User:Emmy0286/sandbox

Week 2: Article Evaluation
William Milnor Roberts biography

The information included in the article is relevant to the topic; however there are too many gaps which I thought were distracting. Most of the claims are neutral and I didn’t see any bias in the articles. Some of the viewpoints in the articles were underrepresented because of the content gaps and lack of descriptions. The cited links do work, and they do support claims of the articles. Most facts had reliable references however most of the information was obtained from Wikipedia, which makes it a bit of a bias. The information is still relevant since, it is a biography however there were content gaps that could be filled.There were a few omissions in the article. Usually in most biographies when they mention someone's parents, they also go on to talk about their siblings; if they did not have any it is usually expressed. However in this article it is a bit ambiguous whether Roberts had siblings or not because they were not mentioned. The article was just listing his positions instead of describing them in detail, which I felt like was not enough flesh added to the article. The author did not include Robert's education history. As an aspiring engineer when i read on another engineers biography i need to know where they attended university as well, and the degrees they received. In William Milnor Roberts' biography there were a few grammatical errors for example the word President did not have a capital letter for its first letter. In the opening sentence, the writer should have said, "William Milnor Roberts was born in..." instead of putting the birthdate and death date in brackets. The article was part of a couple of WikiProjects such as the WikiProject Pennsylvania, WikiProject Philadelphia, WikiProject Biography, and WikiProject Trains. In these WikiProjects, the article has been rated, “mid-important” in two articles and low-importance in one WikiProject.

American Society of Civil Engineers

After reading the ASCE article I found everything relevant. However there was one thing I found distracting, under the section Women in Civil Engineering heading after the information about wmen there was an abrupt change of topic to talking about ASCE’s 10 best achievements. It would have been better to put a heading above the 10 Civil Engineering achievements.The article maintained some neutrality and viewpoints were well represented. However under the historical controversies and criticism section, the author took a side when reporting. They broke the neutrality rule of Wikipedia on that section. There were a lot of in text citations in the article which made it easy to verify the information. However some of the sources area bit questionable for example the source for the ten wonders of the world is a PowerPoint developed by someone else, not really a credible source there. I don’t think any information is out of date. The information in the article follows what we talked about in class. For example, it mentions how ASCE once constituted an Architecture component to it. The article goes on to provide a lot of in depth information about the organization including how it was founded, and what institutes that it consists of etc. The article is actually part of three WikiProjects, namely WikiProject United States, WikiProject Civil Engineering, WikiProject Organizations. It is rated as of high importance by two of the WikiProjects and as of low importance on one of the WikiProject. I think Wikipedia discusses the topic the same way we have discussed in the class.

Engineering Economics

In the Engineering Economics article everything was relevant to the topic. I was not distracted by anything in the article and I found the article neutral. I did not find any biases in the article. Viewpoints seem to be well balanced, and talk about the relationship between different engineering disciplines and economics. In the Engineering economics article, the citations, worked however there was a reference that I found biased. It was a PowerPoint of a professor that did not have citations which made its credibility questionable. The article was brief and provided most things one needs to know about Engineering Economics. The article starts by mentioning that Engineering Economics was once called Engineering Economy. It's a good thing that, that was the opening. When I started this class I was also confused about how Engineering Economy and Economics were different, so the article clarifies this in the beginning. In class we talked about how some Engineering Economics questions will be on the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, which is also in the article hence what we learned coincide with the article. The article is part of five WikiProjects, and is rated as of top importance in two of the projects and rated low importance in two of the WikiProjects. The topic is discussed the same way we discussed in class only in the article it is well expanded.

Week 4:Thinking about sources and plagiarism

I think the reason why blog posts and press releases are considered poor sources of information are because they are not really based on thorough research, they  might not be based on facts and they are based on people’s opinions hence they will be biased. Press releases will be meant to persuade people to believe a certain side of the story hence using them, might cause one to create an article with some bias. A company’s website too has information that makes the company attractive to the user, and information displayed, supports the company. Plagiarism happens in three ways; when text is copied, but credit is not given to the source, when text is copied but the source is credited and finally close paraphrasing when a source’s text is changed slightly. Copyright violations occur when material is copied and pasted in an article. An example is copying an author’s work or artist’s song lyrics; even though you might credit them it is still considered a copyright violation. Public domain means something is subject to everyone’s use and it is not copyrighted. Fair use refers to a doctrine that allows pieces of copyrighted materials to be used without the rights or paying for the article for news reporting and other circumstances. To avoid close paraphrasing one must read different sources and make their own notes of the key ideas of the articles. To avoid plagiarism one must give credit to any words that are not  your own.