User:Bulgolgiricebowl05/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Today I'm evaluating the Financial analysis article.

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.)

Out of the millions of articles on Wikipedia, I chose this specific article on financial analysis because it relates to my major and I'm very interested in the topic that it talks about. Finance itself might seem like a boring and very broad subject, but when narrowed down there are actually many different interesting and important topics within it such as financial analysis. This topic is crucial as well as important to understand due to the fact that it provides an over view of a business's stability, cash flow, and profitability which all help determine a company's business decisions on a daily basis. Upon reading this article my first impression of it was that I believed that there would be a lot of false, or opinionated statements. Due to the stigma associated with Wikipedia being a non-credible source, I found it would be difficult to find accurate and trustworthy information on the topic that I wanted to learn more about.

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.)

In truth I do think that this article was a good source and well designed, as it displayed reliable and helpful information about the topic itself. To begin, I'd give this article a very good rating as it illustrates all of the essential information of this topic clearly. Its strengths were represented through its sources, and overall organization as it was divided up into the different sections which contained no grammatical errors and utilized up to date and reliable sources. All of the links to these additional sources do work and it seems as if they support the information that is being reflected on the topic, one of which is a series of accounting textbooks written by the author Donald E. Keiso, who is a very renowned professor at Northern Illinois University. However one of these sources is international and does not translate to English so that is a bit of an issue. The weakness I would say includes a lack of additional content. Since there were only three main points of this topic realistically there could've been more added into the article itself, I feel like this would've strengthened the article as a whole if added. The lead section was very straight forward and concise. It incorporated an introduction sentence that gives the readers a quick and brief description of what financial analysis actually is. Accordingly the introduction sentence is then followed by a small paragraph explaining the major points of how and why financial analysis is used within businesses. Luckily the lead section doesn't contain irrelevant information, but it also doesn't include a brief description of the main points found within the article later on as the introduction sentence practically does this. Following this the quality of the content, tone, and balance shown in this article were all balanced and satisfactory. Teaming with up to date neutral content, and relevant information regarding the topic this article didn't contain any unrelated information or opinionated viewpoints that tried to persuade the viewers of this article in one way or another. Rather this article was much more informative so I feel as if it underlined opinions of the subject itself, and as far as images and media are concerned there weren't any present. Lastly, the talk page. There were only three comments about possible revision on branched topics in the article but overall these discussions were neutral. Overall I believe that this article did a splendid job of explaining financial analysis, but I do think that it was slightly underdeveloped.