Wikipedia

So this week we are looking at wikipedia and seeing if its knowledge matches up to our own expertise. For some reason I'm inclined to say yes, but i will see anyway. The task asked us to pick two things, could be anything, that we know a lot about and read the wiki article on it.

So for my first thing i decided to pick my favourite tennis player Tommy Haas, from Germany. I know that there would be room for plenty of bias or criticism when it comes to sport players so I thought it was a fair place to start.

The things that we were asked to look for where

* Is this an accurate article?
* Does it cover all the basic facts that you'd need to understand this topic?
* Does this article follow the wikipedia guidelines for useful articles?
* Is this article fair and balanced, or is it biased towards a particular side or argument?

Finally - What changes would you make to this article to improve it and make it useful for the wider wikipedia community?

Reading through the article I found it very accurate, at least to my knowledge anyway. It covered all the basics facts and then some. It didn't just say his had to take time off but it explained why. It follows all the guidelines, there is certainly nothing but respect for Tommy and his fans in the article. There aren't any put downs of his ability or praises without numbers to back it up.

So for Tommy Haas wikipedia gets a thumbs up. Now for the next one.

The next one i did on Water Fluoridation. This one is certainly different. It's history section only includes the medical uses of fluoride and not any of the other reasons fluoride was put in water (see Nazi Germany). Therefor with the lack of history it does NOT give all the basic facts needed to understand the opposition to water fluoridation. It does feature a small chapter on opposition which is good to see, but it really deserves the same amount of text as the pro water fluoridation section. Not it does down the bottom link to a page full of opposition to it, but I would have liked to see it in the original water fluoridation page.

The article is about 80% one sided, but wikipedia does well not to definitively say one way or the other. The only way this page would be better is by expanding the history section and by merging the opposition page with the current page.