User:Wyattbaseball3

About Me
My name is Wyatt Thomas Wilson and I am a student at Everett Community College. My hobbies are gaming, sports, and camping with friends and family. Video games have been a part of my life as far back as I can remember. I started out playing games on a Playstaion 2 like Spyro and Sonic the Hedgehog. Sports have also been included in a big chunk of my life. I played baseball all the way up to the college level, playing for about 3 months at a community college before deciding it wasn't for me. Playing sports has a big impact on my body for the better, keeping me in shape. They have been proven to reduce risk of obesity in children, improve cardiovascular health, and many other positive benefits.

My Wikipedia interests
Wikipedia is a resource that has helped me throughout my life in various different ways. One day I might use it to look up and learn more on a school subject, then the next I might want to look up Badminton rules to prove a friend wrong on a play. If I ended up working on Wikipedia articles long term, my main goal would be to spread the truth about certain subjects with credible citations. There's nothing more annoying than looking something up for answers and getting info that is wrong or not credible. Wikipedia nets over 18 billion page views a month and if all those viewers are reading false information, then that is something I would like to change.

Article Evaluation: the "Spitball"
Baseball is a game that has been around for hundreds of years and is widely known as “America’s Pastime.”  It has been a huge part of my life playing from when I was about three all the way up to the college level, needless to say baseball is a subject I am very familiar with so I decided to do an evaluation of a Wiki article on a baseball subject. So, after a while of searching and surfing, I found a page with only some information and perfect for critiquing. I visited the spitball article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects worth commenting on: are any of the sources biased, is the article up to date, and, are there irrelevant sections or sentences?

As I was reading the Spitball article there was one section that caught my eye and wanted to learn more about, this section is titled “Ban.”  The Spitball was banned in the early 1920’s and was a big controversy in the world of baseball with so many pitchers being “spitballers.”  The question, are any of the sources biased, is answered late in this section with a quote from the MLB Commissioner in 1955, Ford Frick. He is quoted advocating the return of the spitball saying “If I had my way, I'd legalize the old spitter. It was a great pitch and one of the easiest to throw.”  Though the author themselves isn’t being biased, one of their sources on the subject was clearly biased on the subject; leading us to the conclusion that one of the sources is, or was, biased.

The second question, is the article up to date, was another one that caught my eye and I decided to look deeper into it. With something that is not commonly known or searched, such as the spitball, I didn’t expect much of the information to be super recent. Yes, there are a couple of dated, yet relevant, sources that date back to the 60’s, but I was surprised to see that there are sources that date all the way up to 2021. With more research into these recent sources, I feel that these sources are not only recent, but also credible. This was a shock to me in a good way and maybe Wikipedia is more credible than I thought.

The last question, are there irrelevant sections or sentences, is an interesting one for this article. The last section of the article is titled “Comparison to Cricket.” It goes on about how cricket bowlers tamper with their ball as well in various different ways, some similar to baseball. There are no references in this section which questions its credibility right off the bat. My main concern is the sections relevance because the whole page is dedicated to the history of the outlawed pitch in baseball and not once is cricket mentioned till the end. That with the combination of verifiability brings me back to the question at hand, are there irrelevant sections or sentences? My answer is yes, the section about cricket in this article, in my opinion, is irrelevant to the page.

In conclusion, the spitball Wikipedia page is a mostly reliable source for information on the subject. This is because the references that are used are valid and up to date. With the exception of a couple lines being biased from a source and a section that is not relevant to the rest of the page, this is a good article and was interesting for me to learn some history on the sport I love.