User:Shawnm419

Bio

About Me

I am a hairdresser of nearly 15 years, turned student. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I had the opportunity to assess my life goals and reposition my path. Starting 2021, I made the decision to return to school and work towards a Bachelors in Psychology. Making life altering decisions wasn't the only thing I worked on. I found a few new hobbies, such as sewing, and building/repurposing furniture pieces.

During the lockdown period, I taught myself how to sew with a machine and I focused on making cloth masks that follow CDC guidelines. I roughly made 1000 masks and about 20% of those I donated, due to mask shortages. N-95 masks were hard to come by and at the time the public was strongly urged to mask up in public.

When I needed a break from sewing, I turned my attention to basic woodworking. Using general know-how, I crafted a freestanding cupboard made from blue pine, which became an anniversary gift for my life-partner. I also built an L-shaped desk so I could work on my school assignments comfortably. I expanded the dimensions of the original plans, so it could double as a crafting table/desk as well.

My Wikipedia Interests

I am someone who uses Wikipedia as an information source, I'm looking forward to exploring Wikipedia further as a contributor during my time in school. There's no doubt that in the future I will contribute more in my chosen field and perhaps in areas of my current career as well.

Article evaluation

Since just before the global pandemic, I've gained an interest in keeping houseplants. On my journey of becoming a so-called "plant parent", I have collected quite a few different species of popular houseplants. One of the very first propagations given to me by a friend is the Chinese money plant, and because of its unique shape, I visited the Pilea peperomioides article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the article's overall form, its current popularity, and good use of sources.

Overall form

At first glance, this article seems to provide a great deal of factual and straightforward information. Though, in its first paragraph, the tone slightly moves back and forth in factual statements to nearly irrelevant sentences. I found one contradiction, between the Range and Cultivation paragraphs that elaborated on could solve the contractions, otherwise its irrelevant information. The article does provide all botanical information, appropriate wiki links, and has a natural flow.

Current popularity

I noticed very minor changes in the content and in the citations of this article, over the course of a week. At the time of writing my evaluation, the last edit to the article was made less than 24 hours ago. This shows that not only is this a popular plant to obtain and care for, but also frequently researched. Some of the citations are as current as 2021.

Citations

Most of the facts cited appear to come from reliable sources. When I followed the link to the source of the last fact cited in the history paragraph, I discovered everything stated in the history paragraph came from this source. This made a bit more sense, as the first part of the history paragraph seemed to be a separate unverifiable fact. In the references, a title of an interview that was cited as the first source in the Pilea peperomioides article, included the name of a botanist that was linked to a dead link. This took me to a "page does not exist" error page. However, a "[nl]" noted next to the linked name took me to the Dutch Wikipedia article of that name. The article was also available in english. The citations also included printed sources, verifiable through ISBN information.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed looking up this wikipedia article, because it is an easy and natural read. It's not overly saturated with irrelevant facts and seems to be relatively unbiased. It provides a great amount of wikipedia links and factual statements cited from reliable sources. The only thing I'd like to see added to the article would be more specific historic facts and more in-depth research on its range paragraph.