User:Ihatepickingusernames

Article critique

Article Review

One of my favorite things to do is go to concerts. I like to hear the live music, meet new people, and go to new venues. Although I've lived in the state of Washington all my life, I have never been to the Tacoma Dome for a concert or other event. It's somewhere I've always wanted to see a concert, so I looked it up. I visited the Tacoma Dome page on Wikipedia, and found three aspects of it worth commenting on: citations are needed, unreliable sources are used, and a couple of the sources given lead to dead links.

Dead links

While reading the Tacoma Dome article, I checked the references given. For references 3 and 4 the page can not be found. This is a major problem because references are used to help a reader verify facts and claims made. Reference 3 is used in the opening sentence, so immediately the reader is given an unreliable statement, even if the statement is true. Reference number 4 is used in the first paragraph of the history section about the building and size of the Dome. This is fairly basic information that a reader would search for, but again the information is unreliable, because the page can not be found. Unfortunately, the problems with the references don't stop there.

Unreliable sources

Of the twelve resources given, I found that five were unreliable. The first two being 3 and 4, formerly mentioned as dead links. Another problematic source was number 1. After clicking on the link I found nothing to indicate it had anything to do with the construction cost of the Tacoma Dome. Number 8 seemed unreliable, because of its name Gasoline Alley Antiques. It also didn't lead to any specific article or information. Lastly, number 9 is not a good source either, because the website appears to be unreliable, and the article it leads to does not specifically mention the Tacoma Dome.

Citations needed

In addition to having dead links and unreliable sources, the article also lacks references. Of the mere 12 references stated, five are undependable. That is nearly half of the sources given. Four times in the article it says "citations needed". Each of these times a statement is made about a celebrity, artist, or organization. These claims are not backed up by any source, so there is no way to verify the truth of these claims without personally taking on the search.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Tacoma Dome Wikipedia page is in need of a lot of work. I would rate the page as "bad". Not very much information is given, and the majority of the information that is presented can not be backed up by reliable sources.

(Sidenote: As a part of this assignment I also posted a comment on the Tacoma Dome talk page... Talk:Tacoma Dome)