User:Dlgptn/sandbox

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 12)

This week, I evaluated the article, "Linguistic Typology" for the field methods and typology unit.

The article details 5 sub-disciplines of linguistic typology, some of which we have not covered in class. It includes: qualitative typology, quantitative typology, theoretical typology, syntactic typology, and lexical typology. However, in class, we instead categorized the different types of typology in terms of variations in phonology, morphology, syntax (this overlaps), semantics, and pragmatics. Also, although the article delineates 5 different sub-disciplines, it only goes into depth for qualitative and quantitative typology. Perhaps going in depth for the remaining sub-disciplines would be an appropriate extension to this article.

Going back on to the delineation—in the qualitative section, though, it seems to cover phonetic typology, morphological typology, as well as syntactic typology, which raises some confusion on my part because syntactic typology was distinguished as a separate sub-discipline. The quantitative section seems to encompass semantic typology, as it includes semantic maps. Aside from this, I do not think this sub-discipline covers sections we have learned in class. 

This being said, I have learned a lot aside the material we have learned in class due to this variation. The article is informative, and the introduction is very concise, focused, and easily comprehendible. 

All the references that are used throughout this article are all published books, which is very promising. All the provided links to the books when provided as well as the links of the ISBN numbers are all working. There are no website links to check thus there will never be broken links for the article at hand. Because they are all  distributed by valid publishers with ISBN numbers, we can be sure that the sources the article has used are neutral. Not only that, but also the number of references used for this topic is impressive, thus diversifying the perspectives on the topic of linguistic typology. That being said, however, it can be noticed that some of the authors are referenced more than once. Furthermore, the author of the Wikipedia article has maintained the neutrality of these sources without adding their bias. The disciplines of typology are well-described in an objective manner. No viewpoints are specifically over or underrepresented, but perhaps the fact that the 3 sub-disciplines that haven’t been explicitly been explored as the other 2, qualitative and quantitative, can be considered an underrepresentation of these ideas. 

The article at hand is considered a C-class article, which signifies that the article is substantial in general, yet is missing important information or has in it a lot of irrelevant content; in other words, although the article is not considered sparse, it still has a lot of work to do. 

This article is not a part of many WikiProjects, but it is within the scope of WIkiProject Linguistics. Unlike the many articles I have evaluated throughout the semester, this article has a substantial content in the Talk section of the article. However, it seems mostly of a discussion of the positioning of subject-verb-object positioning that has already been addressed in the  article, or sections that were addressed as questions for clarifications of concepts written about in the article but have already answered by other contributors. 

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 10)

This week, I evaluated the article "Lexical decision task" for the Psycholinguistics module.

I immediately chose this article because I actually had participated in this experiment in the Psychology lab here at Penn and I wanted to refresh my memory on it. I remember the procedures exactly, and it was as it is described in the Wikipedia article. However, they mention extensions of the procedures with priming, which I was not exposed to. Thus, this was more interesting to find out. We had talked briefly about this experiment in class as well, but nothing much else in depth. However, we did talk about the implications of priming in general (not necessarily in the context of lexical decisions) and that any sort of priming might make our reaction times faster if it is in line with what we were primed to.

While I did check the talk section of the article, there was nothing, which was odd to me because the article is very underdeveloped although it is succinct and well-written. It is in the S-class (start class) in the Wikipedia's project quality scale which means that there is a lot of room for improvements and additions to the article which I strongly agree with. It is part of the WikiProject Psychology; I am surprised that this doesn't fall into the Linguistics WikiProject because lexicon is directly related to linguistics although it is in the scope of psycholinguistics.

Overall, this article is very simple but strong, as it covers history, what the experiment is, its procedure, as well as some implications as well as extensions to the procedure. There was nothing at all that was distracting, and the article is incredibly neutral. I strongly believe that there is nothing questionable in the article and thus nothing to take out, although I think that it needs to be more extensive since the article is very short.

