User:Avocadude/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Osteopathy

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because Osteopathy is an important field of medicine for me to think about as I apply to medical school. Further, it is an interesting alternative to traditional allopathic medicine, and continues to grow through the education of osteopathic physicians in the United States.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section: This section is well written, describing the underpinnings of osteopathy and explaining definitions necessary to continue the article.

Content: The content of the article is all relevant and useful. Looking through sources it appears that there have been plenty of updates and a lot of relevant, ongoing discussion about content and potential overlap with other pages.

Tone and Balance: This is definitely a subject that has some strong opinions between different groups, such as MDs vs DOs. However, after looking at the talk page there is also a lot of clear misunderstanding of osteopathy vs. osteopathic physicians. A lot of work has been done to weed out biased statements from this article over the past few years. The page also interestingly has a "criticism" section, which I read about on the talk page. Users discussed how, while sometimes these sections are frowned upon for being clearly biased, they can also be a useful way to present opposing opinions on a subject if they report things objectively.

Sources & References: This article has a wide variety of sources that span a long period of time. In this case where there is a historical section, it is good to have some older articles that can serve as primary sources. Sources are generally very credible. Also an appearance of a high ratio of sources to the length of the article. Good!

Organization and Writing Quality: This is overall a reasonably well-written article. However, the "Practice" section goes straight from a discussion of principles to other topics in osteopathy. It could use a better transition here. Otherwise organization is fine throughout the article. Writing style is good and descriptive.

Images & Media: I'd have to give this section a mediocre evaluation at best. Not the article needs many images, but it could be useful to add a few that demonstrate some of the treatments or methods discussed. The few that are included are relevant.

Talk Page Discussion: This appeared to be a very active talk page. There was a significant amount of arguing and debate between users, but also some constructive conversation which I could see had turned into real edits to the page. I also saw a lot of people talking over each other (apparently it's just as possible online), and rewriting the same statements in a discussion rather than acknowledging what others had said. This is part of a larger WikiProject for Alternative Medicine. A lot of people on this talk page get mixed up in a discussion of MD vs. DO physicians rather than osteopathy itself.

Overall Impression: I think this is a relatively sound page. However, like anything, it could be improved. It may be the case that it's hard to find any valid information describing any real benefits of osteopathy, but more might be useful. It is overall a bit of a negative article, but it does have a lot of information from good sources. According to the talk page it was once nominated as a "Natural science good article", however it didn't meet the criteria at the time in 2017. It is listed as a level-5 vital article in Biology & Health, and has a C-Class rating. I am going to do some more research on these categories.