User:Cheesecake259/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Brown Corpus - 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 to evaluate because the Brown Corpus is something that we've discussed in class and is very important to corpus linguistics and to corpora in general as it set the standards for corpora to follow.

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.)

Lead Section: The article gives a clear and concise introduction to the Brown Corpus. From reading the first sentence, I know what the topic of the article is going to be about. Since there is only one paragraph, it does give a brief overview. There isn't a mention of the article's sections in the lead section, but most of them are mentioned.

Content: The article's content is related to the topic as it goes into detail of the history and creation of the Brown Corpus with the variety of topics and tagging for parts-of-speech. The content is as up to date as it can be for a corpus that isn't commonly used anymore and the seems to belong. The 6th paragraph in the History section of the article seemed a bit out of place to me with how they starting talking about Zipf's Law and how that can be used for word distribution in corpora. It's an interesting piece of information, but I'm not sure if it belongs in the history section.

Tone and Balance: The article is very neutral and isn't particularly biased. Each section (except for the parts-of-speech section) has multiple paragraphs and go into detail or show how the corpus worked. The parts-of-speech section lists all the tags that the corpus used for showing the types of words found in the corpus.

Sources and References: All of the mini paragraphs in the History section have citations that back up the information given and the parts that don't have citations have external links shown at the bottom for further research. The sources are thorough as some come from the actual Brown Corpus and manual as well as academic papers and books. There are only 6 references and 2 of them are from the Franics W. Nelson and Henry Kučera and the most recent reference was added in 2005. The links given do work except for this link which says it doesn't exist http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/frown/INDEX.HTM. As long as you click the archived link next to it, then it'll show.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is clear and concise, easy to read, and I couldn't find any grammatical or spelling errors. There article is well organized and there is a clear structure to the article. Each of the paragraphs discusses something different pertaining to each of the sections.

Images and Media: The one image in the article shows the Department of Cognitive Linguistics and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, which is presumably where Kučera and Francis did most of their work on the Brown Corpus. The image doesn't enhance understanding the topic as it's just a picture of the building, but it shows the viewer what it looks like. The image does adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations.

Talk Page Discussion: There aren't any ongoing conversations happening and there is only three, the latest being from 2012. The Brown Corpus article is of interest to three WikiProjects: Libraries, United States, and Linguistics: Applied Linguistics. Most of the conversations on the talk page are discussing dates, links, or names that are wrong whereas in class the discussion was more generalized about what the Brown Corpus is and how it functioned.

Overall Impressions: The article's overall status is a "start" article. I'm not entirely sure what could be added to the article without making it convoluted. I think the article is well-developed considering how niche the topic is. The article has many other sources that can be looked at and downloaded that relates to the Brown Corpus.