Falling timber

Bio

About Me

I'm a high school student in Washington state who has been homeschooled since 1st grade. I run Cross Country as well as track and I will continue to run well into the future. I love the outdoors. I enjoy hiking and boating in the summer and skiing in the winter. I use skis for recreation, but skis are still occasionally used for transportation in rural parts of Russia and Nordic countries. I have an interest in being an engineer and have designed and built my own tree house.

My Wikipedia interests

I plan to use Wikipedia for some assignments in my English class. if I continue to use it in the future I would most likely focus on small changes and fact checking pages.

Article evaluation

I’ve always had a love for the mountains, and so when I was searching for a topic to evaluate, I looked towards the mountains, and thought of Monte Cristo. Monte Cristo is an abandoned mining town in the middle of the Cascade Range. It once had potential to be one of the richest mining towns on the west coast. Now, there are only a handful of cabins and dilapidated structures. I visited the Monte Cristo article on Wikipedia and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: one cited source is overused, there are grammatical errors, and it omits some current information.

Citations

The citations in the article all appear to be reliable, but there is one source that is overused. Of ten sources used there are seventeen citations. One source is cited seven times. They could have found more sources or reference the same facts from another source that was used.

Grammar

There are sentences in the article that lack proper structure and they don’t sound right when they are read out loud. For example, it lists a group of investors that helps fund a railroad to the town, but the sentence is complex and convoluted which makes it hard to read. There are also names of towns and rivers, as well as directions, that make no sense unless you are well knowledgeable with the area. Not everyone who reads it could understand what is trying to be conveyed. It would be helpful to add a map of the region to the article to easily visualize the locations and routes.

Excluded Information

The article gives a little information about the site today, but it leaves out a significant amount of data. There is a hiking trail on the old railroad grade and more trails that lead into the mountains and mines surrounding the town. They don’t mention these clear enough. There are still buildings, foundations, and old mining equipment in the townsite. There is more material that could be given on these and it would benefit the article to add a current map of the townsite.

Conclusion

Overall, this article provides a basic overview of Monte Cristo. Despite it being a little confusing at times with some grammar errors, it still portrays a reasonable image of the townsite in the past. There is little information on its’ condition today, the old structures, and all the hiking trails in the area.