User:B.ramirezz/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Social experiment

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was under Wikipedia's "Articles for improvement" page as needing major improvement. This article matters because social experiments are more common in present day science and social psychology to understand people's differing behaviors. Social experiments are a vital tool for scientists to understand the makings of human behaviors. My preliminary impression of this article was that it needed more information regarding the history and underlying foundation/explanation of social experiments.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of this article does include an introductory sentence that defines the topic be presented in the article, however, does little to introduce the major sections such as the History and Well-Known Social Experiments sections. Although the lead is concise in explaining the entire process of a social experiment, the rest of the article does little to enhance the understanding of what a social experiment really entails. The content presented in this article is relevant to the topic of social experiments being as though it consist of a brief history, some information of ethics in social experiments, and brief descriptions of popular social experiments that have already taken place. What can be done to better this article is the addition of a larger history such as where the term social experiment comes from, where are the origins of the first social experiment, and how social experiments have evolved over time into what it is to be considered today? Because this is just an informational article about a non-controversial topic, there appears to be no presence of bias or under/overrepresentation of a particular position. The contributors of this article are consistent in their citation of information from secondary sources, however, some sources are questionable as they are a .com or .org site. This article does reference scholarly and credible sources when providing information about real-life social experiments that have been conducted by real scientists and professionals. In terms of organization of this article, it is very clear and easy to jump to and from major sections of information. The majority of the major sections are of the several social experiments that are used and examples in this article which is both beneficial and detrimental to the integrity of this specific article. On one hand, it helps a reader to get a view of multiple different applications of social experiments, but on the other hand, a reader may not get enough information about the term and process of a social experiment itself. This article does not contain any images or photographs to visually demonstrate the information that is being provided which leads to no copyright violations to take place. Because this article was on Wikipedia's "Articles for improvement" page, the talk page contained many differing opinions on what changes should be made. One of the major comments that stirred up debate in the TalkPage was of a co-author of a cited source recommending the cite being completely taken down for the article confusing two separate kinds of experimentation. Some contributors agreed on the mistake, however disagreed on the removal of the article which is understandable in the sense that there will then be absolutely no information regarding social experiments if the article were to be completely taken down. An overall impression of this article is that it needs major improvement of background information as well as the contributors full understanding of what type of experiment is being explained and presented in this article.