Welcome!

edit

Hello, Mariamalsamar, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Additional Resources
  • You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:53, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Article Evaluation

edit

While reading the article about the U.S. Census I noticed that there was a bunch of citations which is typical for Wikipedia articles but usually a couple of them don't work when you click on them. The good thing about this article is that all the citations I clicked on (over 20) worked. Something odd I found about this article was the organization. After reading the introduction, the section immediately after was called "Legal Mandate" which talked about how the U.S. Census came into play. I felt like that should've just been apart of the introduction due to similarity, it wasn't a big deal though. I also felt like "Organizational Structure" should've been fallen under the "Data Collection' section since they were also so similar. It didn't make sense to have them separated. In terms of bias, I didn't find there to be any. I even went back and reread the article and still came up empty, which is good. After reading the article for the second time I noticed that there was a noticeable imbalance in terms of representation of different ideas. For example, ideas like "Data Stewardship" and "Organizational Structure" were a lot more represented than ideas like "Computer Equipment" and "Notable Alumni". In fact, there was absolutely no information on the "Notable Alumni" besides their name and a link which lead to an entirely different Wikipedia article. That was a bummer because I felt like including a little information about people who made significant advances to the U.S. Census should be included, even if it's only for a couple sentences. Steering away from the actual article and looking behind the scenes (the talk page) was pretty interesting because there was a lot of information mentioned in the talk page that wasn't included in the actual article which was unfortunate because I felt like a lot of it could've really boosted the article. In class, I remember us talking about the importance of race and how as time changes, the categories of race have changed with with it but in the article there was no mention of that. Race was briefly mentioned in the talk page and that was it. All in all, I felt like it was a good article but there is definitely a ton of room for improvement. Generally, you did a nice evaluation! Great job! - Prof Hammad



Demographic Profile Editing Plan

edit

The article I chose to pursue for this assignment is the "Demographic Profile" article. The reason I chose this wasn't because the one I was most interested in was taken (kind of true) but because it has a ton of room for improvement and is a fairly known about topic that has many parts. As of now, the only information provided on the article is very general (basically it's missing a lot) so I plan on adding some specifics like the main components of a demographic profile and examples of that. Specifics would include ideas like age, sex, education level, income level, marital status, occupation, religion, birth rate, death rate, average size of a family. I also plan on making it more organized because right now it's just a big clump of general information.

Bibliography:

  • The U.S. Census website [1]
  • The U.N.'s Demographic Yearbooks [2]
  • The U.N.'s Population and Vital Statistics Report [3]
  • The World Data Bank [4]
  • Sources for Demographic Data on The Web [5]
  • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [6]

Calculation Methods

edit

Demographic data that makes up the profile is collected through multiple ways such as censuses, surveys, records, and registries in order to keep track of things such as population, births, deaths, relationship status, and more. The Census is the most important tool when it comes to tracking this data. The United States Census was first introduced in 1790 and has been taken every 10 years since under Constitutional law [1]. While the questions in the U.S. Census vary each decade, the aim is to find more about the residence within its borders and their unique characteristics from marital status, age, sex, race, education status, employment status, and location. Even though the U.S. Census is the most relied on tool for collecting this information it still has its flaws such as overcount and undercount which has caused controversy in previous years [2].

United States Demographic Profile 2017

edit
Population 326,625,791 (July 2017)
Age Structure 0-14 years: 18.73% (male 31,255,995/female 29,919,938)

15-24 years: 13.27% (male 22,213,952/female 21,137,826)

25-54 years: 39.45% (male 64,528,673/female 64,334,499)

55-64 years: 12.91% (male 20,357,880/female 21,821,976)

65 years and over: 15.63% (male 22,678,235/female 28,376,817) (2017)

Dependency Ratios total dependency ratio: 51.2

youth dependency ratio: 29

elderly dependency ratio: 22.1

potential support ratio: 4.5

Population Growth Rate 0.81%
Birth Rate 12.5 births/1,000 population
Death Rate 8.2 deaths/1,000 population
Net Migration 3.9 migrant(s)/1,000 population
Sex Ratio 0-14 years: 1.04 male(s)/female

15-24 years: 1.05 male(s)/female

25-54 years: 1 male(s)/female

55-64 years: 0.93 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.79 male(s)/female

total population: 0.97 male(s)/female

Infant Mortality total: 5.8 deaths/1,000 live births

male: 6.3 deaths/1,000 live births

female: 5.3 deaths/1,000 live births

Ethnic Groups White: 72.4%

Black: 12.6%

Asian: 4.8%

Amerindian and Alaska native: 0.9%

native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander: 0.2%

Other: 6.2%

'Two or more races: 2.9%

Maternal Mortality 14 deaths/100,000 live births
Education Expenditure 4.9% of GDP
Languages English: 79%

Spanish: 13%

other Indo-European: 3.7%

Asian and Pacific island: 3.4%

Other: 1%

Religions Protestant: 46.5%

Roman Catholic: 20.8%

Jewish: 1.9%

Mormon: 1.6%

other Christian: 0.9%

Muslim: 0.9%

Jehovah's Witness: 0.8%

Buddhist: 0.7%

Hindu: 0.7%:

other: 1.8%

unaffiliated: 22.8%

don't know/refused: 0.6%

Total Fertility Rate 1.87 children born/woman
Life Expectancy at Birth total population: 80 years

male: 77.7 years

female: 82.2 years

Source: CIA World Factbook [7]