User:A Student From ENGL& 101

Biography

About me

I'm currently a college student attending EvCC. I love learning and have an abundance of interests and hobbies but my prominent ones include art, music, and science. I enjoy making all kinds of art from digital art and photography to painting and even rock balancing. I enjoy all sorts of music but mostly listen to jazz, funk, and electronic music but I've recently started listening to folk. I also dabbled with the piano when I was younger. Science has been a lifelong interest and I love learning about astronomy, physics, and psychology. My psychology interest started at a middle school science fair when I learned about the hippocampus. It functions as storage for memory.

My Wikipedia Interests

Around my middle school and early high school years, my interest and dedication toward science was at an apex and I spent a lot of time surfing Wikipedia reading. I argue that's the extent of my Wikipedia experience save for the occasional single-page-visits that everyone does when they want to learn or fact-check something. I feel that making an account will yield me to start getting involved in Wikipedia which is great since I think there's a lot of learning opportunity here.

Article Evaluation

As my biography notes, I have an interest in digital art which includes pixel art. For over a decade I've enjoyed the graphics of pixels and am involved with related communities. I also make some pixel art as well and am familiar with both the theory and practice of it which is why I'm curious to see the article on it. I visited Pixel Art article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting: structure, techniques, and citations.

Structure

In the introduction of the page, it spoke about the low-color count axiom in pixel art then it was brought up again in the Definition section. The text directly under the definition section can be combined into the main intro to keep the page concise. The section also wrote about the distinction between pixel art and not as some people think any digital image is pixel art since it consists of pixels (the article even goes over this misconception) and I believe someone interested in learning about pixel art should read this definition and distinction at the beginning as I see the question of "what makes pixel art pixel art?" brought up occasionally.

Techniques

The techniques subcategory under the definitions section lists a couple techniques but not many at all. There are numerous items that can be injected into that topic to where it can be under its own heading. Additionally, some parts of the current text can be reworded for clarity e.g. "Daniel Silber recommends the usage of single-pixel thick lines" as opposed to the article's "Daniel Silber recommends lines of one pixel in diameter be used at all times." Alternatively this little excerpt can be omitted completely as it doesn't provide much useful intel with respect to the rest of the topic.

Citations

Some things are thrown in the article such as, "Creating or modifying pixel art characters or objects for video games is sometimes called spriting, a term that arose from the hobbyist community. The term likely came from the term sprite..." This came with no citations and I'm interested in learning about the etymology of the term though no leads are provided. I also noticed a fair amount of citations were referenced from Daniel Silber's book which could be problematic as his opinions and anecdotes could sway the view of information if the article is written dominantly based on one person's work.

Summary

The article does an okay job of an overview of pixel art but there's definitely much more to it. When reading, the article didn't feel current and there seemed to be a large lack of information about pixel art as art as opposed to pixel art as game assets. Additionally, there were some instances of notability and even possibly NOR that I didn't mention as well as little details that could be included that would improve the whole. I might even try updating the page myself when I feel I'm able to write to Wikipedia's standards.