User:Dylan Stansberry

Bio

About Me

I am a brother, athlete, sportsman, and musician. Over the last few years, I've picked up quite a few hobbies (many of which haven't really helped me) that have helped me figure out who I am. Some of these include carpentry, mechanical work, fishing, hiking, and playing guitar. Overall, I am a very outgoing person who tends to be sarcastic a little too much sometimes.

My Wikipedia Interests

I think that Wikipedia is one of the most useful tools that we have access to today. It tends to get a bad rap because the articles in it aren't always written by "professionals." I'm hoping that by using Wiki I can learn more about how to become a better writer and reader.

Essay

Thesis

I visited the Overfishing article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: 1. Are there irrelevant sections or sentences? 2. Is the article itself neutral? Are there heavily biased claims or language? 3. Is each fact cited with an appropriate, reliable source?

Irrelevant Sections/Sentences

Overall, the article did a pretty good job of giving abundant and relevant information on the main topic and subtopic. To be completely transparent, finding irrelevant information wasn't very easy. There was one section in particular that talked about something that needed to be more relevant to overfishing. For almost 7 sentences it spoke on how deep sea fish have slow metabolisms, grow slowly, etc. After listing these things the writer didn't show why we needed to know this information since overfishing in the deep sea isn't actually a problem and wasn't proved by the person giving commentary on it.

Neutrality/Biased Claim

Since overfishing has such a big impact worldwide, this topic can be emotional for some people, so I expected quite a bit of biased claims/information. Surprisingly, most of the info was unbiased, but there was one instance in particular that stood out to me as something that wasn't exactly neutral. "It is almost as though we use our military to fight the animals in the ocean. We are gradually winning this war to exterminate them. And to see this destruction happen, for nothing really – for no reason (Overfishing, Wikipedia)" It seemed quite apparent to me that this quote wasn't exactly 'unbiased.' The use of phrases like "for no reason" shows that this statement wasn't neutral as it should be in a Wikipedia article.

Citations/Reliable Sources

Concerning citation, the first thing I noticed in the overfishing article was that there were over 78 sources cited. The topic of overfishing is a very fact-based subject, and in my mind it requires a solid amount of proof and citation. While the article did a great job of providing reliable sources, it didn't always give relevant information. I counted almost 20 articles that were information from 2010 or earlier. If the old information in this article was replenished I would say it did a great job of giving plenty of citations to reliable, trustworthy sources.

Conclusion

After evaluating this article with the three questions, I would give this article a "good" rating. It covered the topic well, cited evidence properly, and was mostly neutral. While it did lack in current information and was sometimes not completely neutral, it did a great job of giving good information on the topic.