Dan Reiley

Persuasive Writing

September 24, 2008

Varner

Temple Housing and Wikipedia

High crime areas surround Temple University and this is where some students look to find housing that is near campus. Some Temple students are forced to live in these high crime areas due to lack of housing on campus. When I looked on Wikipedia to see what it said about Temple University Housing, they only mentioned that these students live independent off-campus and no mention of the dangers the surrounding neighborhoods. Two days after adding the bit about the dangerous neighborhoods to Wikipedia, it was still on the site. This shows that if people put relevant information onto Wikipedia, administrators on the site will not delete the content. I also wrote that students can be killed at any time off-campus. This was deleted from the website the next day.

The lack of Temple housing on campus leads me to ask if Temple has been trying to keep the neighborhoods safe and use money to build around campus to expand the safe zone. On Wikipedia it says that the section surrounding the campus is known as Templetown. “Templetown may have originated as a name for a student housing company which now operates on Temple's campus.” (Wikipedia Templetown, Philadelphia). This shows that in the students were in mind when the university began to expand and needed more housing to place these students. More relevant news came from Wikipedia when it mentioned the high-crime in North Philadelphia and the lack of concern by the university. “In the time since class let out for summer 2008, there have been two on-campus shootings. Though the university does have an alert system, the university chose not to send an alert for either shooting” (Wikipedia Temple University). Instituting an alert system was an important step for Temple University, but its inability to activate it in such situation shows that they are more worried about scaring students than keeping them safe. If Temple is not going to have a place on campus for all of its students to live than they must inform these students who are living in these unsafe neighborhoods. Yes, Temple does have security check points, but the only go from 10^th to 16^th street even though a lot of the students live beyond those streets. In an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Andrew Maykuth writes, “Even though Philadelphia's violent crime and homicide rates went down last year, the city still ranks last in those categories among the nation's 10 largest jurisdictions” (Maykuth). This article illustrates that although crime is dropping in the city, Philadelphia is still number one crime city compared to the top ten most populated cities in America. Temple needs to make a more valiant effort to ensure the safety of its students.

Finding information on this subject is not an easy thing to do; this is why Wikipedia was so important. Gaining information on Wikipedia is easy and stress free compared to trying to get information on a particular subject through TUlibrary. Although it is easy, the information isn’t concrete. This proves factual, because when I added it onto a Wikipedia page, it was bases purely off of my opinion. Finding an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer is a more credible source than Wikipedia because it is a publication that spreads throughout the area every day. Finding this article helped me answer the questions that I wanted to answer about my topic. Wikipedia was a huge help too, though it cannot be looked at as a credible source because of the nature of the website and how information can be false at times. There has been false information on Wikipedia, but it will always be a site in which people can learn about all sorts of things from other people who have posted on the subjects. This site is helpful to everyone and has more useful information than it has erroneous information.