Talk:Declinism/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk · contribs) 08:26, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for working on the article, Meatsgains. Unfortunately, I do not think it is close to being satisfactory, so it's a quick fail in this case. My assessment of the article according to the six article criteria is as follows.

1. "Well-written" - No. There is a short lead that provides some facts about the subject but does not amount to an acceptable summary of the most important facts. "Declinism" is defined in a way that is less than fully clear: the article starts off with "Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline", but then it states that, "Particularly, it is the predisposition, due to cognitive bias, particularly rosy retrospection, to view the past favourably and future negatively." The first sentence implies that "declinism" is specifically a belief about societies or institutions, but the second sentence seems to define it very much more broadly, so that it could apply, for example, to beliefs about one's personal past and future as opposed to those of society as a whole. Indeed the article includes some information about that topic, apparently contradicting the opening sentence's focus on society and institutions. One sentence in the lead reads, "Declinism is a rather widespread phenomenon". The "rather" part is regrettable. It is likely to immediately give readers of the article the impression that the author does not really know how widespread "declinism" is and is using vague language to try to conceal this. That sentence is followed by one about the results of a survey in Britain, suggesting that the "rather widespread" claim is based only on evidence from Britain.

2. "Verifiable with no original research" - Clearly, an effort has been made to cite the information in the article, but there still seem to be some problems with original research. The sentence stating that "declinism is a rather widespread phenomenon" appears to be sourced to the same article in The Telegraph that states that "70 per cent of the British population suffers from the belief that 'things are worse than they used to be' ". It is thus going beyond what the source states to an unacceptable degree: one cannot move from a statement specifically about British "declinist" attitudes to a general statement about declinism being "rather widespread", which implies that it is widespread beyond Britain.

3. "Broad in its coverage" - No. "Declinism" could encompass so many things that the article in its current state cannot be considered to provide broad coverage.

4. "Neutral" - There does not seem to be a bias in the sense of trying to elevate one view of "declinism" above another.

5. "Stable" - Yes. There are no edits wars.

6. "Illustrated, if possible, by images". No images.

"Declinism" was always going to be a difficult subject to write a satisfactory article about. Possibly sufficient sources do not exist to write one. If you want to continue trying, however, I would suggest that the scope of the article needs to be fully clarified before anything else. One that is done, you will then be in a position to begin addressing the article's other problems, and build it up toward an adequate coverage of the topic. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 08:36, 11 February 2017 (UTC)