User:Apolloh01/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Affect (psychology) - Wikipedia

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 chose affect because it is an important aspect to psycho-oncology, especially related to the impact that diagnoses, stigma, and treatment relates to affect. I was also surprised to see this article listed as a c-class article, giving both its high importance and wealth of information the article could potentially use from the scientific world.

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.)

Lead section - The first sentence feels far too vague in order to narrow down the specific scope of what affect is. The lead section also does little to summarize and explain the sections of the wikipedia article, leading it to feel fractured and unfocused. One plus to consider is that the leading section is mostly concise.

Content- The content of this article seems to have a decent balance of old and new sources, however, this article does not do very much to address potential intersectionality such as affect in relation to marginalized stigma or cultural differences in affect. This article does relate affect to behavior and cognition, though little is mentioned about its link to physiology, at least in relation to clinical settings (such as affect surrounding disease)

Tone - As far as I can tell, the article maintains a neutral tone throughout most of its sections. There are some major balancing issues, with the article taking too much time to focus on specific, individual studies rather than allocating its resources to better address multiple areas of affect. Given the breadth of topics that affect can relate to, there are very few sections that look to integrate it to other areas of psychology. It ignores aspects such as culture, gender, race, and other aspects that can explain a more individualistic and varied experience of affect- rather opting to generalize as much as possible.

Sources - The sources that are present seem to lead to the actual article that is mentioned in-text. However, one thing that I noticed while looking at the article is that the page seems to use only a few sources for very large sections, which could potentially point to a lack of diversity in the article despite the seemingly adequate number of references. The talk page also mentions some prominent concerns about some of the research that is cited in the article. Given the overuse of single sources, and the discourse in the talk page, there is likely some bias or limited perspectives being shared in this article.

Images - This article has virtually no images, graphs, or relevant tables to speak of. The only captioned image that exists on this page is generally unrelated to any specific aspect of affect, and is very surface level in how it conveys an understanding of affect.

Talk Page - This article is rated as a c-class article, while also being an article of high importance in the realm of psychology. The discourse surrounding this article includes many notes that have been left unresolved with little discussion being generated. A lot of the points brought up are related to concerns about redundant areas of the article, specifically surrounding requests to merge certain points in order to make the article more concise and less fragmented.

Overall impressions - This article is rated as a c-class article, and I can completely agree with this. While this article seems to have a lot of sources to work with, and does present a wealth of seemingly accurate and detailed information, the article itself appears to be fragmented, imbalanced, and limited in its scope of a very broad and important topic. Additionally, it is missing many pieces of information that I believe could better serve the encompassing understanding of affect in a variety of different psychological applications. If I had to pick one, I would say that this article is poorly developed, and is in need of some restructuring.