User:William1193/Sandbox

Articles of Interest
Vasa (ship) Engine room

California Maritime Academy Panama Canal

Categories
Marine propulsion

Marine engine

Ship construction

My Panama Canal Review
Comparing and contrasting the Wikipedia Article on the Panama Canal with the article written about the Panama Canal in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History I found slight differences between the two, but they were hidden by the high amount of similarities between the two articles. The differences were mostly found in the measurements of which were different be very small amounts. Also the Wikipedia article left out some of the history prior to initiating the building of the canal under the American rule. I also found that the Wikipedia article went more into depth about things such as the size the of the ships that can go through the canal and what the future aspirations for it will be where as the Oxford Encyclopedia went more broad on its descriptions and wrote only about the history of the panama canal up until the late 1900s.

As I inspected the sources given for this article in Wikipedia, about 80 percent of these sources would be considered reliable according to “Wikipedia: Identifying Reliable sources” and “Wikipedia: Featured article criteria”. This is because these sources are mostly articles written by respected persons that have either studied the Panama Canal, worked for the corporations that manage it, or are professional civil engineers and port managers. Some are these sources that I considered reliable were newsletters posted by Panama Canal Authority giving out history about the project as well as what is currently happening with the Panama Canal and what are future steps in the future to making it better and allow bigger ships to pass through the canal.

While going over and looking for errors in the Panama Canal Wikipedia article I found a minimal amount of errors. The writing style of the whole article was very good and informative with no biases in the article which is good for Wikipedia as it is non biased and supposed to be purely informative for the public. One issue I found with article is that it switches between the European English and American English in both spelling. You can see this in the first sentence where it starts to spell “kilometer” like “kilometre” with the r before the e and then in a four paragraphs later it switcher to spelling it the American way. Nextly, the organization is done extremely well putting things into chronological order as well as keeping all the information under each title specifically to that title which is important to making a good article.

All in all this is a very good article with all the possible important information needed to learn about the Panama Canal without having to research for hours.

William1193 (talk) 18:32, 2 March 2012 (UTC)