User:Stevenarntson

About me
I'm a writer and musician who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I write mostly fiction, but as a reader I read widely&mdash;fiction, nonfiction, and (sometimes) poetry. I play music, and am interested in global folk and classical traditions. Other things about me: I maintain an interest in local flora, I'm an adjunct college English instructor, and my wife and I used to own a cat. Cats are common companion animals.

My Wikipedia activities
I employ Wikipedia in my classes, and assign some projects involving the use and improvement of it (writing a bio like this one is the first assignment). I primarily make small changes to pages, especially in the interest of removing bias. I've also been involved in a longterm project of creating pages for lesser-known women sci-fi writers of the 1970s and '80s. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, and it's been gratifying to be able to collect here some information about authors whose accomplishments were, in my view, notable. So far I've completed pages for Marcia J. Bennett, Martha deMey Clow, Sharon Baker, and Carmen Carter.

Article evaluation
I've been interested in the concertina for quite a few years, which gives me some context for evaluating this article. I want Wikipedia's coverage of concertinas to be as good as it can be, and with that in mind, I visited the concertina article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: its good overall info, its lack of citations, and important missing information.

Good Overall Info
I've noticed that many of Wikipedia's pages about musical instruments try to capture a global sense of how those instruments are used, and this page does mention some cultures that use the concertina for types of music ranging from Victorian classical repertoire to American jazz to Argentinian tango. That said, I know that the concertina is also used in Zulu music in South Africa, and I don't see this mentioned on the page.

Lack of Citations
There are some citations on the page, but not many. General references are listed at the bottom, but these aren't cited in the article itself, so it's hard to tell which facts are attributable to which sections. The section titled "German Concertinas" in particular has claims with no evidence (and only one citation, total). The article could use an overhaul here, with more citations and reliable sources used in the article. If there are other sources beyond these, perhaps then an "external links" section could include some of these.

Important Missing Information
The concertina I play uses the Wicki-Hayden note layout. This is an important system for duet type concertinas, and it has an extensive page (noted above) on Wikipedia. Surprisingly, there is no mention of this on the Concertina page. It seems like a very simple thing to produce a wiki link.

Conclusion
Overall, I'd rate this page as "okay." The scope of information provided creates a reasonably complete background, but the page cites very few sources, so it's impossible to say whether or not the information is reliable. Also, there are pieces of information that are not included on this page, which I think would benefit the scope with a greater sense of the worldwide use of this instrument.

Relevant pages and subpages of this page

 * user:stevenarntson/thesis_project
 * User:Stevenarntson/Author_Template
 * user:EverettCC_Test_Student
 * user:stevenarntson/Tree_frog_example
 * user:stevenarntson/Student_template
 * User:Stevenarntson/kalyani roy (musician)