User:StardustKitten

Hello, I am a Christian, musician, writer, and artist living in the USA! I have played piano for 13 years and have been a proud flautist (flutist) for six. In my free time, I love to write fiction/fantasy stories. I'm also an avid reader. My favorite medium in art is my lovely charcoal pencils -- my least favorite would have to be chalk pastels. Another big part of my life is Crossfit, which is a hardcore fitness training program that I attend twice a week.

One of the topics I research most on Wikipedia is cats, so I would love to fill in any missed information on the many, wonderful cat breeds. When I was younger my friends and I would always look for articles on Wikipedia about our favorite animals so that we could learn more about them since we didn't have access to an animal encyclopedia. I also have a crazy love for plants (although I have a terrible green thumb), and I'm excited to read more about them on Wikipedia and hopefully contribute to the articles.

Article Critique

Cats have always sparked my interest.  I have an orange tabby myself but hope to get a purebred eventually, so I often enjoy researching the many different breeds. I stumbled across the Asian breed during my search and decided to learn more about it.  I visited the Asian Cat page on Wikipedia and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the grammar, the deficiency of links to more information, and the lack of citations.

Grammar

The article’s sentence structure was choppy, hard to read, and didn't appear professional.  Instead of having several short sentences, they could be combined into longer ones. There was also an excessive use of commas, but then none where some were actually needed.  Improving the grammar and sentences would make it easier to read and help readers to extract the information.  The spelling and general format were fairly good, though.  

Links

I happen to have some knowledge about cats, but to someone who isn’t familiar with cat-terms or cats in general, this article could be confusing.  There were no links to explain what a Burmilla or renal disease was.  Providing more links to other Wikipedia articles would be beneficial to readers who aren’t familiar with the subject or are wanting to extend their research.  

Citations

The article only had two references, and they were both cited only once.  About two-thirds of the article needed citations. I visited one of the two sources and found that while the non-cited information wasn’t necessarily plagiarized, it did follow the layout of the source website.  Mostly, the information just needed to be backed up with good source cites, otherwise it is a lot harder to know if you are reading trustworthy, reliable information.

Conclusion

The Asian Cat Wikipedia article definitely has some developing to do, but it has a good base. This article could improve with some grammar fixes, links to other articles, and more reliable sources with citations.  The author did appear to know their subject and there were hints that they had personal experience, which is good. Overall, the article needs the addition of more trusted information, as it is weak in some areas.