User:Alexander Tatro/sandbox

Article Critique10-14-17
While Wikipedia is a wealth of information on the internet, it cannot always be taken for face value. Wikipedia is a open work encyclopedia which can be edited or amended by anyone. This provides a broad scope of information from everyone from scholars to enthusiasts, but can result in less than exemplary page construction. The duty of its editors then becomes a everlasting push to make their articles of interest as accurate and polished as possible. I visited the Seiko Corporation page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the lack of sources referenced and citations, the lack of information about certain corporate aspects, and finally the “alert of failure to follow Wikipedia’s guidelines” concerning external links.

I was taken aback that the primary corporate Wikipedia page for a major corporation such as Seiko would have so few citations of fact. As I reviewed the page I noticed that while there was a plethora of specific information about Seiko’s accomplishments and products, there were very few external links indicating where that information was sourced from. I started with basic corporate history as it pertains to their wrist watch manufacturing. There was not a single reference citation in the entirety of the “History and Development” heading. I researched the history of Seiko and found that all of the provided information could have been sourced from the Seiko Museum’s web page. Thusly I entered a citation for the Seiko Museum web page, and added it into the list of external links.

Seiko has created several tiers of wrist watch production. Their highest level of finishing and refinement belonging to their Credor line. Laterally their Grand Seiko line, which while equally refined is much more understated, is the highest level of luxury that Seiko produces under the Seiko name. This was changed in March of 2017 with Grand Seiko becoming an independent line from Seiko entirely. There is no mention of this departure on the page. There is a small embedded topic about Grand Seiko, and none for Credor. It should also be mentioned that there is a request to create a Wikipedia page for Grand Seiko, but there is none. It would be my pleasure to generate this page myself with more time to do so.

As for the use of external links and citation that were given on the Seiko Wikipedia page, there were a few which were formatted incorrectly. I corrected those with dead links to style blogs or men’s fashion magazines dealing with the Seiko Spacewalk. The use of temporary articles posted on blog-like fashion sites does not meet the requirements of a valid or reputable source. I also revised the formatting for a few links which were not in the same orientation as the rest of the references for continuity’s sake. There was also a discretion of the header format in the various subsections of the page, where some titles were capitalized and some were not. This too, was revised.

In conclusion, the fact that a topic has a long standing history in the public eye does not mean that the content of its Wikipedia page accurately depicts the scope of the topic. The number of contributors does not mean that there are any fewer mistakes made or overlooked. The frequency of editing on the Seiko page was a several times a month, but there are still many gaps to fill, and areas to polish. Finally the use of proper and frequent reference is essential to finding and repairing these gaps in content. Without references and citation, there is no way for the casual reader to substantiate the claims of the article or check the validity of their statistics. Edit on Wikipedians, edit on.