User:Debungalo/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Criminology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article covers the topic of Criminology, which is an important field in understanding the context of United States history. Criminology enables people to understand how the criminal justice system works and it impacts their lives. I chose it because it helps me understand my major and the role I serve as a citizen and employee at a police department. My preliminary impression was that it is broad and quite encompassing of the field of Criminology. At the same time it was also detail oriented.

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 article provides a simple explanation of what criminology is and what criminologists are and clearly states what this article will be about. The article starts of by going into the origins of the topic and is up to date with our current understanding of the topic, but could be update to include the latest years of Criminology research. It discusses more terms and definitions, the schools of thought and theory and are all at an equal depth, which balances out the topics. It is a large topic, so at times the article feels less organized, but it does include proper headers and sub-headers to make it easier to read. Furthermore, the absence of grammatical errors makes it easy to read. Every section has multiple references that have links available, and there are a lot of sources at the bottom of the page. There are also links to sub-topics which go into more detail about specific topics under Criminology. It remains neutral and does not suggest the field of Criminology to be negative or positive. It does address some populations that are historically underrepresented but not all of them. The article is not very efficient at including important images that help the audience understand the topic, and they are not very visually appealing, but they are well-captioned. The talk page includes some good questions by others that could enhance the content of this article. There are talks of nature vs nurture, demographic factors, and overall ways to make it better. It is rated B-class and is a part of psychology, criminology, and sociology WikiProjects. We have talked about similar content that is on Wikipedia, but we have more in-depth analysis and conversation. We can express opinions more than Wikipedia, which changes how we perceive certain topics that are neutral on Wikipedia. The article's overall status is a level 4, and I would say it is an average Wikipedia page, and it comes short when including important topics. It could be better be adding the recommended ideas in the talk page, such as deleting some pictures, fixing the vandalism on the article, and being more organized. Therefore, this article is underdeveloped and could be added to.