CeleryPreserves

Bio

About Me

I'm a student living in the Pacific Northwest. I enjoy reading, writing, and painting in my freetime. I enjoy reading a variety of genres, but my favorite genre is fantasy. One of the authors I enjoy reading is Terry Pratchett, and I specifically enjoy reading his Discworld series. One of my favorite mediums to work with when I'm painting is watercolors. Watercolors are made using pigment and a water soluble binder. While I like using watercolors, I also enjoy dabbling in doing mixed-media pieces.

My Wikipedia Interests

I am interested mainly in making small, grammatical changes to articles. I could also see myself working on pages that relate to books I've read if the information available is lacking.

Article Evaluation

I've had an interest in the novel Dracula for some time now, and I was looking at the Dracula page on Wikipedia when I noticed a link to Elizabeth Báthory's article. I know she's often seen as inspiration for vampire stories, and so I wanted to learn more about her. I visited the Elizabeth Báthory article on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the lack of citations, unreliable sources, and a lack of information about what her supposed crimes were.

Lack of Citations

When I was looking over the article, I noticed that while there were citations, there was also a lot of claims made without proper citations. I wasn't the first to notice this however, as there were a lot of citation needed marks on the article. They were recent as well, so someone is clearly trying to make this page more credible.

Unreliable Sources

Not only is there an issue with a lack of sources, but there are also several unreliable sources. One of which is a fictionalized account about Elizabeth Báthory, and even if it draws from actual fact about her it's a story that's almost certainly been dramatized. Another was a website with no information about who the author was, and thus no way of verifying where they got their information from. It seems like it might be a good idea to go through the current sources and double check their verifiability in addition to finding more sources.

Lack of Information

The most glaring thing about this article to me however was the lack of details on what Báthroy's supposed crimes actually were. There was some detail in the introduction for the page, but little to none in the main article. It just went straight from her biography, to the accusations. And it never said what the accusations were, just that it reached a point where it had to be investigated. It seems like a strange thing to lack, especially when most people would think of those crimes first when thinking about her. In order to fully update this article, it definitly needs elaboration on this subject.

Conclusion

I would not give this article a very high rating. While it does have some good information about Báthroy, it's difficult to verify. It also lacks quite a bit of information about her, which makes it hard to fully understand this bit of history.