User:BigOrangeOctopus

Bio

About me

I am a college student who enjoys performing card magic and playing soccer. I usually am the goalie because I like being the last line of defense. The main reason I enjoy performing magic is because if I can perform a trick successfully then I get to see the audience be amazed. I also know how to juggle and how to build a card castle. The tallest my card castle has ever been has been about 1.5 feet tall. The tallest house of cards ever made was 25.75 feet tall and it was made by Bryan Berg.

My Wikipedia activities

As of now I don't have any major plans for Wikipedia in the future. I might make little grammatical changes I notice any. If I know about an obscure person who only has one paragraph on Wikipedia, I might add more information to make more complete. However, I don't use Wikipedia that much so I probably won't see any mistakes or small pages.

Article Evaluation

For about the last year, I have been getting into card magic. Recently I have found out about cardistry. I visited the Dan and Dave (magicians) article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: when there were links to the sources, they were not there or didn’t back up the claim, some sentences had no meaning, and not all claims were backed up by evidence.

Sources

In the Dan and Dave (magicians) Wikipedia article, there were ten links listed as evidence, but only three of them worked. Three of them lead to private videos and one to a blank website. One claim that was in the article was that the Dan and Dave system was met by success, had two sources that were supposed to back it up, but neither of them even mentioned the System at all. The final source came from the user EndersGame reviewing the Art Of Play and, anonymous users aren't trustworthy.

Irrelevant Sentences

The background section of the article was about how Dan and Dave learned about card flourishing and practiced all the time; then, it says there was limited information about cardistry at that time. The end of that sentence doesn’t help you understand or learn anything about Dan and Dave. There was one sentence said that their Show-Off tape, “was filmed as a low-fi home video with a tripod-held camcorder, edited on a dual VHS tape deck". The fact that they filmed their tape does matter because it played a part in them becoming as big as they are in the cardistry world. However, what their film was filmed on has no relevance to them at all.

Evidence

There were some sources listed that didn’t support the facts they were supposed to; other facts had no sources backing them up. An example would be that a tape of Brian Tudor had mesmerized Dan and Dave and introduced them to new card flourishes. The fact that it had no evidence to back it up means that the "facts" could be wrong, so they shouldn't be in the article.

Summary

As a whole, I would say that the article was poor. If the only problem the article had were the irrelevant sentences, then it would be acceptable. However, because we don't know if most of the facts used were true, then they shouldn't be there. That means there would be almost no facts in the article.