User:Devyn.Baucom/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Wikipedia Article: Concert Photography

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_photography

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because it's the field I work in. I am a concert photographer/videographer while I'm not in school and had never looked up the Wikipedia page for it before. I wanted to evaluate something that I was highly knowledgeable and interested in so that the assignment would be more applicable and allow for a better learning process. When clicking on the article for the first time, I was shocked to find how little information there was on it, how long it's been since it was last edited, and that there isn't any discussion on the article's 'Talk' page. I immediately knew it needed some work and have already come up with several ideas as to how this article could be improved in the future.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The first sentence does a good job of giving a basic overview of what the page is about. It starts with, “Concert photography is the photography of activities relating to concerts and music. It encompasses photographs of a band or musician as well as coverage of a concert.” This sentence is followed by, “It is a minor commercial endeavor that supports in part of the efforts for many independent photographers.” This sentence isn’t very clear and concise and doesn’t really make sense. There may be a typo where it says, “in part of the efforts for…” This section needs to be reworded or rewritten so that it makes more sense and is easier to understand. The lead doesn’t describe the article's major sections, but there is a small box giving the four main sections of this article: History, Technology, Three-Song Rule, and References. The lead is very short and definitely needs some work. It’ll be easier to update the lead once there’s more content and information in the article. Right now, it’s just kind of ‘bare-bones’.

Content

The content of this article isn’t very relevant to the topic, but it is related. The article briefly describes the origins of photography and the increased demand for memorabilia during the 1950s and 1960s. This is likely meant to give a background to where the concert photography industry started. It’s very basic though and doesn’t have much detail. There isn’t much information for someone to ‘learn’ or ‘read about’ with this Wikipedia page.

The content is slightly outdated as well, considering the page hasn’t been updated in almost two years. The concert photography industry has grown quite a bit in the last few decades and more information could be given about the industry and the niche of concert photography. This page definitely needs to be updated and brought up to date.

There could be more information added to this article. First, in the history section. I feel like it should go deeper and give more pieces to the evolution of concert photography up to modern times. I also think the technology section should be updated. Right now, it just mentions DSLR and Film cameras and that they’re both used by photographers depending on the style of photos they’d like to create. The article compares slide film with RAW format files from a DSLR. This is slightly irrelevant to the topic of ‘concert photography’. I can see how it’s distantly related, but I feel like there could be some better, or additional information added to the article to give the whole thing a bit more context.

The final section of the article about the “Three-Song Rule” is interesting and important information that is known within the concert photography industry. However, this rule is not applicable to concert photography of all genres of music. It’s relevant and applicable to mostly rock bands. The section gives a backstory to how the rule came to be. It’s interesting information, but again, without more information in the Wikipedia article, it seems to be slightly out of context and unnecessary (in the article’s current state).

Tone and Balance

This article is neutral and objective. It gives information and facts and doesn’t seem to have any controversy or issues with bias. It’s a pretty straightforward article. It doesn’t try to persuade the reader or anything. Honestly, there isn’t much text on the page, let alone enough to cause controversy, disagreements, or issues. The tone is very informational, but when reading the whole thing from start to finish, you can tell that different parts were added by different people. There hasn’t been very much attention or care put into the creation, editing, and upkeep of this article. This might just be due to the article being unpopular, or because there isn’t much relevant information for those who are interested in learning more.

Sources and References

The first citation says that it’s “offline” so it doesn’t really go anywhere. The second, third, fourth, and fifth citations are all websites/articles that don’t seem to have much validity behind them. They’re a mixture of blog posts and opinionated articles from unknown sources. These sources might be relevant to the content within this Wikipedia article, however, the sources themselves don’t seem to be very significant or factual. From just a quick glance at them, I could see that the articles weren’t subjective. Rather, they were articles written by a concert photographer, which leads me to assume that there’s a chance the websites/articles may have been cited by the original writer here on Wikipedia and added to the page in order to increase traffic to their website/article/blog. There really isn’t anything ‘solid’ in the sources that I’ve found. They’re outdated (around 10 years old) and there isn’t much diversity amongst the individual sources’ authors. There’s only 6 sources on this Wikipedia page. I know for a fact that there are more than six sources of information about concert photography online. I’ve researched the industry and the craft for several years and I know there’s much more solid sources and information out there. This Wikipedia article just needs to be updated so that more reliable information can be added.

Organization and Writing Quality

This article is pretty choppy and isn’t written very well. I’ve already found a couple of grammatical errors and sentences that just don’t make sense. There are several run-on sentences and irrelevant information within the article. It doesn’t really ‘flow’ and isn’t an ‘easy-read’. The only way I can personally describe it is ‘this article doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.’ It feels incomplete.

This article is organized very simply. There are only three informational sections in the article, and they’re quite small sections. I feel like the page could include more historical information, technological information, impactful moments for the industry, information about how popular it is and what the process is for a concert photographer, the importance of various settings, venue etiquette, etc. There’s a lot that could be added to the page. Right now, there isn’t much to organize in the article. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

There is only one photo on the page, captioned, “A photograph of a Christina Novelli concert in Honolulu, Hawaii.” The caption doesn’t include any credits to who the original photographer is, date, camera, whether the photo is unedited or not, etc. The photo is slightly blurry and isn’t very high quality. There’s a lot more information that needs to be added, and unless the photo was added with the original photographer's approval, this could be a copyright violation. l like more photos could be added as more information and history are added to this page. This photo is also slightly irrelevant to the page. It’s a photo of an artist. It’s mediocre and not representative of the artistry and creativity that is possible within the field of work. I feel like there should be a better ‘main-photo’ and more photos in general. This will help give context to the article.

Talk page discussion

This page does not have an active ‘Talk’ page. The last edit performed on the page was December 19th of 2019. It’s been awhile since it has been updated. I went a bit deeper into the talk page and saw that this article is a part of WikiProject Photography. Even on the WikiProject talk page, there wasn’t any relevant discussion. The article has been rated as Start-Class on it’s quality scale and it is rated as Mid-Importance for WikiProject Photography. It’s also included in WikiProject Stagecraft with Start-Class and Low-Importance ratings.

Overall impressions

Overall, this article needs a lot of work. There can be improvements made in each section of the article, in the sources/citations, information given, photos displayed on the page, and more information needs to be given. When assessing this article’s completeness, I would say that the article is underdeveloped, and what is there currently was poorly developed. There needs to be some thought and care going into this article. There’s a lot of information that could be added, so hopefully I’ll be able to find some time, brainstorm, and begin adding information and cleaning it up!