User:RM395/Course/Encyclopedia comparisons/kslinker5493

I compared the articles about competitive swimming on Wikipedia and in the World Sports Encyclopedia. The WSE is available online, but only in Polish and only if you subscribe for a fee, so the web access is very limited. I really wanted to write about this topic and older encyclopedias didn't have anything about the new innovations in the sport. Because the sport has changed so much recently and it has only been showing up in the news in the past couple of years, the book article needed to be more recent.

The Wikipedia article went into detail about other forms of competitive swimming like open-water swimming, while the WSE article only focused on the traditional pool sport and left other information for their own pages. This seemed to be a better way to do it because there aren’t many swimmers who do both traditional swimming and open-water swimming. They are usually very separate sports and deserve their own full articles. Open-water swimming has started to become more popular in recent years and the dangers of it had been in the news when Fran Crippen, a University of Virginia swimmer that made the transition to open-water, suddenly died in the middle of a race. There is a Wikipedia page on open-water swimming, but there isn't much information on there either.

The Wikipedia article emphasized equipment and suits way more than necessary. Yes, you use various forms of equipment at practice and different types of suits at meets, but nearly half the article was devoted to that, when other parts of the article are more important. The WSE article mentioned equipment, drag, and suits, but not nearly as much. There are also separate articles on Wikipedia for competitive swimwear and swim suits, so there isn't a huge need to talk about it a lot on the actual sport page.

The Wikipedia article had an entire section on dolphin kick. There is a bit of history with the evolution and use of dolphin kick, but there are two other types of kicks that weren’t written about at all. For there to be twice as much information on one type of kick than collegiate swimming as a whole seems unreasonable. There was also a section on skin care and health, which is interesting and may be useful, but seemed out of place.

The WSE article emphasized the strokes, competition, and history, while the Wikipedia article emphasized equipment, officials and records. Overall, I think the WSE article was better because, other than records, it emphasized more relevant information than the Wikipedia article. Both pages seemed to have correct information and both were neutral, but in this article, you could tell that people had written about what was important to them as an individual (which may be very useful and interesting), but not what was most relevant to the sport itself. Kslinker5493 (talk) 15:23, 18 February 2013 (UTC)