User:Ogracel

Bio

About me

I am a photographer and am slowly learning videography. My favorite subjects to take photos of are people, the sky, and other landscapes. I primarily use my DSLR camera, a Nikon D3500, but I tend to use my phone camera more regularly. I also enjoy listening to music and have been using Spotify to make monthly playlists since March of 2020. Listening to music helps to retrieve memories and form new ones. Personally, listening to music helps me to relax and focus.

My Wikipedia interests

If I were to use Wikipedia in the future, I would begin simply by fixing small grammar or punctuation errors. However, if I were to choose a subject to start a page about, I would most likely write about something in nature. Writing or adding to these pages would also provide an opportunity to research and learn more about the subject, whatever it may be.

Article evaluation

As a rule, the main goal of a public park is to provide recreational activities for its community. Parks in the Seattle area are popular for many different activities such as hiking trails, children's playgrounds, sports fields and courts, as well as access to the ocean. In the Ballard neighborhood, you will find that Golden Gardens tends to be the most frequented park with one of the few sandy beaches in the Seattle area and its beautiful views of the Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains. I visited the Golden Gardens Park article on Wikipedia and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the lack of citations, few adequate links, and choices of relevant information.

Citations

Throughout the article, I found quite a few claims about the park and the birds residing there, however many of these were left uncited, without a way to establish credibility. The article instead relies on original research to verify its claims. Some knowledge can be found from a map such as the Wikimedia one included in the article. However, the article doesn’t refer to the image after these claims. When listing the birds found within the park, the article uses wikilinks, but continues to leave out a citation to verify the presence of these birds. The article could easily list common birds found in the area using a source such as the Seattle Audubon Society.

Links

With only two citations listed in the article, I would expect these sources to be dependable. However, when I looked into the two links provided, I found that the first citation, regarding the park’s historic landmark, a bathhouse, only brings the reader to a City of Seattle listing of the city's landmarks, arranged in alphabetical order. In order to find the listing for the bathhouse, it is necessary to move through nineteen pages till “Golden Gardens Bathhouse” appears, then go to the given PDF. The article should lead the reader directly to the source, without requiring them to follow any additional links to find the information on their own. The second source, the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department’s page on the park, offers us a better resource, but little information is retrieved from this source.

Relevant information

The article also fails to provide relevant information. A lengthier description of the park's recreational activities (as would seem relevant for a public park), should be the priority, however the article instead shares a list of birds found in the park. Though not unimportant, by placing more weight on the wildlife at the park than its activities and physical features, there is an uneven balance of information at the readers disposal. By overinforming the reader on this trivial detail, it becomes difficult for the majority of readers to discern the debatably more useful information, such as the activities found at the park. The page also lacks a timeline of Golden Garden's history. A simple google search of "history of golden gardens" brings us to an article by Historic Seattle. This article provides more information that could be easily included to give context to the description of the park.

Conclusion

With the addition of more verifiable information about Golden Gardens, a revision of the existing links, and an adjustment of the information provided, I would maintain that this page is satisfactory. However, at present the page provides little helpful information and other sites such as the Washington Trails Association's page would provide better information about the park.