User:Civil Protection Team 9/Evaluate an Article

Presentence investigation report
Presentence investigation report - Wikipedia

Class Exercise
The Presentence investigation report article was chosen for me to evaluate as a class exercise. My preliminary impression was that it is in need of significant development.

Evaluate the article
The lead is concise, though it could be cut down even further. There is minimal content in the lead pertaining to the major sections of the article. All of the information does seem pertinent.

All the content strikes me as relevant content, and I am satisfied with the sources as being up to date. My initial impression is that the article needs to be developed with a great deal more information.

The article does not strike me as entirely neutral. Some sections read to me as being lightly biased. There are some viewpoints that are in dire need of citation or should otherwise be removed. Nothing in the article struck me as attempting to be persuasive.

Sourcing is mixed in my opinion. Many assertions are marked as needing citation already, and the first citation is linked to far more than any of the others. However, there does look to be a healthy number of sources listed, and I expect it will continue to grow. More evenly distributing material from all the sources seems like an shot term fix. The merit of the few links I tested seems reasonable to me, and all tested links work.

Clarity was not an issue for me, though I feel as though some sections could be more concise. If there were any grammatical or spelling errors, they went by me. Overall, the organization seems sensible to me, though I wonder if the *History* and *Purpose* sections shouldn't be combined.

There are no alternative media files, though I don't think inclusion is strictly necessary.

The talk page discussion strikes me as very lightweight. The talk page is quite young so perhaps that is to be expected. The article is part of the WikiProjectLaw project, and its status is rated as 'start' and 'low priority' for the project.

Overall, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. However, the article is young, and I have no doubt it will continue to grow. For what it is right now, I think there are enough sources, though I think there needs to be more work done in bringing out information from the current sources. Of course, as the article develops, more sources should be added. After that, I think the core of the work needed pertains to sentence phrasing with regards to conciseness and elimination of any biased or unsubstantiated writing.