User:GZhen/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Bloodstain pattern analysis

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I honestly just thought it was interesting. I looked up criminal justice following the Wiki Evaluation Lesson and found forensics there. Forensics is a large part of criminal justice as well and blood stain pattern analysis is a small part of forensic science that helps to solve crime. This is important because 1. it relates to my major and 2. it's an important aspect in solving cases and very important while presenting evidence in court.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section: The lead section starts off with the definition Blood Stain Pattern Analysis. This is a good and concise way to start off the article as it provides readers with the meaning of the term being talked about within the article. I briefly talks about the articles sections in the order that they are provided in the section making it clear what each section would be about without providing too much information. But it only seems to cover the first 3 major sections and completely leaves the out the last one from the discussion. The section I'm speaking of is "In Popular Culture" which I think is a little confusing as a heading so without providing a small explanation about what the section is actually going to be about.

Content: In terms of content everything seems to be in order. However, it is lacking significantly in terms of methodology. Blood stain pattern analysis contains a lot of small details and a lot of measurements that should be included within the article in order to make a well-developed article but doesn't. The methodology section of this article only gives a brief overview of what an expert looks for in terms of size, shape, color, and pattern in which the blood has been splattered. The subsections of each major section are also very long and muddled. The criticisms as well don't seem to be up to date. The last report being from 2009. There is also no pros to compliment the criticisms of blood splatter analysis.

Tone and Balance: The overall balance of the article is good. But the tone of the article has some issues. 1. It is informal. 2. The article often falls into the trap of using intensifiers such as "very". Although it's one word, this article is littered with words like this. This can take away from the neutral tone that a Wikipedia article is supposed to provide since it sounds like the writer is trying to persuade the reader about what they are saying. I don't think that this is done on purpose but the word choice for the article makes it seem like an article used to persuade instead.

Sources and Resources: Yes, all the information in the article is backed up by a secondary source. However, it is definitely not all the literature that is available on blood splatter analysis. Looking at methodology alone the article is already missing a huge chunk of information that is important to make the article fully developed. Additionally, there are no peer reviewed articles at all in order to support the criticisms/ pros and cons of using blood splatter analysis. But the links do work.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is very easy to read and doesn't contain terms that are left without links and are undefined. But that doesn't mean much since the methodology section is nearly completely missing. Much terminology come from the methods used in order to determine facts from the blood splatter. The article provides none of it. It is however, quite organized. But the subheadings are a too long and it doesn't seem like a lot of thought was put into trying to come up with subsections at all. No grammatical or spelling errors though.

Images and Media: No images are provided to support the article. Adding to the methodology would make sure that there are images supporting the article.

Talk Page Discussion: Rated mid-importance, start class. The talk sections highlighted a lot of problems with the article. Problems with tone and even some factually incorrect information that I otherwise would not have caught on to. There are also some information in the talk section in which contain additional and new information that could be included within the article. The talk section does differ from the discussions that we have in class, the comments are detailed and it seems more like a collaborative effort compared to a peer review session in class.

Overall impressions: The article needs a lot of work and is not fully developed just yet. There needs to be more sections because there is a lot of information on blood analysis and there definitely needs to be more information in the methodology section.

(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.)