User:Ellekiko/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Magic Tree House

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 read these books often as a child. When considering fantasy children's literature, these books did not originally come to mind. But after considering how the treehouse whisks the children away to other lands; it seems like the perfect article to evaluate. I picked this article because I liked these books and did not enjoy other fantasy books as a child. The article is rated C-class and low-importance. My preliminary impression of the article is that it is very comprehensive and long, but there are some issues with the citations and neutrality of the sources.

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.)

1) Evaluating content:

The first paragraph, or lead section, is a summary of the series that is wordy. It is not concise. It also provides irrelevant information about specific books, which should only be included in the chart holding information about each individual book. This is a bit distracting from the main summary; they appear like tangents.

In the series background section, there is again unnecessary information provided, as well as wordiness. This slightly distracts from the content provided. There is no need to provide information about Pope's shared office or the amount of time she spend writing the series a day. This seems out of place. Nothing is included about the editing process or writing process of the books.

The content within the charts is informational and presented clearly; the divide between the first 28 and 29-55 seems warranted and supported by the post.

More information needs to be included about the purpose of the Magic Tree House Research guides besides that they are nonfiction. How are they supposed to be used in conjunction with the series books. This is a content gap.

The theater and movie sections seem adequate and provide relevant information.

2) Evaluating tone:

The tone of the main characters section could be considered slightly biased; Annie is called annoying. If this is a direct quote from Pope or a scholars opinion of the character, this needs to be better noted in the text.

The tone of the repetition section seems biased, and this section seems unnecessary for explaining the books.

The legacy section seems to be lauding Pope instead of discussing the series. The tone and content of this section should be reevaluated and repositioned.

3) Evaluating sources:

Two issues arise immediately, as there is a pop-up at the top of the article. Both issues are from April 2018-1) The article relies too much on references than primary sources, and 2) the article relies on too many sources to close to the subject which can limit verifiability and neutrality. These issues are also addressed within the talk page; the verifiability of sources has been a recurring issue.

The links cited in this article appear to have a multitude of dates, ranging from the 1980s to recent 2022 publications.

A lot of the sources are direct references to the book, interviews with Mary Pope (author), or non-academic articles such as Scholastic, Entertainment Weekly, or the New York Times. They also include references regarding theater. The sources do not appear to be diverse; furthermore, the lack of academic research cited makes me think that academic articles on the Magic Tree House Series are currently sparse or unavailable.

4) Checking the Talk Page:

The talk page references a 2016 discussion regarding the characters of Magic Tree House page; the final decision was to merge the character section with the actual book page. The characters were added to Magic Tree House page; the old page redirects you to the current page.

The talk page also includes calls for a general criticism section and average word count per book.

This article is currently apart of a Wiki Education course for the Spring 2022 semester. It has a student editor and peer reviewer assigned to it.

The article is rated in two categories Children's literature and novels; in both areas it is rated as C-class and low importance.

The last edit to the talk page was on Feb 24, 2022- very recent.

5) Overall:

This article has a lot of important information about the series, author, and individual books. The main improvements that are needed involve writing style, relevance of information, and concision. The base information seems to be accurate, but lacking neutrality. Most of the important information is there, but it is overshadowed by style and irrelevant information.