociological analysis (manifested in striving for a law degree and eventual career in campaign strategy and speech writing), as well as one of severe arrested development (manifesting in an inability to put the bong down and shut the X-Box off long enough to finish a single project I start). I enjoy long walks and aggressive debates, trying to solve world problems across the coffee table, so to speak. I also enjoy comic books, horror movies, and a heavy nostalgia for 90's Saturday morning cartoons. I hope to one day put pen to paper and create a story of my own, but in the mean time am focused on learning everything I didn't know when I started life the first time.

Article Critique

From the time I was eight years old and saw the first Halloween, I've had an obsession with horror films. One of the strangest movies I've stumbled across during my lifetime is Phantasm. In it, an other-worldly mortician known only as "the Tall Man" is doing something nefarious at the local cemetery and it's up to a young teenager, his adult brother, and their ice cream truck driving buddy to get to the bottom of it. Out of morbid curiosity, I visited the Tall Man page on Wikipedia and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: a lack of relevant citations, an overabundance of irrelevant links, and the overall confusing organization of the page.

Citations

There were only three citations for the entire article, which made the fact that two were used in the introduction alone, with one in particular being used twice, all the more apparent. The third citation was tucked away in the "Other media" section, and used as proof of appearance. The body of the article, however, was left completely without reference. Due to the article being about a character from a film series, it seems obvious to include not only the films themselves as sources, but the Internet Movie Database entry as well, rather than relying on a thirty year old newspaper review for the entire initial synopsis.

Irrelevant links

In lieu of applicable citations, the author chose to generously endow us with links to other Wikipedia pages defining seemingly random words and phrases throughout the article. Beginning almost immediately with fictional character in the very first sentence and ending with Undertaker in the "See also" section. Undertaker was particularly strange, as the word mortician was already redirected to the same article twice. Peppered throughout include links for words such as brain, machine, sphere, action figure, and many others. While this practice seems understandable for intermediate words a reader may not understand such as industry jargon or additional fictional lore, to randomly select nouns is lazy at best and condescending to the reader at worst.

Organization

Along with the lack of citations and unnecessary smattering of links, the structure of the body is a mess. The one paragraph dedicated to the history and origin of the character is in an awkwardly titled "Development" section positioned beneath the three-paragraph "Powers and weapons" section, which clearly dominated the author's attention. There was a third section called "Characterization" consisting of three sentences and describing the appearance and mannerisms of the character. At the very least, this could be absorbed into the introduction or history; it would be better to expand on it and restructure the article so that it reads from the intro to the origin, to the appearance/mannerisms, then to a revised and reduced section on abilities, before finally moving on to the lists in the end. As it is now, it remains clunky and imbalanced.

Summary

This article is not the worst on Wikipedia, but it is also objectively not good. To give credit where it is due, I know from personal knowledge and experience that it is factually accurate, but that's not enough for a page on a character that spans five films in as many decades. The lack of citations makes it unreliable to the average reader, the extraneous links serve seemingly no purpose, and the organization is poorly thought out and distracting. Taking into account these factors, I would infer that the author is a teenager; a fan that is excited about certain [violent] aspects of the character and wants to speak to it, but lacks the education and discipline to channel that passion into an effective product.