User:Beyonce0414/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Social media in the 2020 United States presidential election

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I found the title interesting as I think it is fascinating how the political platform has taken over social media. This matters as it explains the uses and drawbacks of using social media as a political platform to draw supporters and capture events. My preliminary impression of it was I found it surprising that the political leaders used it for many different political fronts and the impact it had on influencers.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The introductory sentence describes the topic without much detail as it just states that social media was used a lot during the election but not how it was used. The lead does include a brief description of the major key points in the article. The lead didn't include any information that wasn't expanded upon in the article. The lead is overly detailed as it contains more information than some points of the article.

Content section

The content is relevant to the topic of social media as it includes many aspects of how social media was involved in the 2020 election. The content is up to date as it includes many examples from the years leading up to 2020 and the year itself for examples though it could include present day examples about how social media is continued to be used. The information that is missing is evidence on the republican primaries as the democratic primaries are mentioned but not the republican primaries. This article doesn't deal with any underrepresented groups as it talks about the politicians and the American population as a whole and only mentions one politician from a minority briefly.

Tone and balance

The tone is not neutral as it talks about Donald Trump in a more biased view than Joe Biden. Donald Trump is talked about using social media in negative ways although it does not mention any democratic use as negative if any. I think the Facebook view point is lacking details and substance as it is noticeably smaller than the twitter example. There are not many minority viewpoints described as the American citizens are referred as the general public although one political is mentioned briefly. I believe the writer is leaning towards the fact that social media is negatively used by the republican politicians more than the democrats.

Sources and references

The majority of the evidence is backed up by reliable sources though many of the sources are primary instead of secondary. The literature is thorough as it reflects many viewpoints from the topic such as the use of social media as specific examples and different articles that reflect upon these. The sources are a couple years old but correspond around the election year, making them current to the article. The article does include a wide spectrum of authors including some individuals from marginalized groups. There are some better sources available such as studies from colleges such as Princeton but there are some valuable sources already. The links do work.

Organization and quality of writing

I think the organization of the article needs more work as most of it reads as choppy and is hard to follow. The information is broken into subsections but the information is too concise as some sections have a lot of evidence and others have little to none. The article does not have any grammatical or spelling errors that I could find.

Images and Media

The article doesn't include any images to enhance the article but does include a table of the 2020 election. The table if considered an image has no caption. The table does not adhere to Wikipedia copyright regulations if it is considered an image. I think there could be an addition of more images to help visualize the concepts or capture the two politicians.

Talk page discussion

The conversations talk about how the article needs more substance and how it is lacking details. The article is C-rated and is part of wikiprojects. Wikipedia talks about this specific election whereas in class we talk about the social media impact as a whole,

Overall impressions

The article is overall underrepresented though an interesting topic. The articles strengths are the number of examples that back up the claims. The article can be improved by expanding upon the evidence. The article is underdeveloped as it lacks substance for many claims.

(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.)