Some caveats of this article include that it only has one reference as a source although it does cite some other sources in the Notes section. Everything that is used is a reliable source, as they are all published books from reputable sources. There are no broken links because there are no website used; however, they all have working links to ISBN and ISSN numbers. Naturally because all sources are reputable and peer-reviewed and scholarly, the article is neutral and does not underrepresent or overrepresent any side of the topic at hand. The sources are quite old although this topic is something that there is not much room for update because it's a classic experiment; however, some updates on its connected studies might be feasible and thus it would be nice to update the article with newer sources.

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 8)

This week, I will be evaluating the article "Fluency" for the module of Language Acquisition.

The article is cohesive and everything is relevant to the article topic at hand. The topic is quite board in nature, so inevitably the article makes large strokes across the topic, but it does a good job of covering the breadth of the subject. The article is neutral and represents all viewpoints in a fair manner.  

The majority of the sources that are listed in references seem to be from reliable sources, including academic journals and books with reputable publishes. However, something to note is that the Talk page of the article briefly mentions that the article has no real citations and is getting information from commercial sites including sources regarding a lesson plan by a teacher. In other words, they are not proper academic sources. Although now there are more valid sources added, I cannot entirely be sure that the information retrieved from the less reliable sources have also been removed and replaced, or just the sources have been deleted and their information intact with additional information from the new and reliable sources. Not only that, but also some of the links of the sources cited in the References section of the article no longer available/ are broken (such as Bruce Harrell’s “Speech-language pathologist”). Also, along with this, the sources could be more updated, as the broken link may be due to the fact that information has been retrieved from it 10 years ago and all of the references listed are from more than a decade ago. Although it is true that fluency is probably a rather static topics, potential updates should be addressed. Other than this, the sources seem in line with the topic of the article and supporting the claims in the article, and these sources that are used are neutral mostly because they are academically renown. Furthermore, facts in the article seem to be often cited with a reference (with the concerning observation that the definition of fluency itself has not been referenced). With all this said, I believe that there is a pressing need to update sources and reconsider the article with reputable, valid sources. 

The article talks about the four different facets of fluency, which we didn’t really delve into too much during class. In class, rather, we talk about fluency as a general whole although we did delineate the categories. However, I think differentiating the multiple aspects of fluency: reading, writing, speaking, and listening because levels of fluency required may be different in different environment. For example, only reading and writing fluency may be needed at a desk job requiring a second language, but when involving communication with others in the job, speaking and listening are also crucial. In this light, I have been applying to many internships as I am a junior, and multiple companies ask me about the languages I speak and my fluency in each of the respective domains. 

This article is categorized by Wikipedia as an S-class article, which is described as a preliminary article that has a lot of room for improvement. I believe that improvement in the sense of correction to existent information is not necessary per se, but definitely in terms of elaborating and adding information because fluency is a comprehensible topic and the article is relatively short. However, it is also a broad topic that branches into many other specific topics, and the article does a fair job of making a section of “See Also” which gives a list of other relevant Wikipedia articles. Additionally, this article is a part of many WikiProjects, including WikiProject Linguistics/Applied Linguists, WikiProject Marketing and Advertising, WikiProject Psychology, and WikiProject Neuroscience. I am a little curious as to why it is a part of WikiProject Marketing and Advertising because I don’t see the direct correlation between fluency and the WikiProject. Also, it is important to note that one of the WikiProjects listed as of top-importance, so the urgency of the improvement for this article should be prioritized. The talk page also elaborates on this note because someone mentions that the article needs a lot of work regarding how fluency is viewed, much like how in class we struggled to find a good definition for fluency in the beginning. 

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 6)

I evaluated the article "Variation (linguistics)" for the sociolinguistics unit.

The article does a very good job of giving a comprehensive idea of what variation in linguistics is, and all the information given is very relevant and not distracting at all. Additionally, it does a good job of the different kinds of variations within a language that may cause confusion, including accent, lexicon, morphology, and syntax. We talked about all these different expressions of variations in class. However, the article omitted some of the ones we have discussed in class, such as active v. passive variations. Otherwise, the discussion of the topics is very similar even though the descriptions of the different types are very sparse in the article, it gives references to other articles that delve more deeply into these topics if the reader wishes for greater elaboration as like our class discussions. Furthermore, the aspects of the triggers of sociolinguistic differences such as geography and gender are factors we have talked about in class. However, they did not discuss the associations with education/social class, which we extensively discussed along with the department store study and instead went into a rather in-depth discussion about association with age which is new information to me. Finally, the article specifically details the desirable variables of sociolinguistic experiments/ interviews, which we implicitly discussed while talking about the department store study (for example, interviewing many people and to be in an environment where their responses may be consciously manipulated from their usual behavior).  

