User:Hannahzav/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cause Lawyer

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this because my initial idea for my own article was "Movement Lawyering" or "Movement Lawyer" this is the closest related article to my topic that exists on Wikipedia. My initial reaction was that I was a bit disappointed. There is a lot of overlap between this article and my own initial topic. I think there is enough overlap that my topic could be covered by this article, however, I don't think this article is particularly strong and it feels a bit outdated.

Lead Section
The lead section introduces multiple concepts as if they are different terms for the same thing: cause lawyer. Further on, the article expands on the three different terms it introduced in the lead section as completely different concepts with different histories, ideologies, and goals. I found this a bit confusing and looking back at the lead section after reading through the article it didn't feel like an accurate description of the general concept or what was going to be discussed in the article.

I do think that if someone had never heard the term cause lawyer before and looked up this article, they would get a brief, general idea of the concept.

Content
The content was very broad and not as detailed or in depth as I would have liked. It felt like it was trying to cover everything related to the main topic in this one article rather than focusing on understanding and explaining the main topic.

Some of the headings did not make sense in this article. There were several areas I felt needed to be expanded on and explained better.

Tone and Balance
I was impressed with the neutral tone of the article. I think it did a really good job of presenting an unbiased overview and also discussed how cause lawyering is used to advance both liberal and conservative perspectives.The "criticism" subheading on several sections gave an outside counter perspective to the topic discussed in those sections. The article also presented internal conflicts and debates within cause lawyering.

The overall tone was informative and educational. This tone was consistent throughout the article.

Sources and References
On my first skim through the article I felt like there were not enough citations. There were often long paragraphs with a single source cited at the end. On a closer reading, I felt that there was usually a citation where I expected and each section felt well researched.

The section on "Organizations" was noticeably less cited and I felt also had more of a subjective tone and opinions in the text.

Looking through the references, I felt like the was a good mix of academic texts, law review articles, contemporary and historical news reports, think pieces, and cases. There were a lot of unique sources cited (rather than consecutive cites of the same source.)

Organization
The organization of the article was confusing. The headings did a good job of breaking up the different sections however, I think the article ultimately was trying to do too much.

I felt like there were two smaller articles on related topics embedded into the main article on cause lawyers. The tangents into the sub topics took away from the overall flow and content of the article rather than adding to it.

Images and Media
I definitely would have liked to see more images. There were very few images in the article and they felt more like general images that would be added to a slide show presentation to fill space rather than illustrate or enhance the content of the article.

Talk Page Discussion
On the talk page I discovered that the page "Cause Lawyering" had been merged with this page "Cause Lawyer". Both authors had discussed back and forth about which was the better title (noun or verb). Besides that there was no other activity on this page and it was designated a low priority.

Overall Impression
This article was flagged by Wikipedia that it was written as a personal/argumentative essay. I did feel like this page needed a lot of editing. Overall, it seemed to give a good overview of the topic and highlight related areas and topics. I think ultimately it became bogged down trying to cover subtopics that were only related but not the focus of the page. The sources that were used all seemed reputable, academic, and addressed the topic. However, I often felt there could be more citations or more substantive information presented.

I think the tone was generally neutral and gave space to present appropriate criticism or contradicting perspectives. However, there were sentences and entire sections that felt to be a bit more personal or opinionated. The final sections of the page were noticeably the weakest and most opinionated.