User:Jbizarro

About
NYU Tandon Senior Studying Civil Engineering

This space will be used for class assignment related to the topic of the professional and economic world of Civil Engineering

William Milnor Roberts Article
Edits on talk page about possible typos.

Edits on talk page related to change some of the dates in his career timeline to the correct times and a citation to reference the new corrected dates.

Arthur M. Wellington
The Wellington Article does a decent job at informing the reader of some of his projects as an engineer. The article does lack information on his philosophy on quality engineering, specifically his works on developing what is known today as the engineering economy. Based on information from inside and out of class, this article does not show the importance of Wellington, the father of engineering economy.

Engineering Economics
The article on engineering economy does reflect the thoughts and works of Arthur Wellington. Since this is a more modern model, It goes beyond the engineering economy talked about by Wellington, and goes into more advance topics such as time value of money, statistics, and micro-economics. The foundation set by Wellington is still prevalent, especially towards the end of the article which addresses the idea of many alternatives to a single problem, even the alternative of doing nothing if there is no viable possible returns. The only changes for this article would be the addition of a subsection focused on the history of engineering economy.

What is a Content Gap
Content gaps are areas that lack information on Wikipedia. This is when an article on a specific relevant topic does not exist, or even when an article on a topic exists, but it fails to supply the whole context of the subject. Someways of identifying them is by looking at the ranking of existing articles or checking navigation templates. Reading assessment tables show articles' rankings based on importance and quality. Navigation templates use red text to indicate names/topics that are not yet covered in Wikipedia. The link provided for this assignment was an example of content gaps because the information listed is relevant, but some names had links that lead to nothing because no articles exits yet.

It matters who write Wikipedia. Since it serves as an encyclopedia, it is important to provide a wide range of information in an unbiased manner. This means the people who write the articles should be knowledgeable about the topic but lacks a major personal connection. Civil Engineers should write Wikipedia articles so the profession is accurately documented and explained on Wikipedia. Going along with being bias free, Civil Engineers should write articles, but should not write articles about their own work because there will be an inherit bias of favoritism towards his or her project.

National Academy of Engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineering

This is an extensive article bout the origins, historical progress, accomplishments, and effects of the National Academy of Engineering. Although this article covers a wide range of aspects about the National Academy of Engineering, it does not lack quality or detail. Each heading has numerous sections, all with at least a thick paragraph with substantial information. Considering the extensive detail and attention to every little sub-heading, this single article must have been composed by numerous contributes. The difference in writing structures also reveals the presence of multiple contributors. During the edits of this article, it was evident that some sections used unnecessary words, or had poor sentence structures, needing many edits, while other sections were grammatically prefect, needing no structural edits.

The history sections needed the most edits. It had a written structure of only simple sentences, instead of fuller sentences that composed cohesive paragraphs.

An example of the original structural system compared to the modified can be noted in the first paragraphs of the article. Originally this section had short sentences describing, how new members were elected, when they were elected, what the organization role is. This section was translated better by informing what the organization is and what it does before explaining the election process. When explaining the election process it now informs the reader in one or two well condensed sentences instead of multiple choppy sentences.

old-"New members are elected by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The election process for new members is conducted annually."

new-"New members are annually elected by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research"

Gerald W. Smith and Milnor Roberts articles
These two articles discuss two people who saw great success in different realms of civil engineering. Gerald W. Smith experienced great success in the studying and developing knowledge in the civil engineering profession. Milnor Roberts learned the civil engineering profession through practice and oversaw and managed a range of international and national projects.

Both articles are well developed articles for Wikipedia. Neither drift in irrelevant information, stay neutral and refrain from over-emphasizing any particular attribute. The only complaint can be a lack of information regarding anything outside of their profession, but to be fair, there is probably little to no relevant information about other aspects of their lives.

Most of the citations operate correctly, but one citation for Robert's article leads to an expired page. Citations that were checked and worked came from reliable sources like informative scanned pages of biographical books. The only questionable source is the funeral page for Smith. Although this is a great source to receive accurate and reliable facts about his life, it can also have some bias, because as a bio serving as the memory of a dead man it might neglect some of the negative facts and promote the positive attributes. There are some descriptions that do need more citations. For example the section of Roberts' article that speaks about his marriage has no citations.

