User:Ajknight2/sandbox

Deborah Schiffrin

Wiki Assignment #3

write a few sentences about what you plan to contribute to the selected article. Some things to do as you make your plan:

• What can you add? You have been assigned a stub, which means that it needs information added to it. Post some of your ideas to the article's talk page.
• Compile a list of relevant, reliable books, journal articles, or other sources that you could use to add information to your assigned article. Post that bibliography to the talk page of the article you'll be working on, and in your sandbox. Make sure to check in on the Talk page to see if anyone has advice on your bibliography.

Contributions

There is a lot that can be added to this "stub" article including:

• Early life
• Education
• Mid life
• Studies and research topics
• Late Life (I do not particularly like the section titled "Death" I think that is quite tacky honestly and would rather have something titled "Late Life" and then towards the end include the facts related to her death)
• Children
• A time line of some sorts
• And... I am sure that I will find more possible sections that I can add once I have done some research about her and see what types of sections my peers are adding to their articles. The publications section is nice, but certainly can be added to.

Bibliography

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. (2012). Schiffrin, Deborah. isbn 9781405194730

By searching on the Consortium Library pages, the only publications regarding Deborah that come up are books and publications that she has produced. I tried searching her in the advanced search box as subject field and nothing appeared. I did notice a lot of sources already cited on the stub page and I plan on checking these out. I did request an inter-library loan for the citation listed above, but noticed that this one already appeared on the stub page as well. Usually you can find more resources by looking at the references of these other sources tho, so that is my plan. I also noticed a blog entry as one of the sources on this page, I thought we aren't supposed to use blog entries because they are unreliable sources?

Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics. (2001). Deborah Schiffrin (1951-). isbn 9780080437262

Muller, Simone. Discourse markers in native and non-native English discourse. (2005). Benjamins, John Publications: Philadelphia. isbn 9789027293961

I have requested inter-library loans for all three resources listed.

Article Evaluation

Wiki Assignment #2:

Choose a non-stub article on Wikipedia related to your course to read and evaluate. As you read, consider the following questions (but don't feel limited to these):

Voice (phonetics)

1. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

Before the introduction to the article there is a section that shows redirection and a “see also” notification. I don’t think that’s entirely necessary, they might have chosen to make the word voiceless a tag later on in the article instead. The word is used in the first sentence of the introduction, this is where I would have chosen to make that word a tag to locate a different article regarding voiceless rather than the distracting side note at the top.

2. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

Overall, I have not found any suggestive language but it does use a lot of what I call “un confidant word choice” (I can never remember the actual word to describe these words, I think it is along the lines of modality, but that doesn’t sound right). These “unconfident words and phrases include: maybe, possibly, might, can mean, should, could, and more.  There was the word “best” used but I think that it fit the circumstances.

3. Are there viewpoints that are over represented, or underrepresented?

Notation to me seems to be underrepresented a bit, I think the article should build upon the notation section by simply address the question of “what is notation.” This question is not answered, and it is not described as to why brackets are used to distinguish between sound and letters. Earlier, in the beginning of the article, there is a sentence in which the author states that “s” and “z” are notated as [s] and [z] to distinguish the sound from the letter, (they phrase it differently) and it doesn’t really answer they “why” question.

There could also be a section included that goes into “other languages,” there is a section for English, but nothing that denotes the relationship of Voice with other languages in any degree or fashion. This would be a great section to add to this article along with some sub categories of the particularly major languages around the world.

4. Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?

At first, I was a little confused as to how the citations worked because I noticed there were not direct traditional in-text citations, but after clicking on the little ^ sign next to the reference in the References list, I see how they work. These citations are more like footnotes, and less like traditional in-text citations.

The references listed in the references list are not links themselves, they are just either a traditional reference or not a reference at all, and are rather an end note regarding the correlating information. There are however tags for some of the information listed in the references that will take you to different articles regarding that topic, but not to the sources used to discuss this topic.

5. Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

No. There is not a footnote, end note, or traditional MLA style in-text citation for all of the information listed. Especially in the last section “voice and tenseness.” There is also a hypothesis mentioned in this last section that could be seen as either a biased notation or just a comment on the research that is being currently worked on. Overall, I did the citation training but I am still confused as to how this citation business worked. Mentioned above, I thought I understood but now I am back to not being so sure. I understand that all information should be cited, but are they supposed to be end note citations or MLA style in-text citations?

6. Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?

In the last section, it mentions a hypothesis that is currently being worked on but it doesn’t give a year or date for when that hypothesis was developed. How are we supposed to know if it is still being worked on or if it should be finalized by now?

  7. Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?

There is a conversation on this talk page on if English even has voicing features or not, and I think that is kind of ridiculous. This whole conversation is a biased opinion of certain individual who have “come to their own conclusions” but the whole point of Wikipedia is not be biased and to only mention the reputable facts about the topic. There are clearly reputable facts that voicing features do exist in the English language so this whole conversation is moot.

   8. How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?

The article has been rated as “start-class” on the projects quality scale and has not yet been rated for the projects importance scale.

   9. How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

  It definitely talks about linguistics, and voicing in laments terms. There is not a lot of difficult words to understand or even long sentences with wordage. Any words that are remotely difficult or pertain to the topic are linked to other articles within Wikipedia about that specific term. However, it did mention the Adams apple example in how to distinguish the difference between voiceless and voiced constants. One more thing that was left out and I think could be brushed upon, is why vowels are not categorized as either voiced or voiceless.

  10. Optional, but recommended: Alongside the notes you make in your sandbox, choose at least 1 question relevant to the article you're evaluating and leave your evaluation on the article's Talk page. Be sure to sign your feedback with four tildes: ~~~~.

For my comment on the talk page I wrote: “I think that a few additional sections added to this article could strengthen its coverage in the notion of "voice." The two sections that I think this article would benefit from is an "other languages" section that could have sub categories of the major languages used around the world and how voice relates to those languages, as well as a "vowel" section that explains why vowels are not considered to carry voice. Just a thought. ~~~~”