User:Chelsea rowell/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The Society of the Spectacle

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle, specifically his analysis of 'the spectacle' as a means of economic domination over social realities, provides valuable insights relevant to Critical Theory. However, the density and abstractness of the original work can make it difficult to understand. A well written Wikipedia article would make DeBord's ideas accessible to a wider audience.

Evaluate the article
The article's lead is short and uninformative. It alludes to the concept of the Spectacle and provides a limited amount of historical context, but lacks any explanation for what the Spectacle is. It also does not introduce the theoretical components of the book that are discussed later in the article.

The content of the article is relevant to the topic and up to date, but the article is very brief and would not leave an unfamiliar reader with a thorough understanding of DeBord's philosophy. It also includes a lot of jargon. It does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps. The article is not particularly biased and does not attempt to convince the reader to adopt one position over another. Since it only discusses one viewpoint, rather than providing an overview of viewpoints on a particular topic, I don't think that it needs to determine whether or not DeBord's views are minority or fringe.

The article heavily references The Society of the Spectacle itself, and makes limited use of secondary sources that discuss or summarize its ideas. This seems somewhat contradictory to Wikipedia's policies on not doing original research, and I think that it might be more appropriate to cite the analyses of well respected authors, rather than performing original analysis. Links to sources work, although there are very few of them.

The article is not particularly well written. It does little to enlighten the reader on DeBord's broader points or their implications, and uses extensive jargon that it does not explain. It mostly consists of direct quotes. There are no glaring grammatical or spelling errors, although the phrasing is often awkward. It is somewhat well organized, and the headings are relevant to the content.

The images are well captioned and relevant to the topic but do not enhance understanding. They appear to Wikipedia's copyright regulations, and are neither visually appealing nor unappealing.

There is absolutely nothing going on in the talk page. The article is rated start-class, and high importance to WikiProjects on Politics and Socialism.

Overall, the article is underdeveloped. It fails to coherently explain the concepts outlined in The Society of the Spectacle and to meaningfully cite secondary analyses; it would be improved by doing so.