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Peer Reviews

Week 4 Sandbox

Week 9: People's Code

Week 2: Wikipedia Article Evaluation
In this work, I will be providing an evaluation of Wikpedia’s article on the cryptocurrency Ethereum. I have organized my assessments into the three headings below, and have answered Professor Tracey P. Lauriault’s guiding questions throughout.

Official Article Rating
Although it ultimately fell short, this article was nominated as a ‘good’ article by the Engineering and Technology articles of Wikipedia. It is also included in various Wikipedia Projects ranging from various backgrounds, such as: Economics, Business, Cryptocurrencies, Computer Science and so forth. This speak to the articles’ notability in these areas, as well as its overall verifiability for having achieved acknowledgement by way of this nomination.

Quality of References and Content
As expressed by the Talk page portion of this article, this work did have some questionable editors, and for this reason, their contributions were understandably scrutinized by fellow Wikipedians. These contributors were either owners of the cryptocurrency themselves, or developed for Ethereum, both of which raised legitimate questions about whether this was in contradiction of Wikipedia’s guidelines on conflicts of interest, and more largely, about whether these contributions were resultantly biased because of the positions of their editors. Their contributions were decidedly objective enough to remain in the article, however, this was still made mention of almost immediately on the Talk Page, likely to demonstrate recognition of potential biases/limitations early on. Similarly, this article did make mention of some past Eretheum projects, but again, admits early on that this information is outdated, which, again, was likely done to be clear about potential limitations.

Outside of the questions of reliability raised above, the remaining portions of the article were seemingly very sound, and reputable. The article cited upwards of one hundred resources to affirm its claims, and, as per Wikpedia’s guiding principles in its training sessions and modules, these sources were excellently curated from up to date official business/academic journals and professional university research, with updates from as recent as yesterday. In addition to this, ostensibly none of these references were promotional in nature or from Erethreum themselves. In fact, for the most part, many of the cited works had subject matter which was independent from, and had more vast focuses than Erethreum alone. Alternatively, these references touched on topics like: ledgers, smart contracts, blockchains and hard forking, to further the dialogue in this article more comprehensively in relation to Erethreum’s affiliated areas, and facilitated a better understanding of the cryptocurrency in this way.

Apart from this, the singe reference I did take issue with was Bitcoin. As arguably one of, if not the most well known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is intuitively also one of Erethreums largest competitors, as an up and coming big cryptocurrency in its own right. For this reason, citing material from Bitcoin’s direct website on Erethreum would likely result in a fair amount of bias, in light of this economic competition. And, unsurprisingly, the only two references from Bitcoin in this article were both negative in nature, and painted Erethreum in a negative light. These references suggested that Erethreum is risky, and also predicted it will hard-fork at least another two times in the next few years.

Final Thoughts
While the general consensus in the Talk Page and acknowledgements of this article would contend this article was well done, I do think it could be improved in some areas. It was largely well sourced, (with the exception of the aforementioned Bitcoin articles), and was all fairly relevant, with little to no distractors. However, I found myself in agreement with many Wikpedians on the Talk Page that this article did seem slightly negative, and not otherwise as neutral as it should be.

There seemed to be an over representation of Erethreum’s drawbacks and supposed failures, and a serious under representation of its successes and capacity for good. Had it have not been for class discussions in COMS 4407, and some previous knowledge of cryptocurrencies, I would have likely been very disinterested in Erethreum, and curious about the popularity of cryptocurrencies as a whole, because this article does a poor job of drawing on their positives. More specifically, I’ve learned from personal discussions from external resources and friends that this particular cryptocurrency has some very unique features to it in relation to smart contracts and the exchange of assets it can facilitate. Herein, Ethereum could potentially have the capacity to negate need for lawyers and banks within these transactions. However, because this article was seemingly reluctant to touch on positives of the currency, I unfortunately did not get to read more into this, which I was excited to.