User:Lydia.spurrier/sandbox

Urban Dictionary Article Edit

Urban Dictionary

Under the Application section, specifically Legal subsection, I added another court case that used Urban Dictionary to define a term. The term "to nut" was defined and subsequently used to reject a motion to dismiss a sexual harassment case.

References

As I go through the Urban Dictionary article I noticed an abundance of citations. Most of the sources come from an accredited or reliable news platform. Other sources come from books written by the creator of Urban Dictionary himself, Aaron Peckham, while others cite the website UrbanDictionary.com itself. However, when visiting the talk page for the article it was mentioned that some of the sources needed to be verified. Further investigation of this proved that most of the corrections had been made by one user or another. There had also been one statement on whether or not Aaron Peckham made profit off of UrbanDictionary.com within the first five years, which was deemed "dubious" by Wikipedia and is currently being discussed in the talk page. Lastly, the talk page discusses the possibility of "original research" being cited in the article which Wikipedia does not condone.

Relevance and Distractions

After my initial scan, most of the information seemed pertinent and relevant. However, I do believe the information presented could be organized in a clearer manner, rather than a hodgepodge of tidbits. Mainly in the History section of the article, the timeline of the website was split up well. Although, the information found in each subsection could benefit from better formatting and overall explanation of the significance of the information being presented.

Neutrality

Overall, the article reads as quite neutral. Although, the creator of Urban Dictionary is quoted a few times which could impose a bit of bias. However, the article does not elaborate much on what Aaron Peckham said but rather kept to just quoting him. The talk page also suggests adding a "Criticism" section as to balance out a generally positive article. Some participants in the talk page suggest that Urban Dictionary is a "well of insult and nastiness" while many of the definitions appear sexual and "presumably made up by pre-adolescents". In this vein I agree that a criticism page of the current state of Urban Dictionary would be welcomed.

Neutral Sources

Most of the information regarding Urban Dictionary comes from UrbanDictionary.com itself or online news sources. The article does not site any information coming from a database or academic journals, so most of the news articles cited was the best editors could find in terms of neutrality. As previously mentioned, the article does omit the negative aspects of Urban Dictionary. In light of this, the articles cited appear to have a bias in that they did not acknowledge the poor aspects of the online dictionary.

Representation

To repeat, the positive viewpoint of Urban Dictionary was well represented. The negative aspects however were few to none.

Links

After clicking on some citations, it seems that some links are out of date and do not lead to the intended URL. Most of the links do in fact work fine though. As for plagiarizing, editors appeared to have paraphrased well in addition to citing their sources. Credit was given when quoting a source as well.

Out of Date Information

After visiting the talk page, there was much discussion over the ever changing website and the features it provides to the public. There may need to be changes regarding who can create entries on the website as well as the process of removing entries on the website. Information regarding IBM's Watson computer was recently added which was a good addition to the recent application and use of Urban Dictionary. The article could benefit from an addition of a "Most Popular Word of the Year" section as the article mentioned the most popular word of a year at least twice.