The article also gives references to other articles in Wikipedia for more information that could be useful to understanding the topic at hand through the “See Also” section as well as hyperlinks throughout the article. Some of the cited articles in “See Also” are also of a higher quality class than this article, so readers can gain an enhanced understanding through these other articles. 

For the length of the article, there are many citations used throughout, which makes this a very reliable source from which readers can gain a greater understanding of variation in linguistics. Not only are there lots of citations which mean that many sentences are corroborated by a specific part of a reference, but also there is a large number of references used by many different authors. Thus, from this, and by the content of the article, it is evident that the article is very neutral and biased, and all viewpoints are equally represented and highlighted in light of the topic. Moreover, all the references that are used throughout this articles are books or journal or scholarly articles that have their full citations that I can look up on Google Scholar. All these citations work (there are no website links that I can check because these are all scholarly sources). In other words, these are all peer reviewed, very reliable sources with valid publishers and with ISBN numbers in case of the books. However, it can be noted that the information is drawn from rather old resources. That is not to say that the information provided is incorrect, but perhaps there are advances in the field of sociolinguistics that have not been taken into account that may provide new insights that readers should be aware of. 

On Wikipedia, this article is rated as an S-class (start class), which is a preliminary article with plenty of room for improvement. I thoroughly agree with the rating because this is a very broad topic that can be greatly elaborated; however, the article is fairly short and doesn’t go into much detail. Furthermore, this article has been rated of high importance, which is all the more reason that more attention and effort must be taken into account for this article. 

According to the Talk section of the Wikipedia article, this article is a part of WikiProject Linguistics, which strives to enhance coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. Also on the Talk page of the article, there is not much conversation going on, as it seems like what is written is already in consensus. This is possibly because there isn’t too much content for contention to begin with. Instead, there is a minor addition to the Analysis and Methodology Section and a minor changes in the reference method but not particularly any debate on anything that has been written on the article itself. 

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 4)

I evaluated the article "Tree Model" this week.

Everything in the article is relevant to the article topic, and I had a good time reading the article because a lot of this information I never knew about. However, as I was reading it, it caught my eye that many bulks of the information was marked as “citation needed” so that really distracted me. This is mostly because I was now aware of the fact that perhaps the information I was processing could possibly be false. Other than that, the article is very neutral and represents views equally as it delineates the tree model’s history and some of the examples on how it is models. I did not discern any biases in the article, and thus I also did not notice any bias that has been duly noted on the article itself.

Of the citations available, the links to them work and were good supporting resources to the claims made in the article. Also, a very positive aspect of this article is that the references are all reliable and unbiased, and this can be substantiated by the fact that all of them are books with valid publishers of ISBN numbers. Additionally, all the sources are up-to-date, the most recent source being only 3 years old. Not only that, but the tree model is a topic that has been around for many years, and a very ubiquitous concept, thus it would be very uncommon to see that the information, even if resources were a little old, is outdated. However, one concerning aspect of this article is that there are so many chunks of writing and information in this article that is not at all cited. Thus, not each fact is referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference. Even if the provided resources are valid and neutral, if not everything is well-references in the article, the article itself cannot be considered valid. 

