User:WikiWikiWack

Biography

First and foremost, greetings my fellow Wikipedians! I look forward to learning more about the community here and contributing where I can to help Wikipedia grow. Now with that out of the way, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm currently enrolled as a student at a local college were I'm working towards a degree in synthetic biology. I have a deep passion for world history, especially events pertaining to scientific advances and I can happily spend most days with my nose buried in a book. That being said I believe that an active lifestyle is just as important as an academic one. Most days you can find me at the local gym, or on the rare occasion the sun decides to shine in the PNW, hiking through our local national forest.

While I'm interested in being a follower and contributor in scientific fields on Wikipedia, I also hope to partake in building pages on historically significant scientists and how they contributed to humanities overall scientific progression. My main goal using Wikipedia as a tool is to find like minded contributors and hopefully expand my current knowledge through discussion about said subjects.

Article Critique

While searching for a Wikipedia page to critique for my english class, I decided to look into the college I was attending to see what the world of Wikipedia knew about my school. What I found was dismaying at most. While visiting the Olympic College page on Wikipedia, I found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the absolute lack of any sort of citation, no table of contents or general structure of the page, and lack of general content.

Citations

For the entirety of the article there is only a single reference to credit it, although without a single citation it’s difficult to know which statements are related or even credible for that matter. For this article to have any sort of credibility it needs to have a least a few citations placed within the article, perhaps starting with the statement about the demographics of the school. It would also be useful to have another reference or two, preferably from a neutral party (the only reference is from the actual college website).

Page Structure

Most Wikipedia articles will use a table of contents to help structure the content of the page and make it easier to navigate for the reader. Unfortunately, this article lacks any sort of structure whatsoever with most of the information seemingly jumbled together. I think it would be beneficial to tidy up and reorganize the content into like segments and add some headings to make a table of contents.

Lack of content

Lastly, there is the content itself. While it isn’t entirely without information, what’s available is extremely vague in all regards with a total word count of barely over 500. For a college that reportedly educates 13,000 students a year, that is severely disappointing. There’s no mention of any sports teams, extracurricular activities, or impact on the local community.  Even more shocking, there is only three sentences on the history of the college. If any of these sections were improved upon I feel it would greatly enhance the quality of the article.

Summary

In summary, I think the Olympic College Wikipedia page needs a lot of work, but isn’t beyond redemption. There are a couple of very interesting facts sprinkled throughout the article but citations are needed for all of them to be considered reliable. Organizing the page is also a must while adding additional content and background in almost every section.  Once accomplished I feel this could become a credible article that is both professional in its presentation and educational in its content.

Olympic College: Rough Draft

Olympic College is an urban-based, but rural- and urban-serving, 2-year public institution in Bremerton, in the U.S. state of Washington.