User:DionnaTaylor/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Young adult fiction

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because as a reader I am familiar with the YA genre. YA is the most popular selling genre for authors, most likely because it reaches people of all ages - from teenagers, to adolescents, to young adults. As a young adult I still read within this genre even though I have surpassed the primary age for it. At first glance I see a good amount of information, there's history, criticism, references.

Evaluate the article
The lead section starts strong with a concise sentence explaining the young adult fiction (YA) genre and the age range that it covers. The description is only about a paragraph, keeping the overview of this article brief and to the point. This section also includes a contents box that outlines what is covered in this article (history, themes, genre, criticism, etc.) making specific information easy to find. Overall, this seems to be a good lead section.

All of the content included seems relevant to this topic. I noticed a heavy emphasis on the "history" section, but not as much emphasis on the "themes" section. With the exception of coming-of-age, various other themes are listed without elaboration. It might be of interest to expand on these (even if briefly) to help balance this section out. An expansion on the 'content' portion of the "criticism" section might also be of use. Especially in terms of boundaries between YA and adult fiction - there have been books published and marketed as YA first, only to need to be republished and marketed later on as "New Adult" (NA) due to the content, or a series starts out as YA only to develop into an NA series later on. The "criticism" section also discusses lack of diversity amongst YA novels - I think it could be beneficial to add examples of diverse YA novels in this section that have accurate representation as well as authors whose writing is harmful and should be brought to attention (such as J.K. Rowling who is already mentioned on this page).

The overall tone feels neutral, everything I read felt very informative. I don't think there's anything inherently controversial about the YA genre itself so it seems relatively easy to keep this article neutral and unbiased. As I mentioned above, the only thing that I think could be expanded on would be the diversity section and maybe more about movements and controversy within that specific aspect of this genre.

The references seem to be a mix between reliable and unreliable sources (according to Wikipedia's Perennial Source list). I see reputable sources such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Guardian, and research papers; but I also see things that are not considered reputable like Goodreads, blog posts, and non-working links (42 - New Adult Books Growing Up - Lansing Slate Journal). Other than that, there are citations in every paragraph, most references seem to be from the last five years, and are not all from the same place - there are a variety of references.

Writing quality is exceptional, with no grammatical or spelling errors upon first glance. The sections and sub-sections are organized in a way that make logical sense.

Images that capture "YA genre" are hard to come by given this is not a tangible thing. There is an image of Rick Riordan at a book signing for Percy Jackson and the Olympians which is interesting to me because that series is predominantly categorized as middle grade (though the lines between children's, YA, and adult are flexible! as the article discusses). There is another image of a book title page as well - the page doesn't feel cluttered with images and media.

This article is rated as C-Class and is in the WikiProject Children's literature. The conversation within the Talk page revolve around Diversity, number of Harry Potter references, misleading name for the genre, etc. I was happy to see discussion of how to improve the diversity section along with the overall structure of the article.

This article has been rated as Top-importance. As for improvements, I mentioned some ideas above that I think could help expand the scope of this article (diversity expansion, touch up references). Overall, the article is well-developed, but like most things, has room for improvement!