User:Giannamadden/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Linguistic imperialism

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I've always been fascinated about learning how a language is a powerful tool that can broaden our horizons. But I became more curious about how a language can limit the amount of conversations and idea seeking that can happen ultimately causing various amounts of discrimination towards marginalized groups of people. My first impression of this article was that there were quite a few error because there seem to be many moving parts that are missing some key elements such as citations, which is concerning.

Evaluate the article
Overall, I thought that this article donated an interesting amount of knowledge on the topic of linguistic imperialism. But, at the same time, I feel that a lot of the sections were missing some key components. Here are some of my recommendations:


 * In the lead section, I was disappointed to see that the first sentence into the article that your definition was quoted from a source and lacked a citation. I would suggest first and foremost finding the source that you are trying to cite the definition of linguistic imperialism from. Next, I'm going to recommend that instead of directly quoting from the source, paraphrase the part you are wanting to cite using your own words. Furthermore, while I do appreciate the amount of valuable information that you brought up in the second paragraph of your lead section, I'm going to suggest that you either try to weave this information into the history section or get rid of it as it makes the introduction a little bit bulky.
 * For tone and balance, I would say that this article mainly articulates a neutral point of view except for one part: the English section. In this part, you were flagged for getting away from your neutral tone because you used terms such as "the best" to showcase some one-sidedness when you described Phillipson's theory. My advice would be to use more neutral language and clarify why people theorized this. Instead of just stating the reasons behind the theory, I really want you to dig into the the so what factor. By this, I mean that I want you to go into detail about why this theorist thought these things this way so that way you end up balancing out the points of view and make this part of the article less one sided.
 * In terms of sources and references, I would have to say that I am very disappointed in this portion of the article. While I think that this publisher has listed a lot resources that are useful and intuitive, a lot of places where the publisher meant to place a citation is missing citations information. This makes it hard for me as a reader to see this publisher as a credible source, especially since some of the sources in the bibliography are a quite a bit outdated and some of the links are either missing or don't work, even though there are a variety of scholarly secondary sources from diverse authors. In this case, I would recommend that some more recent articles should be found to increase your chances of being seen as timely and credible. Depending on your access to library databases, I would recommend looking on JSTOR for articles as they are both free and reputable peer-reviewed scholarly sources, these can even be found on the internet if you don't have access to a library database.
 * A link to a suggested resource: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4398617?seq=3
 * For the article's content, unfortunately not all of it is up to date, especially since majority of the articles are from either the early 2000's or late 1990s which makes it hard to see how any of this information can or will still be relevant to our present day. Also circling back to the clarity and conciseness, I noticed that throughout the article there were many instances where the clarification needed stamp popped up in sections all around the browser. But, to be a little more optimistic, I will say that I appreciate the author's topics on linguistic imperialism because this addresses minority populations that don't have English as their first language. Also, I like how this article has subtopics based on the overall topic on linguistic imperialism as it adds more depth to the overall affect of this subject on different sectors.
 * While I thought that the article's organization was excellent and broken up into different sections based on different subtopics, I would have to say that the quality of writing was not very strong. The article contained valuable information, but I would like to argue that it didn't seem very conversational and straightforward, especially in the English section of your article. Also there were many parts where you weren't clear enough in your statements in describing various theories which led this section particular to feel more one-sided. As of right now, this portion of the article is definitely persuading me to see English as the dominant language that is necessary to assimilate to. Instead, changing the wording to be more neutral is imperative so that way we can see how these ideas were eliminated or why they should be omitted to ensure that minority groups can feel that their injustices and experiences have been voiced.
 * The images and media that the publisher incorporated enhanced my understanding of the topic as I was able to get a more visual understanding of people, places, and legal documents that the publisher was talking about and the layout of the images was paired perfectly with each section and the captioning below the pictures wasn't too long either. Most of the images don't have a citing problem, but the one image that was slightly problematic was the school yearbook picture as the source was cited as an unknown source, which would most-likely be violating Wikipedia's copyright rules.
 * While looking at the article's talk page discussion, I noticed that there were a good amount of negative comments that were put up towards the publisher, calling the article "garbage" or saying it was "unneeded." What I noticed was that this article was rated as a start class and was part of a WikiProject. A start class means that there's some good information that was published but needs to be improved in terms of expanding its resources and writing style. But on a more positive note, there were some more optimistic comments giving advice on places to search for better scholarly sources and also the need to include Chinese linguistic imperialism and how Mandarin is seen as another dominant language of the word. I would say that in comparison to what we've learned in class about this topic, I would say that there's definitely some more depth that has been given. By this, I mean that instead of giving just a basic overview, this article was giving historical contexts on linguistic imperialism as well as clarifying the possible criticisms and responses towards this topic and how it could be addressed.
 * My overall impressions of the article's overall status is registered in the start class which means that it definitely needs some revisions, but it has a good skeleton that can be built upon to make it better. I would say that the article's strengths would easily be it's organization as it allows readers to see how linguistic imperialism has impacted and still impacts people in different subject matters. But, I think the highest priority for this article should definitely be to fix the citation errors throughout the writing. Also, another thing that should be improved upon should be the one-sidedness in the English section of the article, making sure that it is using more neutral language. Overall, I would say that the article is definitely underdeveloped as there are lots of gaps that can definitely be filled in in terms of completing unclear information.