User:Curiousterp23/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
National Technical Institute for the Deaf

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the book we are using in this class heavily references the founding of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, NTIC. Multiple interviews that we have read mentioned the process to obtain funding for research in hopes of establishing NTID. In the last three weeks, we have studied Dr. Boyce Williams and his work with the federal government. It was through his jobs, the at funding was established to research vocational training for the Deaf community. From this research, the idea of NTID was born. A year after NTID was founded, the school realized there was a shortage of interpreters and founded an interpreting training program. This program is still running.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section: The lead section uses neutral language and does a good job of listing out the unique programs and supports that the school provides for its' deaf and hard of hearing students. However, in the history section of this article, the only other section on this page, these services are not mentioned again. The enrollment numbers that were listed in this section were from ten years ago and need to be updated. In the history section, enrollment numbers were listed for three other years but none of these were recent. The lead section in concise and has a good introduction sentence.

Content: The content of the NTID article is lacking with only one section besides the lead, a very brief history. When you look at the talk page you can see that two other sections have been removed because it was advertising that NTID put into the article themselves. That was what the person who removed them claimed at least. The history does mention the laws that helped found the school however it doesn't do a good job at mentioning the people who worked to establish the school. The content is not up to date. The most recent date I saw was 2011, when a new President took over.

Tone and Balance: I would say this article does use neutral language. The strongest word I saw on this page was "contention" however I would agree in that it is a good word to use when describing the emotions on campus when the school first opened.

Sources and References: There are eleven resources listed for this article. Of the eleven resources, eight come directly from the schools library, website, or their press. This could cause some people to believe that they are using only internal information which could have biases. On the other hand, most information about a college would come from the college itself.

Organization and writing quality: The article is concise with no glaring grammatical mistakes. I however, am not a good person to rely on for checking grammar. There is only one section, history, and it is in chronological order.

Images/Media: The only image is one one building on campus, there is no name listed for this building.

Talk Page Discussion:One the talk page you can see that one section was removed because it was created by NTID marketing, this was found out by using the ip address.

There was a lengthy discussion about citation as one contributor deleted the note claiming they were needed. The person who claimed citations were needed went line by line explaining where citation was needed and the article could be considered plagiarized if citations weren't added. In fact, one section was completely deleted because of plagiarism and copyright violations.

There was another discussion about getting rid of a section, and they did, because the contributors only found on source about the topic. And, the link they were using had been orphaned.

Overall Impression: This page needs work. There is a lot of important information missing and it hasn't been updated in a very long time. If I was looking at this article as a way to learn more about the school I would have to find other sources to rely upon.