User:BEE-TRUM2610/Evaluate an Article

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

World War III in popular culture - 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 this article because it is an article that I am considering writing about for my project and I would like to further evaluate it to see if it would be viable to improve this article in any way. I think that the topic of how perceptions of nuclear warfare have changed over time is really interesting and I would like to further evaluate how popular culture plays a role in both shaping public opinion about this topic, but also how it serves as a relic of how people in the past have considered the possibility of atomic weapons within international conflict. The first thing that you see when you open the article is that there are multiple issues that need improvement, so that gave me the first impression that this was an article that I could work to improve. After reading through the article, I did recognize many media forms that we reviewed in class, such as Failsafe and The Day After, but also popular social movements such as the nuclear freeze. I saw a couple different ways that the article could potentially be expanded upon.

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 introduction to the article is pretty good. It gives a detailed explanation, uses multiple good sources, and overall does not need much improvement. The one thing that I would say is incorrect about the introduction, or about the article in general, is with how the intro mentions that the Cold War produced significant effects within popular culture both within the United States and within the Soviet Union, and yet the article seems to heavily focus on the effects of the United States and generally western countries and does not particular mention what popular culture in the Soviet Union looked like during this time. I don't know if that could be something that could be improved upon easily, but it was something that I noticed, nevertheless. Additionally, there are numerous large sections within the article that go without any citations, and several citations that are flagged as needing better sources, so one thing that this article is most certainly lacking in is a viable list of strong references. Furthermore, the descriptions of the different forms of media within the article are inconsistent. Some books or movies will have short descriptions with them that describe the book/film and how it relates to popular ideas about nuclear weapons during the time period that it is in, but other media form, such as the book Alas, Babylon from the 1950s, does not include any sort of description, only that it dealt with the nuclear effects of war. While a drawn-out description is not necessary for every media mentioned by the article, the inconsistencies in discussing more about somethings than others is defiantly something that could be fixing with the implementation of appropriate references and descriptive information. These are just some of the ways that this article could be improved upon to be a more accurate representation of what atomic weapons and the possibility of nuclear war looked like in public perceptions since the 1900s.