User:Cliffordhist/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Adoption in the United States

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it is a topic that I have heard many things about in conversation, but have never read any scholarly articles on, so I'm interested in how the authors of this page used sources.

Evaluate the article
The article starts with an introductory sentence that does describe the article’s topic, but it could be more clear, particularly the phrase “automatically recognized.” The lead does not include a description of all of the articles major sections, only addressing the types of adoptions and number of adoptions. The particular statistics on number of adoptions are not clear and are not referenced anywhere else in the article. For instance, one sentence in the lead says “About two million Americans are adopted” without giving any time period over which this applies. Also there are no citations anywhere in the lead.

Most of the article’s content is relevant to the topic, and the article was updated with numbers from 2021, meaning that it has been edited fairly recently. It seems to be missing a comprehensive history of adoption in the United States. There are mentions of Indian Boarding Schools in the early 20th century and the Korean War in the sections “Trans-racial adoption” and “International adoption,”  but does not seem complete. There do not seem to be entire sections that don’t belong, but there are definitely sentences or paragraphs that could be cut out, mainly for the quality of the information. It is either opinion or presented as a fact but not properly sourced. The sections “Search and Reunion” and “Adoption Facilitators” have no citations in them at all so could arguably be removed. In “Trans-racial adoption” it does attempt to address topics related to historically underrepresented populations, and does try to present multiple viewpoints. However, “Physical characteristics as a cost factor" speaks about historically underrepresented groups in a dehumanizing way.

As stated before, not all facts in the article are backed up by sources. For the ones that do have sources, the quality of the sources is very mixed. There are some governmental websites and reports, including census information, as well as scholarly articles. But then there are also blogs, magazines, entertainment documentaries and some older archived websites that seem out of date. Also not all of the links work. Specifically, I noted an issue with plagiarism in the section “Related legislation” where the language of the Act was copied word for word from the website without quotes around it.

The article is written well with no glaring spelling or grammatical errors. However, the organization leaves much to be desired. One particularly confusing aspect of the organization is the section entitled “Social and psychological results” under which “Trans-racial adoption” is a subsection. There isn’t a clear link between these two topics. The costs section could also use some organizational work, as it is a fairly straightforward topic but has multiple nesting subsections, the most of any other topic on the page.

The talk page indicates that this article was given a C-Class on the quality scale and that it was part of 2 WikiEdu course assignments in 2018 and 2019. One of the 2018 WikiEdu contributors commented in the talk section about the changes he made, acknowledging that it hadn’t been changed in almost 10 years and asking for reliable sources. No one seems to have commented back. The talk page also calls attention to the missing sources that I saw, but all comments were from the 10 years before the WikiEdu work.

Overall, I think the article has some strong points, such as use of data and including historically underrepresented groups. But as noted before, these groups aren’t always talked about in the most humanizing way, there are missing sources, and an imbalance of information in certain sections, perhaps tied to the fact that sections were edited for a class but not comprehensively worked on.