Something questionable is also present in the section about his marriage. It says his first marriage was in 1837, with Annie Gibson. It then says she died in 1957. Well thats just not possible because that would mean she lived to be over 120 years old. Must be a typo.

Blog posts and press releases are considered poor sources of reliable information. Why?
Blog posts and press releases are poor sources to acquire information for a Wikipedia post because these sources have an agenda of persuading the reader to understand a specific side of a story instead of the straight facts.

What are some reasons you might not want to use a company's website as the main source of information about that company?
a company has its own bias to support itself and highlight their best parts and ignore the worst. A company’s website is a good source to get some information, but because they will inherently have a bias towards themselves, a company's website should not be the main source of information about a company.

What is the difference between a copyright violation and plagiarism?
The term copyright violation and plagiarism are often used as synonyms, but they have defined differences. Plagiarism is when someone tries to pass off another person’s ideas and works as their own by copying from existing texts and not citing the source. Copyright violations can still occur even when proper citation is used. Copyright violation usually occur from a failure of introducing new thoughts or interpretations of data, just relaying the same information but only changing or rearranging a few words.

What is public domain mean? ...
Public domain is when the intellectual property rights have expired, or when the work was created before copyrights existed

What does fair use mean?...
Fair use allows copyrighted materials to be used without permission to a certain extent. It is meant to balance the need for information be used and open to the public with the rights and ownership from the creator.

What are some good techniques to avoid close paraphrasing and plagiarism?
A good technique to avoid accidental close paragraphing is gathering information from multiple sources, this way information is provided from different angles, allowing the individual to form a better and more unique personal outlook on a topic.

If Wikipedia was written 100 years ago, how might its content (and contributors) be different? What about 100 years from now?
If Wikipedia was written 100 years ago, it would be a much smaller encyclopedia with a lot less information. Wikipedia serves as a tool to take existing and prevalent proven facts from credible sources and summarize this cumulative information into a concise neutral article. Today the internet allows a plentiful of easy accessible content covering virtually any topic; this setup is perfect for Wikipedia. If Wikipedia was a resource a hundred years ago, the average person would have an exponentially harder time to contribute to the public encyclopedia. Wikipedia would have been mainly a tool for influential people, or individuals deeply passionate about sharing knowledge, to publish information. Although it would be a good tool, it would not be serving the purpose of Wikipedia. A Wikipedia from a hundred years ago would not be a source to have the collective knowledge of the masses come together to contribute information, thus would not provide neutral information covering a range of topics. The content of a hundred year ago Wikipedia would be more narrow, one sided, and there would be less works with multiple contributors.

If the world does not fall apart and a hundred years go by, Wikipedia will be a more stagnate site. After a hundred years, theoretically most of the topics that are relative enough to have a Wiki article will have one already. Existing articles would have existed for so long and had enough contributors that they would have reached perfect form. Of course there would still be contributors creating new content, but these articles would solely pertain to current events.

If Wikipedia and civil engineering topics were being written 100 years ago, how might its content (and contributors) be different? What would CE knowledge look like 100 years from now?
Hundred years ago, the relationship between Wikipedia and Civil Engineering would be somewhat similar. The current contributors to Civil Engineering knowledge on Wikipedia are from contributors that are learned or involved in the engineering discipline. The content would be way different because articles would discuss civil engineering knowledge of the early 20th century and touch on topics like the very beginning of the engineering economy. The civil engineering knowledge would be heavily focused on infrastructure for transportation systems to accommodate the automobile, integrating electricity, and utilizing heating in cooling for buildings in a way never accomplished previously.

In a weird twist, civil engineering in Wikipedia might decrease in a hundred years. Articles might get a wider range of contributors from other disciplines of engineering. This would be caused by civil engineering losing monopoly on certain aspects of the discipline due to technology and changing of means and methods. An example of this would be the increased investment in autonomous cars and transportation systems. In the future this would become a reality and Computer and mechanical engineers would start laying more influential roles in transportation infrastructure. Wikipedia would still be relevant as new technologies and methods of construction continue to be developed.