User:Ameliakeily/sandbox

Social Construction of Gender
Initially, I am immediately distracted by jargon, phrasing that is difficult to understand particularly for Wikipedia's majority demographic. Not only is it full of these intensely constructed sentences and jargon, the initial paragraph on gender (a fairly essential piece of the ‘social construction of gender’ puzzle) fails to provide more than one source for it’s information, implying to me their definition of gender is a limited scope from merely three authors. Moving forward, in the section on ‘Gender orientation and sexuality/sexual orientation’, I also notice dated research - research used in the very same article to show an historical perspective, rather than a timely view.

Another problem that arose, was the links were not all completely accurate. When I visited the site to a few citations, the information was accurate according to the article, but not necessarily unbiased according to the article it came from - merely choosing a specific part of the phrasing because it supported the claim they were trying to make. While these links technically support the article, it also inhibits its ability to be as accurate and representative of the consensus in the field of study as it can be. To me this is on the same level as an undergrad research paper, choosing an article based on its title, skimming it and using whatever one can to make a claim compelling.

There is a multitude of circumstances whereby a source has not been correctly cited, has been disputed, or has not been cited whatsoever. Where a source is not cited, the brackets say ‘[citation needed]’, yet it only appears when logged into wikipedia, which could be problematic for those trying to find information in the article to locate from the source. A scan of the talk page yields a lot of concerning information about the previous edits of the page, there is information that is inaccurate, not well worded, and some that is simply made up. Areas on the talk page range from minor grammatical corrections to entire sections that have been removed. One is even titled ‘This page is a mess!’, and another ‘Had to remove some sources that were unsourced and clearly not true’. While these edits don’t appear on the page visible to those who are not logged in, it begs the question of how much of the article is really ‘intact’. What information is actually legitimate, and what is biased?

The talk page raises another issue altogether - how could we better present the information that is on the page? The user who adds that the page is a mess has a point in more than one way - the page is not only full of biased, uncited and occasionally made up claims, it is lacking in structure and a flow. The points do not connect well with each other, and is repetitive at times. As I touched upon earlier, the jargon and lack of readability make this wikipedia site seem completely nonsense - nothing is in tune with each other, and it requires some serious work.

Assignment due 1/31/18 - Sentences
I hope to contribute some honest, and balanced information to the page on Ableism. I wasn't aware of the concept of ableism until this semester, when a professor explained to the class that she is trying to reform how she speaks to audiences - to be more inclusive. Eg. Instead of 'Do you see what I mean?' (implying everyone has always had sight, saying 'Do you understand what I mean?' - being more direct and inclusive.