StephenChappel46

Bio

About me

I'm a college student who attends Everett Community College. My hobbies include playing music, playing video games, but mostly spending time with my friends and family. I'm also very much an active person who on days off will go hiking or snowboarding. I love getting outside whenever I can because I love where I live and exercising outside is great for you as it isn't only great for your physical health, but your mental health too.

My Wikipedia interests

I've used Wikipedia since I was old enough to use the internet. I've used it for all sorts of research from specific articles for school assignments, to looking up places I want to travel, and even bands I like. I could see myself using Wikipedia in the future to create more concise articles about things that interest me. I find it very frustrating to go to a Wikipedia page, only to find it not informative enough for your liking.

Article Evaluation

I chose to do my article evaluation on one of my favorite bands, Kyuss. Kyuss is a desert rock band who formed in 1987 in Palm Desert, California. Originally called Katzenjammer, the four piece renamed to Sons of Kyuss just before the release of their first album and soon shortened their name simply to Kyuss. I visited the Kyuss page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: Is each fact cited with an appropriate, reliable source?, Is anything left out of the article that should be there?, and Are some viewpoints over-represented or under-represented?

Firstly, I’ll examine the consistency of the citations throughout the article. I found the citation in this article to be spotty and somewhat repetitive. At first glance, the article looks extremely well cited until you take a closer look. Upon further inspection, many of the sources are from the same Kyuss biography, written on Allmusic.com back in 2007. Looking through the Wikipedia article, almost half of the citations come from this one article. Also, after reading that article, it looks as if most of the Wikipedia article is copy and pasted with a few rewording and structure changes.

The next question I asked myself was “Is anything left out of the article?” After reading the Allmusic.com article, I found a few nuggets of information that weirdly enough didn’t make their way into the Wikipedia page. Mainly how after the break-up of the band in 1995, all of the members had extremely prominent and successful careers and how the aspects of the Kyuss sound followed them throughout their other projects.

I thought this tied well into my final question of “What viewpoints are over-represented or under-represented?” I found the mention of their wide influence under-represented as some very successful bands came from Kyuss. Josh Homme, the guitarist of Kyuss has had a number of successful projects himself. Firstly, as a guitarist for The Screaming Trees and then, with 2 other Kyuss members, Queens of the Stone Age. The detuned, groove based guitar work with psychedelic flashes can be used to describe most of his more commercially successful work and it was all original to Kyuss.

As I come to the end of this assignment, I look back at the parts of this article that came up short to my standards. The lack of a large variety of sources is my main concern and I don’t feel it breeds a well written, original article. That along with a lack of mention Kyuss’ influence, on the members and the stoner, desert rock genre as a whole, shows little understanding of the impact this band had, despite little commercial success, on a whole era of heavy metal music.