User:Bigbidness/sandbox

Article Critique
Wishing I was travelling to the Caribbean one day in class, I figured that researching the islands would be a great way to kick off my editing career on Wikipedia, and after following a few links, I visited the Buccaneer page on Wikipedia,and found 3 aspect worth commenting on: Citations, Structure/completeness, and Grammar.

History
The History of Buccaneers does not cite any sources, and with just a few quick searches on the internet, I was able to find a couple reliable and accurate articles as well as publications that could be added as possible sources for the history section, and they provide back up for the points already briefly stated in the current article. For the first source I visited Encyclopedia Britannica's website and was able to find the entry on Buccaneers. For the second source, I was able to find a book on google written by James Burney, a Captain of a ship in 1816, who had first hand knowledge and experience of Buccaneers, as well as the political scene in the 18th century. As you can see throughout the article as well, almost no sources are used, and a "citation needed" tag is common throughout.

Structure
Structure on the Buccaneers page is lacking when it comes to the warfare section, an editor decided to divide it into 2 parts, Land and Naval. Without adequate information for either section, I do not see why this section needs to be split into different parts, as it stops the flow of the article and makes it look less reliable. The article could also use a "Notable Buccaneers" section, instead of including most of the influential buccaneers in the history section.

Grammar
Lastly, the grammar of the Buccaneers page seems to all rely too heavily on a single source, giving it a single tone that isn't entirely neutral. For example the sentence "literature brought buccaneers to glory as example of virility and self-reliance... ... set the tone for the glamorous ways in which later generations would perceive them." eludes to the fact that later generations would find buccaneers as glamorous instead of savages or pirates.

The Buccaneers page certainly isn't as bad as some other pages on Wikipedia, however I feel as if it's only a few small changes away from becoming a solid, reliable source of information on buccaneers, but also a page where you can find other informative links to articles and publications.

Bigbidness (talk) 06:32, 17 October 2018 (UTC)