Auditing a wikipedia page was a very informative experience. The first step was probably the hardest for my group, which was finding a wikipedia page worthy of having us audit. Ideas that were thrown around were cloning, the neutron bomb, and cassette culture. These were either taken by another group, to short, and not controversial enough respectively. I then suggested we audit the page for the band Gorgoroth which had pictures of crucified people on stage during their performance. This was instantly deemed too controversial to do (probably for the best). In the end we pretty much failed in finding our own topic and the professor gave us polygamy in North America.
At the first glance of the article, it was obvious that this article was just going to be about the most publicized and popular case of polygamy in North America which is that of the Mormon religion. The first statement of the article made it seem that polygamy only happened with a male with multiple wives, which by the definition of polygamy is not the case. If for some reason polygamy only occurs this way and not with any other combination of partners in North America, this should have been stated in the article. The next obvious focus of the article was that most of the time was going to be spent on the United States. Once again if for some reason less polygamy is practiced in the other two countries of North America this should have been stated. These two problems with the article showed that it was too focused on one topic and did not look at the big picture of what the page was supposed to be about.
When it came to the references, we checked the validity by seeing what they were used to cite in the article and then see what they actually had to say in the article. Most of the references had something wrong with them. All of the extreme religious sites were used to prove statistical information instead of showing an opinion (usually an extreme one). All of the good resources seemed to be used poorly. For instance four very objective articles from reliable sources on genetic mutations were used to cite one sentence that did not have to do with the subject they were on. The page barely even mentioned inbreeding which shows that a lot of the information was watered down. By doing this individual statements were not biased, but on a whole the page was biased because of this emission of facts. From reading the resources I got a very different picture of polygamy in North America then from just reading the wikipedia page. Therefore the wikipedia page for polygamy in North America makes a very horrible scholarly source, but I guess is a good source if you only want to know information for small talk.
Like many of the wikipedia references for polygamy in North America I will sign off by saying "GLORY TO GOD" (luckily this doesn't discredit me in the eyes of wikipedia)
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