User:Joshedits96

About me
My hobby are Botany, Astronomy and Urban exploration. Portions of the Monte Cristo mining town still have unsafe levels of mercury almost 100 years later.

My Wikipedia interests
My goal on Wikipedia is to add information on some of lesser known locations an industries throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Article evaluation[ edit]
I have owned and operated carbide lamps for over a decade and know that there are a handful of well curated websites dedicated to them on the internet. However the first search result for this is from wikipedia. I visited the carbide lamp article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: its citations, parallel technologies, and no section dedicated to hazards.

Citations[ edit]
The article has very few citations, however, the ones it does have are good if not a little dated. most of the links were to pages archived on the wayback machine. There's a troubling amount of claims without citations, most of them seem like they would be trivial to find and add to the page.

Parallel Technologies[ edit]
A large part of the carbide lamp's initial success and later decline was its use of calcium carbide, the same fuel as steam cars as well as several other tools and appliances of the time. The article says very little about the calcium carbide industry surrounding the lamps. There is no mention of ubiquiti calcium carbide and the convenience of running a lamp off it.

The page makes a mention of the 1932 Moweaqua Coal Mine disaster where a carbide lamp was implicated as the cause, however this is the only instance where the potential dangers are brought up which I find odd because safety is commonly cited as the main reason why the lamps stopped being used.

Summary[ edit]
Overall I would have to say I am disappointed in the page. It will likely give a newcomer a basic understanding of what carbide lamps are and how they work but for anything beyond that such as their history or impact in the world It would fall short. The lack of citations for some of the more interesting claims (such as them being used to prevent hypothermia) prevented me from using it as a jumping off point for further research.