Wikipedia is one of the most important -not to say the most- enciclopedies on the Internet, as it contains thousands and thousands of articles. Not all the articles, though, are as good as they should be.
I have been asked to compare and contrast four different articles that can be found in Wikipedia. These are them:
As I’m deffinitely not an expert in this subject, I’m just going to give my opinion about the articles, saying which similarities can I find between them and which article I would choose as a model for our own article.
First of all, I would say that all of them follow the rules that Wikipedia puts about new articles: They show us reliable sources, they talk about something important… All of them also have the Content scheme correctly done, even though some of them are better elaborated (See the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition).
Not all of them have everything right, though. Let’s take a deeper look at the articles.
As you may have noticed, the structure of the four articles are quite similar, but if we look at Linguistic Typology, we’ll see that this one doesn’t have sections such as “See also”, “Further reading” or “References”. As this sections should be put in our article, I think that Linguistic Typology’s article is not the model we need.
So now we have three articles left that could be used as a model.
Let’s now take a look a the length of the articles. We notice that the article for Artificial Intelligence is really long, while the one for Pattern Recognition is really short. Which one would fit the best as a model? Well, in my opinion, Pattern Recognition article is way too short and symple as it doesn’t even have sub-sections. I think we should put sub-sections in our articles too, so I would also reject this one as a model.
We now have two articles left: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation.
From my point of view, Machine Translation is a better example for us, because it’s more simple. I don’t think we need to do a very complicated and long article, but just a middle-sized one with the information we are able to find about our subject, so this would be a great example.
I might be wrong and the rest of my class may not agree with me, but I choose Machine Translation as the best article to use as a model for ours.
References:
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Wikipedia: Starting an article. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:25, June 19, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Starting_an_article
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Wikipedia: Layout. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:40, June 19, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Layout
