Coppercoin Kirwan

Bio

I am a Robotics Mentor for Team 4309, The Snohomish Botsmiths, through FIRST and backed by the 4-H STEM Project. I've been building robots as a youth member competitively for the FIRST Robotics Competitions since 2014, but this is the first year that I've actually been a mentor. In my professional and academic life, I'm attending Everett Community College and majoring in Criminal Justice. In my childhood, I grew up on Black Pond Farm, deep in the rural forests of the Pacific Northwest. Living 9 miles out of town, we rarely had a solid enough internet connection to stream shows or play online games, but for every hour I couldn't watch or play a series firsthand, I could spend another three looking up synopses, character analyses, and fan-theories to keep up with the rest of the fandom. The lore I generally put the heaviest amount of research into are told through multiple generations of characters; Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Assassin's Creed, Homestuck, and the Middle Earth legandarium, for example. To a lesser extent, I know about the actors, plot, and locations for several of the Police Television Dramas that would air on cable in the 2010s (Law and Order, CSI, Hawaii 5.0, NCIS, etc).

Outside of fiction, I'm in love with everything about the Pacific Northwest; from the History of Starbucks, to UFO Sightings and Cryptozoology. I study Law of the United States, Law Enforcement Procedures, and Criminal Justice for my major in classes led by officers. I've also done way more research into Anthropology and Pre-Colonial American History than I have into the History of the United States; in hindsight, it rarely ends up being useful in regular conversation. Probably not the better option.

Article Critique

I visited the Sherman Alexie page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: inconsistent formatting, vandalism, and bias.

Inconsistent Formatting

This page’s Reference section is filled with broken and permanently dead links. Sherman Alexie recently had several allegations brought against him about regarding Sexual Misconduct; as a result, a number of Literary and Native American news agencies have started removing their older articles that champion him as a Native author. I’ve fixed a couple of oddly-formatted citations and added Archive links from the Wayback Machine in the event that another one of the articles about him gets taken down. Fewer citations are inappropriate or unreliable. One sentence about Alexie’s heritage is cited from a Tweet he wrote insulting a United States Senator.

Vandalism

There was one vandalism edit published on April 11, 2018 at 16:30, wherein the caption under the page’s photo was replaced with a long string of random numbers and letters. I caught and undid this edit 3 hours after its publication at 19:37 when I visited the page to critique it. The page’s edit history has entries for almost every month of every year since July 2004, but since the recent Sexual Harassment controversy being outed in March of 2018, old news articles are starting to go dead and edits are being reverted on a regular basis on account of vandalism.

Bias

The ‘’Life’’ section of the article makes direct references to his semi-autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but uses that as its ‘’only’’ source for much of Alexie’s early life and pre-college education. Redundant or out-of-place adjectives are used throughout the article, but never in a negative way; even during the section on his Sexual Harassment controversy, facts are being stated without a hateful bias.