User:Emilyzorro/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Political economy
 * Briefly describe why you have chosen this article to evaluate. I have chosen this because I think the discipline is interesting - a more critical study of economics that includes the philosophical assumptions behind it. I wish more people were "political economists" instead of "economists". Just wanted to see how developed the page was. My major is PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) and one of the heads of the program said that what we study is basically "Political Economy."

Lead

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the Lead include an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic?
 * Does the Lead include a brief description of the article's major sections?
 * Does the Lead include information that is not present in the article?
 * Is the Lead concise or is it overly detailed?

Lead evaluation:
The introductory sentence does an OK job at explaining the term (at least, the way I understand it). In my opinion, it didn't include enough emphasis on the philosphy aspect of political economy. The first paragraph also is a bit disorganized and doesn't exactly correspond to the sections below. There are only two sections - etymology and then "Current Approaches." I think it probably should probably be organized chronologically. First, explaining early conceptions of political economy by Adam Smith, Marx, Ricardo, etc. and then going through time looking at different approaches. The first paragraph talks about political economy of the past and then it jumps straight to current approaches, as if those are two separate categories. Plus, the first paragraph is supposed to serve as a summary of the pages below.

Content

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
 * Is the content up-to-date?
 * Is there content that is missing or content that does not belong?
 * Does the article deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps? Does it address topics related to historically underrepresented populations or topics?

Content evaluation:
All the content was relevant. It didn't include anything about Elinor Olstrom, one of the most famous Nobel Prize economists who studied political economy, though. It also didn't include anything about Modern Monetary Theory, which is a newer kind of movement questioning ideas of scarcity of public budgets. The last example of political economy on the page was from 2017, three years ago. There's also a famous quote from Marx - "The anatomy of civil society can be found in political economy." It does talk a lot about Marx but this quote is a good one from him. Almost all the political economists listed on the page are white men from Europe, which does make me suspicious. So no one else in the world studies political economy? I haven't done enough research about this but I'm sure there are a lot of other sorts of people who could be classified as political economists.

Tone and Balance

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article neutral?
 * Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * Does the article attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another?

Tone and balance evaluation:
The article does appear to be mostly neutral, that is, it seems like people from a variety of people from different political backgrounds have contributed, as well as a number of scholars. It doesn't seem to be trying to convince the reader of anything.

Sources and References

 * Guiding questions


 * Are all facts in the article backed up by a reliable secondary source of information?
 * Are the sources thorough - i.e. Do they reflect the available literature on the topic?
 * Are the sources current?
 * Are the sources written by a diverse spectrum of authors? Do they include historically marginalized individuals where possible?
 * Check a few links. Do they work?

Sources and references evaluation:
Some of the bullets under "Current Approaches" do not have any citations. The sources I looked through at the bottom mostly are from academic papers from political economists which is encouraging though. Many of them are white men also.

Organization

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article well-written - i.e. Is it concise, clear, and easy to read?
 * Does the article have any grammatical or spelling errors?
 * Is the article well-organized - i.e. broken down into sections that reflect the major points of the topic?

Organization evaluation:
The section "Current Approaches" is extremely disorganized. It first has this categorization: "(1) the role of government and/or class and power relationships in resource allocation for each type of economic system; (2) international political economy, which studies the economic impacts of international relations; and (3) economic models of political or exploitative class processes." This sentence reads like a thesis, but these categories are never followed through on in the subsequent paragraphs. The next paragraphs talk about public choice theory and another "more recent focus" of political economy, and then there's a list of bullets of seemingly random ideas related to political economy. This section should be broken down into a 1. 2. and 3. describing each of these points, or otherwise delete those bullets.

Images and Media

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the article include images that enhance understanding of the topic?
 * Are images well-captioned?
 * Do all images adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations?
 * Are the images laid out in a visually appealing way?

Images and media evaluation:
There aren't many images here aside from some of famous political economists. They're captioned well, but I think some diagrams explaining the concept in a visual format would be more helpful.

Checking the talk page

 * Guiding questions


 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Talk page evaluation:
The conversation here is interesting and it seems like some professors have weighed in on their takes on the article. One of the people who I assume is a professor, (Dr. Gawande) made a similar point that I did about the organization of the paragraph "Current Approaches", as the area of International Political Economy isn't really explained aside from that one sentence. Apparently it's an entire discipline under Political Economy.

The article is part of a WikiProject and it looks like there have been a lot of contributors here. It's rated "Start-class, Top-importance", not sure what that means. Sounds like it's a good article. Overall it was a good article, honestly, just a bit disorganized.

Overall impressions

 * Guiding questions


 * What is the article's overall status?
 * What are the article's strengths?
 * How can the article be improved?
 * How would you assess the article's completeness - i.e. Is the article well-developed? Is it underdeveloped or poorly developed?

Overall evaluation:
Overall the article was well done. "Political economy" has so many different disciplines and is very general. This page does a good job of explaining the term generally as a interdisciplinary area of study about the underlying assumptions behind neoclassical economics. It is a bit disorganized, but because there are so many ideas about what it means, I guess that makes sense.

Optional activity

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