User:CKRRKQ/Evaluate an Article

For my practice evaluation, I chose the page Ableism from Wikipedia's list of C-class articles. This page aims to talk about the definition of ableism, its origin, its history, as well as its present day effect on society. While the article has some sound content, most of it is disorganized and resembles more of an op-ed than an encyclopedic article.

Evaluating Content
In terms of subject matter, the author(s) seemed to have trouble staying on topic, even in the introduction. In the first paragraph, they explain how the words "ableism" and "disablism" are interchangeable, yet in the very next paragraph they go into detail explaining how the two words do not mean the same thing. In addition to the murky definition of the page's topic, the introduction also seems to jump into the history of ableism with half-explained mentions of eugenics and certain stereotypes. The article attempts to explain ableism's etymology, history, how it is used in the workplace, in healthcare, in education, in media, in sports, and also the types of ableism and what causes it. However, some of these topics have more content than the others. For example, the topic about ableism in healthcare is one sentence, while the history of ableism tab has 5 different paragraphs going into detail about ableism in different countries. Also, the information regarding the causes of ableism is shockingly short - it seems that there should definitely be more information about what causes ableism. This article's content quality is pretty poor - lots of information is missing, it is disorganized and hard to follow, and each topic has a disproportionate amount of information. I think that this page needs a lot more information about how the word was formed/where it originated, how ableism affects different cultures and societies, and more proportionate/equal amounts of information per category.

Evaluating Tone
The tone of the article reads very emotionally and politically charged. The author failed to keep a non-biased, informational tone and it feels more like reading an opinion piece about ableism rather than an educational article. And, as I stated in the paragraph above, this page's topics did not all receive the same amount of research. The tabs regarding ableism in healthcare, education, and sports are severely underrepresented compared to the tabs about ableism in media and the history of ableism. Even the content about the history of ableism is still missing quite a lot of information and seems to be primarily focused on western culture, with nothing regarding ableism in other parts of the world. In terms of the general tone of this article, the author could stand to be more neutral, and each topic of ableism should be equally represented with adequate information and sources.

Evaluating Sources/Talk Page
When it comes to this article's sources, some of them were legitimate, but some also seemed to be biased/opinionated. Out of the 47 cited sources, only a couple of them led me to an error page. There were also multiple places within the article where Wikipedia noted that citations were needed to back up certain claims. The long list of sources included a few books and links to PDFs, but a lot of them were links to websites from questionable networks and online magazines. As for the talk page, it is full of criticisms and critiques. The page is rated C-class, and it has also been used for student-projects in the recent past. Many people stated that the article had lots of gaps in information and was hard to follow. Others had problems with the language used in the article, expressing that calling disabled people "the disabled" is dehumanizing (and also grammatically clunky). Someone also commented that a source link was incorrect, and that the Swedish article that was linked did not actually talk about ableism. Though we haven't discussed ableism too much in our class, this article talks about it in a much more emotional tone. Usually, our class discussions stay very neutral, non-biased, and based on information from the articles we have read.