About Me
Evaluating a Wikipedia article
23/2/2016 by Morien Raeymakers
For evaluating the Wikipedia article, the Dutch page of “Lorem Ipsum” seemed to be a good place to start, as we used the term and the concept already while exercising on Wiki mark-up language. Although the page did have some interesting information about what this textual filler is about, it had two main problems as a Wikipedia article.
First of all, the lack of references made me look more critically to the content. The original article stated that “Lorem Ipsum” had no meaning at all and was only a type of pseudo-Latin. Because I have studied Latin Linguistics and Literature I could see that it was not true, and I started looking for additional information and references to back my claim up and complete the page with the original reliable sources. Other information stated that all variants of Lorem Ipsum has always the same first sentence, which was wrong to, as one of the external links even proved.
The second problem the Wikipedia article had was a structural one. The introduction did show what the concept was, but did not offer an overview. It did cover what it was, but not why it was used. Also the sequence of the article went from introduction-present-1500-present-past, which did not seem to be balanced well. After rearranging this, a more clear structure will be better.
After evaluating this Wikipedia article, I have made the necessary changes to fix those problems, hoping to contribute a useful asset to the Dutch Wikipedia.
As a Belgian exchange student at UIUC and an aspiring journalist the world of New Media creates a wide variety of possibilities.
