User:Cmurr81/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Internet troll

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 find this topic very interesting because "trolling" on the internet is something that is very potent on social media. I think it matters to have a page dedicated to internet trolls because sometimes people fall into the trap where they don’t know that they’re being trolled or even worse, sometimes they lash out and give in to them which makes it worse for the person being attacked. It's definitely important to recognize that the internet and social media are where these trolls can flourish because there’s little to nothing someone can do against them except ignore.

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.)

The first sentence is very clear and concise and exactly defines what an internet troll is, however the sentence following really could have been stated better in my opinion. The lead section doesn’t do a good enough job in my opinion of describing the major sections in the article as there are little to no explanation of what subsections are going to be in the article. There isn’t anything that is said in the lead section that isn’t in the article. In the introduction paragraph, there are way too many pretentious and overbearing words that distract the reader from the definition of what an Internet troll is. There wasn’t really a need for four adjectives in a row basically describing that a troll posts messages that are meant to upset and provoke people online with the hope of making people mad enough to respond. Most of the articles content is relevant to the topic, however there are some things that are way to detailed and too narrow about the topic. Some of the content is up to date, however there are sections with sources from 2012 which is obviously not up to date with what an internet troll is in 2021. I think the section titled "Psychological Characteristics " needs some work because some of the information is straight up opinions and not exactly concrete enough to make claims about the "psychological makeup " of a troll. The article doesn’t exactly touch on any of Wikipedia's equity gaps however the article does mention underrepresented groups by explaining how internet trolls do in other countries, not just the U.S. The author seems to take an unbiased approach, well frankly because it would be odd to be supportive of "internet trolls". However maybe the author should have mentioned at least a few sentences about how sometimes "trolling" can be put way out of proportion. The only viewpoint that is most overrepresented is that internet trolls aren’t good. Thats basically the entire article. The author gives sources that really only have that same viewpoint which leaves fringe groups and minority opinions out of this article. Going into the main article, the Usage section's introduction sentence has a clear mark on the end stating that there needs to be a citation for the information written which leads me to believe that this is an example of bias in the writing. I don’t think the author is trying to persuade readers to believe one thing, but obviously with the topic of the article being "internet trolls" its hard to assume that there isn’t a little persuasion to think Internet trolls are bad. Not every source is reliable as I clicked on a few random ones and three sources do not have a page that exists anymore which obviously is no bueno. I think there are definitely better sources available for some, not all. There is straight up an orange bar over the "in different languages section" that states that some of the information in that paragraph is not confirmed or sourced properly. There are some sources that after clicking on and checking, they seem academic and credible. There are parts that are not easy to read and getting through some sentences is like pulling teeth with the amount of absurd and pretentious language that is sometimes to overbearing to understand what is being said. The article is broken up well in my opinion, there are clearly marked sections with descriptive titles. The article needs more images. The images that are on the page do adhere to the copyright policy and also have decently written captions but this page is dry and needs more. The talk page is filled with minor improvements and not a lot of discussion. The article provides a good amount of knowledge of what an internet troll actually is but I noticed a handful of things that I would change. The strengths would be its amount of deep and niche information, that in some parts needs to be verified. In some sentences that have a citation the writer states "Some psychologists" or "Others suggest" instead of providing names of people who have said things about this topic which to me would be a big change to make because what comes after "Some psychologists" means almost nothing if there isn’t people that can be associated with what is said. The article is developed decently but there are a lot of changes and verification of sources that need to be done. ~