User:Cosmicolly

Bio

About Me

I am a high school student taking college classes as I finish out my junior and senior year. I am on my school's swim team where I compete in diving too. I am also on the tennis team and enjoy playing tennis with my friends during my free time. I recently learned to crochet and am currently trying to learn how to make clothing. Similarly, I also make blankets to gift to friends and family by finger knitting. I use very chunky yarn and by finger knitting I can get a knitting result without needing to know how to knit plus they are fairly inexpensive to make. Besides those, I don't have many hobbies and really just enjoy watching and cataloging movies and finding and listening to new music.

My Wikipedia Interests

I haven't used Wikipedia much and would mostly use it for a quick summary or to find links elsewhere. This led to me never writing any articles or making edits. I think If I were to work on the site I would work on filling out smaller, less detailed articles to provide a deeper dive and more information on newer or obscure pages. I also really enjoy learning about different types of first so I could also write new pages on birds species that do not yet have pages about them.

Article Evaluation

Introduction

As a child, Webkinz was my favorite game, and I would play it frequently for around 3 years. Since it has been updated and a new version has come out, I have revisited it. Now, when I needed to think of an obscure topic to research, I was reminded of this game. I visited the Webkinz article on Wikipedia and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the lack of citations, biased opinions in the information, and potentially biased sources.

Lack of citation

When you first open the page it seems promising that it will have citations to back up the information, as the introductory paragraph has a citation for every fact. This trend, however, does not continue past this point. The next 4 paragraphs, which comprise nearly the entire article, only contain three citations. Each paragraph contains details including dates and precise reasons for decisions made by the company, none of which have any indication as to where they came from. The final section on the page is a bullet list of criticisms of the game. Most of these were added one at a time by different individuals and, contrary to before, almost all do have citations. While there is a low likelihood that any of these facts are false or fabricated, it is hard to trust when there is no way to verify.

Biased Opinions

There are several places in this article where topics and information are written in a way very similar to an advertisement. The way aspects of the game are talked about is almost always presented in a very positive light that seems to entice readers to check out the game in comparison to explaining the game and its history. An example of this happening is in the blank section where they are discussing how a new version is made that is “safer” for children. It is not written as if this were the public’s opinion and comes across more so that these are the author's beliefs. The same trend of opinions coming across as what the author believes, not consumers from that time, is apparent throughout the entire article. Another potentially biased area is the last section about controversies with Webkinz. Most aren't directly negative opinions, but the way the criticisms are all written out together paints a very negative picture of this site right at the end of the page. This could be made more neutral if these criticisms were placed in the explanation timeline along with the positives instead of lumped together.

Unreliable Sources

This issue goes hand in hand with the biased opinions. The cause of the article having sections sounding like an advertisement directly results from most of this page's sources being the Webkinz official site. Seven of the seventeen references listed are articles on the official Webkinz page. Then, another one of these sources is a tweet from the creative director of Webkinz, Karl Borst. The official site could be cited for small parts of the article, but they should not make up nearly half of the citations. While it is unlikely that the sources are inaccurate for information such as launch date or when new things were released, when these are sources discussing topics such as a data leak on the site, it is much more reliable to understand the story from a third party.

Conclusion

Overall I would consider this article to be "good." It included an informative explanation of what Webkinz is, how it works, and how it came to be. Additionally, it is much more fleshed out compared to other articles with the same lack of traction. While the writing does include many concerns for bias, It is unlikely that the statements made are untrue and if additional sources were used, this issue could be expected to disappear or at least significantly lessen. Considering most of the citations from external sources (not the Webkinz official site) are archived, there was likely not much coverage to parts of this story. I think if this article was filled with more supplementary citations for all the facts in the primary paragraphs, it would be significantly improved.