User:Ajr1234/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Punishment (psychology)(Provide a link to the article here.)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I choose this article because I have always been interested in the subject of punishment pertaining to psychology. Punishment matters because it has been used for years by parents, teachers and researchers to decrease the frequency of a particular behavior. Punishment is also important because people need to know how to use punishment effectively, not in a way to cause harm to an human or an animal. My preliminary impression of punishment was that is was used to stop undesirable behaviors, using two types which are positive and negative.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section of the article includes an introductory sentence that defines the topic, and it is defined in a way that readers will be able to understand the meaning of the topic. The lead section also does include a summary of the major sections of the article. However, in the lead section it includes something called a motivating operations, which is defined but the definition provides could be clearer. Also, the way the sentence about motivation operations is structured needs to be divided into another sentence because it can look confusing at first. Furthermore, the lead section is concise because it gives enough details about the article's major sections without giving to much information away.

The content of the article is relevant to the topic because it does not go into subjects that have nothing to do with punishment in psychology. None of the content is up to date because none of the information provided was published in the last three years. There is a lot of information is the article that is traced back 20 years ago and even more than 50 years ago. Punishment is not a widely studied aspect of psychology which could be a reason why the content in the article is not up to date. However, nothing in the article relating to the content looks out of place because all the content is connected to punishment. As previously stated, the article topic is a topic that is not really studied in psychology. Punishment is an underrepresented subject in psychology, which plays a part in why the content is considered out-of-date.

Furthermore, language of the article is in a neutral point of view because when talking about the effectiveness of punishment is describes the different reasons why some consider it effective and why some do not without explicitly stating their opinion. There are not any claims that appeared the be bias toward a particular position. However, some viewpoints are underrepresented in the article. For example, the traumatic bonding section under applications is severely lacking in information compared the under sections in the same major topic. More information should be added to the traumatic bonding section because readers are not getting enough adequate information to see how it is related to punishment in psychology. Moreover, the article does not attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position over another. The article allows readers to draw their own conclusions about punishment.

The facts in the article are backed up by reliable sources of secondary information. For example, numerous sources are books written by authors and there are also textbooks as sources. The sources reflect the literature on the topic because many of the contain information about punishment, research about punishment, and subjects that use punishment for various reasons. Also, none of the sources are from press releases or official websites, all the sources are from reliable entities. However, none of the sources in the article are current because many of them are books or research that was published more than 10 years ago. The sources do not appear to written by a diverse spectrum of authors, but some of the sources include populations of people who have been historically marginalized. For example, some sources include groups of women and people with disabilities, such as people with autism. There does not appear to be any sources that can be better because all of them include peer-reviewed articles. Most of the links for the sources work except for third sources and the book links do not appear to be working properly.

The writing of the article is clear in some places but confusing in others. For example, the portion about motivating operations could be described more clearly. Also, the examples used for some of the concepts could be communicated better. Also, in the section that relates to contingency and contiguity has a grammatical error in the last sentence, the word "be" should be before "ways" and after "may". Furthermore, the article is well structured because the major topics are broken down into sections. Also, there is no information that is in the wrong section.

Moreover, the article includes an image that helps readers further understand the meaning of the topic. However, there is not a caption on the image, which could be necessary for some readers. The image appears to adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations and the image is laid out in a pleasing way where readers can see it and know what the image contains.

On the talk page of the article, the conversation going on mostly involves one comment about how most pf the understanding of punishment came from Azrin and Holtz, not B.F. Skinner, which is widely believed. The other comments include how different perspectives about punishment should be considered, instead of just focusing on operant conditioning. However, the last comment on the talk page states that punishment relating to applied behavior analysis is not relevant to the article because the study did not make that connection. The article is rated as a C, and it is a part of the WikiProject of Psychology.

The overall status of the article is okay because the article is well written, but some improvements need to be made. One strength of the article is how well organized the information is. The article is organized into sections that contain all the relevant information and not of the information feels out of place. The article is easy to follow, and majority of the information is communicated in a clear and concise way. The weaknesses of the article are the number of sources that are outdated, which is important because some of the information may have been disputed. Another weakness is how some sections feel underrepresented compared to others. Some sections need to have more information so that readers will know how and why it is related to punishment. For example, the section of traumatic bonding needs more information on how it relates to punishment. The article can be improved by updating sources so that the information is recent, putting more information in certain sections, and fixing a few grammatical errors. The article is underdeveloped because while it does contain the necessary information, it needs other information so that the topic has more to offer future readers.