There seems to be a much more populated Talk page than the last page I evaluated. Most of the content within the Talk page consists of need for modification and review of these modifications, citation addition, calling for the need for elaboration on existing topic sections, or fixing of an error within the article. It was most notable that a lot of people are talking about how sections need to be rewritten because of the lack of information or to name one specific example, the Babel section is not in line with standard historical accounts. Behind the scenes for this article, collaborators agree that there is so much room for improvement and elaboration in this article and are striving to achieve this goal. However, they also agree with the fact that the topic is so wide in range that it may be difficult to do so. Thus, there is a lot of missing information that the article could benefit from. Not only that, but also it can be noted at this time that the article is unrated, which signifies that this article has not been rated on Wikipedia’s quality scale. I think this is because although the article is quite lengthy, there is a bulk of information that has not yet been cited and this article definitely needs more work. It is also not a part of any WikiProjects. Other than that, I wanted to point out that it was very exciting to see Mark Liberman, a UPenn professor, to be noted within the talk page of the topic of study. 

In class, we didn’t talk about the tree model concretely or specifically, but on the board, we naturally drew a tree model of the language families that eventually lead up to a proto-language. There is nothing different from what we’ve discussed in class, but rather a much sophisticated and elaboration of our discussions, including the history and origins of the tree model for languages, limitations, and how computation can model the language tree model. 

Article Evaluation (Homework Week 2)

The article assigned to me to evaluate this week was "Ideograms."

Everything discussed in the article is relevant to the topic at hand. One important aspect that I don't see in the introduction, is a thorough citation process of where the definition has been brought from. Consequently, I cannot give a clear evaluation of how valid the source from which it came from nor can I determine how well it was paraphrased. In fact, it seems as if there is no links in the references section that insinuate that the author brought this from any valid source because all the references listed are more catered toward more specific topics within ideograms. This is a recurring theme throughout the article: not each fact is substantiated by an appropriate and reliable reference. Not only that, but also the author of the article has not given a thorough comparison and contrast of similar concepts to ideograms, such as phonographs and logograms, although he/she did start making the distinction between ideograms and pictograms. I am aware that there is a discussion later in the passage about logograms, but I think it would be nice to have a brief explanation in the introduction so that the distinction can be made extremely clear and later have a further discussion in section Terminology. Straying away from these drawbacks, however, the introduction to the topic and explanation of the definition is very comprehensive and comprehensible.

Other positive aspects of this article is that it is neutral and there is no sense of bias toward a particular viewpoint of position. Furthermore, the references (although a little barren) are all reliable and unbiased sources-- most of them are books with valid ISBN numbers, and the one link provided works and greatly supports the claim given in the article. In addition, the information is not out of date, as this is not a dynamic topic such as technology. Also, the article has been updated only a few days ago, thus there is no problem of outdated information; thus, regarding novelty, there is no missing information to be added.

However, I would make the following comments. Although everything written in the article is unbiased and relevant to the topic, I feel as if language is overrepresented. Granted languages are a big part of ideograms, I think other aspects of ideograms are highly underrepresented and only presented on the side with pictoral examples.

Also, it distracted me that there were so many language systems mentioned without background that I had to read up on them before I could fully understand what the article was discussing. Not only that, but also the discussion under "terminology" is a little misleading in the beginning paragraph because it seems like they are not completely discussing the terminology of ideograms but more so the origins. However, after the first paragraph, the author does a decent job of it, although it is mostly citing common misconceptions and mislabelling rather than identifying ideograms themselves.

There isn't much conversation going on in the Talk page of the Ideogram article: the one that was begun was quickly resolved by the contributor herself by adding a brief section on her input. She added a valid claim with a reliable source, although it could definitely have greater elaboration and discussion. That being said, this article is of interest to many WikiProjects, including WikiProject Graphic Design, WikiProject Marketing and Advertising, WikiProject Media, WikiProject Systems, WikiProject Visual Arts, and WikiProject Writing Systems, all of which are rated start-class and mid to high importance. Thus, it is important to make elaborations on this article.

As I have mentioned before, I think it would be a great and helpful addition to the article if there were more distinctions made between similar concepts because that is definitely something that I was unclear of until I did further research.

We haven't had a particular conversation about ideograms in class, thus there is no extensive differences in the way this Wikipedia article discusses this topic than our conversation in class. However, it does talk about logograms, which we briefly discussed. Most is in agreement, but the article goes into detail as to how Chinese characters, which are characterized as logograms, insinuates its origins in ideographs.