Wikipanda2

Bio

Hello! I, Derek Loy (1998-present), am a student at Everett Community College. Born in Everett, Washington, I moved to Montréal, Québec at the age of four. After graduating high school, I decided to come back to Washington State and start college here. My interests span from hockey to robotics. I also enjoy learning about new cultures and traveling. I currently work at the Future of Flight Aviation Center, where I get to meet and greet tourists from all over the world.

As for how I would like to contribute to Wikipedia in the future, I would consider improving or creating articles on young leaders of technology. Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST and someone I look up to, stresses that “[We need] to transform our culture by creating a world where […] young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders”,^[1] and that “We should celebrate the heroes in science and technology the way we celebrate sports figures and entertainers"^[2]. Developing information about such people on Wikipedia will help bring forth such a future. Another topic I’d be interested in writing about is hockey in Seattle. Once the city acquires a professional hockey team, I would be eager to contribute to its article with information about the team’s creation.

Article critique

I have been a big hockey fan ever since I watched the Montreal Canadiens during the 2010 NHL playoffs. I enjoy learning the history behind teams and what the players do off the ice. Now that I go to Everett Community College, I wanted to learn more about the city’s local team. I visited the Everett Silvertips page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: the age of certain information, the lack of citations, and the omission of a Team Identity section.

Age of information

First, I found that certain sections haven’t been updated for a few years. While the team records and names of active players have been updated as recently as April 17^th, 2018, I noticed that the article’s History section does not have any content about seasons following the 2013-2014 season. The Everett Silvertips have several accomplishments that should be added to the History section, such as the team reaching the WHL Western Conference finals this season.^[3] Additionally, the NHL Alumni section needs to be updated, as it is missing players that have recently become NHL professionals: Nikita Scherbak and Noah Juulsen, for instance.

Lack of citations

Second, the article has an evident lack of citations: only 3 sources are mentioned at the end of the article. Many statistics have been stated without giving the source. Having checked the team statistics for accuracy, most of them seem to come from the website hockeydb.com.^[4] Team records most likely come from the official Everett Silvertips website.^[5] However, this would have to be confirmed with the Wikipedia user who published the information. Without the references, the article suffers in reliability.

Omission of a Team Identity section

Third, I feel that an important section was omitted from the article: Team Identity. If one were to look at the articles of more renowned hockey teams, such as the Montreal Canadiens or the Toronto Maple Leafs, we would notice that these articles have a Team Identity section (or a similarly named section, such as Team Information for the Toronto Maple Leafs article). The section gives information about the team’s logo, sweater, mascot, rivalries… While these details were briefly mentioned in the lead of the Silvertips article, no further details are given in the article. Adding a section that would explain why they are named the Silvertips and what makes the team unique would greatly improve the article’s overall completeness.

Summary

To conclude, many improvements can be proposed for the Everett Silvertips article. By adding citations to statistics and content about the team’s identity and its more recent successes, the article can be brought to a higher standard of quality. Nevertheless, the article does show some positive aspects. When looking at the article’s revision history, we notice that it has been updated twelve times in 2018. This reveals that there is already an active community of Wikipedia users working on the article, which will help make implementations quicker and easier. I have done my own part by updating the NHL alumni section of the article, and by posting on the article’s talk page to suggest adding references.