SA#5 Wiki Analysis

Part 1: As far as comparing and contrasting the Michelle Citron and the Marshall McLuhan articles on Wikipedia, they are drastically different in every way, shape, and form. On the whole, the Marshall article is far more involved and structured significantly better. The depth of the Marshall article can be seen immediately just by the lay out of the table of contents. All the information is grouped nicely into sets and subsets. The information itself is more than the basic information given in the Citron article as well. General information such as birthday, occupation, a graph, and a short bibliography is all that is present in the Citron article. The Marshall article contains multimedia with it's use of pictures. The use of this intertextuality helps understanding aspects of the article and allows the reader to gain a better understanding of who this man was and what he did.

Both of the following articles are on Henry Sedgwick. The Stanford version is far more in depth, just as the Marshall article is. It is less interesting as well. At first glance it is nothing more than a huge block of text. This can be off putting to a reader, and with the boring tone it holds it can put the reader off even more. The Stanford article is a scholarly source, and holds far more weight in an essay. The resources used to gather the information in that Stanford article is more than twenty times as much as in the Wikipedia article. This means the Stanford article has its flaws ironed out a bit more. The Wiki article just seems short and stagnate when juxtaposed to the Stanford article, which makes me now doubt the creditably of any other Wiki article I read.

Part 2: I chose the Joan of Arc article from the Wiki featured articles. It is very well written and comprehensive, but an immediate issue I noticed were the amount of resources used to write the article. It had an astounding total of five sources sited. The structure and lead in to the article are great and it is structurally sound, it's also significant in length so there isn't a shortage of information. The article also has a plethora of images to support the text. Overall the main concerns were of the sources and the article being neutral and having no original research done to support the claims. 

The sources used in this article are reliable, but the is that there are only five sources cited. This if severely lacking when compared to the nearly one hundred sources used in the Stanford article read earlier. The resources must not be original too, which seems easy enough, but there are people who use Wikipedia as a place to spit out their own ideas and research. I didn't see that in the Joan of Arc article, but I can imagine if is fairly prevalent. Which leads to articles being neutral an unbiased. With so many controversial topics like same sex marriage and abortion,  it can be very easy for someone to push their ideals onto other people through Wikipedia.

Analysis: Wikipedia has a strict set of rules for posting to the site. Unfortunately, even though the information is similar to any encyclopedia or scholarly source, the site isn't held to the same standard. Which, when you think about it, is perfectly reasonable. With articles having as little one or no sources, or having only a sentence worth of information, being considered a serious source is hard to imagine. On top of that, having articles be totally unbiased is next to impossible to do.

The organization of an article is rather understated, but can make or break an article. How a work is divided up or how the information is displayed is integral to allowing the reader to fully grasp the ideas being put forth. How the articles are laid out with the inclusion of multitexts, be it pictures, graphs, or what have you, is another aspect that is key to keeping the readers attention and maximizing the amount of information reaching the reader.

I believe it will be rather difficult to finalize a draft destined for a Wikipage. Getting the information and writing an article is one thing, but doing so in a manner that is conducive for the requirements under the FA criteria is another. Articles posted to Wiki are torn apart by editors and other posters, changes are constantly happening to pages, and it would be impossible for the information to remain the same on a wikipage for more than a couple months. In the time I spent looking at the 'last date edited' sections on pages, not a single one was left untouched for more than three months.