User:Apollo1997/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sport psychology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
My major is psychology and I also played four years of college soccer so sports psychology is an interest of mine. I saw that the article has multiple issues, so want to improve it since I can relate to the sports psychology field.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of this article can be much better in my opinion. Although the lead sentence describes the articles topic well enough, the lead section fails to include brief descriptions of some of the major sections in the article such as the commonly used techniques section. There is nothing in the lead section that isn't covered in the article, but the lead section needs more detailed added to it.

The articles content is relative to the topic, but it has not been updated since February of 2020 which was almost three years ago. In the past three years, there could be advancements in the field of sports psychology. There isn't any content that doesn't belong, but I did notice that all of the content was drawn from North America, Western Europe, and Russia. The Continents of South America and Asia were not represented.

The article is written from a neutral point of view. The article simply just provides information on the topic of sports psychology and doesn't try to convey any points or attempt to persuade. Since the article is represented as a neutral source of information, there aren't any viewpoints that are expressed except for the AASP section which touches on the disagreement of members in the AASP. Some of the members wanted the organization to push more toward a career development field while other members wanted to remain as a research oriented organization. Both viewpoints were expressed equally and were just meant to inform the reader of the history of the AASP. I did not detect any attempts to persuade the reader in any direction.

Not all of the articles topics are backed up by reliable references. Some of the references are websites that were created by organizations which can be bias or in some cases, inaccurate. There are articles and studies that would be considered more reliable that the website references that were used. Some of the facts don't have refences backing them up at all. I went through a handful of the references and a lot of them I was only able to read the abstracts for as a lot of the research articles referenced need to be purchased. Overall though, there are over 100 different sources drawn from which is a very diverse spectrum of information.

the article only includes one image which is related to the topic of biofeedback which is explained in the article. The image does help create a visual representation of what biofeedback testing looks like, but the image needs a better caption. What exactly is being measured in the picture? The article would benefit from adding more visual imagery in many different sections. The one image is in compliance with Wiki's regulations at least.

Overall, the article has multiple issues that need to be improved upon. The article is not poorly developed, but underdeveloped since it needs more citations, images, and representation from other areas of the world. The article also needs information drawn from research from the past three years since it was last updated. As for positives, the article is very well organized with each section being clearly labelled. The article is also very dense with information on topics that are within the realm of sports psychology.