User:Ilikesk8

About Me
My hobbies include weight lifting, skateboarding, longboarding, snowboarding, and similar sports. Skateboarding is an unrestricted, rule free, and creative activity; even though there are skate competitions, innovation is generally valued more than winning. I also enjoy cliff jumping, tubing, and swimming in cool spots. I'm currently a running start student and am persuing a business degree. I hope to start a business when I graduate and possibly later down the road start a skate shop or something skate related. I'm the 6th child of 10 kids in my family and have a one-year-old niece and four-year-old nephew whom I adore.

My Wikipedia Interests
My Wikipedia interests are currently to learn more about navigating Wikipedia and improving it for my college classes, but I can see myself later contributing to skateboard pages discussing topics such as different stances, styles of skating, advanced tricks and how they're named, as well as impacts that differents specs of skate equipment have and how certain materials will be better for different aspects of skating.

Artical Evaluation
Due to my interest in skateboarding, my curiosity has led me to look into how more scholarly organizations and writers view and explain the activity. One aspect of skateboarding and some other sports/activities is: footedness. Since it is commonly a confusing subject in board sports, I visited the Footedness article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: its hard-to-understand language, lack of citations, and limitedness to only a few examples of footedness.

Confusing Language

The Article's wording gets lengthy and hard-to-understand in both the introduction and the "Boardsports" section. The introduction's third sentence isn't structured as well as it could be and overcomplicates the subject. The sentence dives into the topic of what footedness is, but instead of giving a broader overview of what it is, it confusingly gets too specific by including two random motions of the foot and two different sports that involve footedness. The sentence isn’t articulated in a clear way and doesn’t seem to fit in the introduction. Instead, it could simply say that "footedness is the topic based on what foot or stance tends to be more dominant or natural, in terms of both strength or comfortability." Further down under the boardsports section of the article, it contains the undefined term "taking off" that isn't clear enough for the context, as well as the term "front foot" which in the context could mean either foot since the paragraph is about riding "switch" (opposite direction normally ridden). It describes fakie in a few complicated and overly lengthy sentences when it is best simplified as doing the exact same tricks as in normal stance but riding in the opposite direction.

Lack of Citations

Some parts of the article were incorrect, and other parts had solid points, but without any verifications it's impossible to tell what's trustworthy information and what’s not. There was inaccuracy in the section comparing the fakie and switch stances, and the article claimed that the difference between them was the direction the rider's shoulders face. The difference, however, in the stances is not in shoulder position but in foot position. Switch and fakie stances are both done riding backwards, but while fakie is executing the exact same trick done in normal stance just riding a different direction, switch is doing the trick itself backwards, meaning the left foot and right foot trade motions. Switch is an imitation (or reflection) of the stance that a skateboarder isn't natural at, but fakie is only a change in the direction of travel and not stance. If the writer of the untrue information looked for a source, they most likely would’ve been corrected and contributed to a more accurate article. Despite the fact that the boardsport section makes up almost half the articles, there are only two citations for it and adding more is a very doable task since there are a good number of articles published about skate stance.

Limited Examples of Footedness

The article's examples of Footedness are limited to football, soccer, basketball, boardsports, and BMXing (as well as a short mention of kickboxing). It could benefit the article to expand into a few more examples of footedness such as scootering, ice-skating, roller-skating, and parkour. These areas bring in more unique aspects of footedness and help to better understand it. Scootering footedness is very similar to skateboarding footedness, but some scooter riders have both feet side-by-side instead of one in front of the other. In ice-skating and roller-skating, some people can go backwards (like skating switch) as well as us tend to have a dominant foot for breaking or to lead in certain tricks. A parkourist can also tend towards a dominant foot for jumping and/or landing, which can also affect which direction feels more natural to rotate in certain moves. These are a few examples of footedness that could expand the article and make it more complete.

Conclusion

Since the page contains confusing wording, too few citations, and limited examples, it is possible a reader could be left more confused or misinformed after reading it. The article has great potential to be very helpful with a few improvements on the points discussed, but until then, it isn't accurate enough and could be just as harmful as helpful.