User:IndianaSports/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Indiana Pacers 2001-02 season article.

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.)

Briefly explain why you chose it
Using the Wikipedia assignment guide, I decided that I wanted to evaluate a class C Wikipedia article, which is an article that was up until now unaccessed. One of the topics that had a lot of class C articles was basketball, and so I followed the link to see a list of class-C basketball articles. My favorite team is the Indiana Pacers, and this was one of the first articles that I saw, so it made sense to evaluate an article that was interesting to me, and that I already had some background knowledge on.

Why does it matter?
It is important that this article is reviewed because much of the fanbases within the NBA rely on Wikipedia for keeping accurate histories of previous seasons. If this article on the Pacer's 2001-02 season is inaccurate, then people might reference inaccurate information in other online forums, and the actual history of what occurred during the season might be lost. This season is particularly important for the Pacers because it falls in between a time were they made the NBA Finals (1999-2000) and when they were favorites for the championship (2004-05). Individuals may be interested to what occurred in-between these two time periods, so it is important that the 2001-02 season Wikipedia page possesses accurate information.

Preliminary Impression
My preliminary impression of the article is that it seems accurate and well-cited. It doesn't contain an overwhelming amount of information, for example, there is not much information about the major storylines or rumors that occurred during the season. However, there is more information than I expected would be available for a random season in Pacers history. Overall, I am impressed with the amount information available, and have no concerns about validity.

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.)

Lead Section
I feel as though the lead section of this article contains sufficient information describing what one can be expected to find in the rest of the article, and does a good job of providing a concise summary of the season. Even so, there are still room for improvements.


 * First, I believe that the introductory sentence is appropriate for the topic, and I know that it follows the format of other similar articles. I do believe that a second sentence that provides a brief overview of the results of the season, as opposed to diving right into the offseason, would benefit the article.
 * The lead section is concise and not overly detailed. Aside from a more general second sentence, the only improvement that I believe is needed is a description of the sections to come, which is abset from the introductory section.
 * The introductory section does include information that isn't available elsewhere in the article, which is frowned upon by Wikipepdia. However, I think that this is due to a lack of information to create a section where that information could be included. In my mind, the only logical location for his data to be included is introduction.

Content
I personally feel as though the content of the article is more than sufficient, and that it appears trustworthy. It includes all the information I could ever envision wanting to know about the 2001-02 pacers season, and I believe that information that is not included would be too specific for an online encyclopedia.


 * The content is up to data, especially since the article is an account of the past.
 * All article content is relevant, and the only significant information that is missing are the game logs. However, given the sheer amount of games played during an NBA season, I believe attempting to provide detailed game logs is an undertaking with little benefit.
 * The article does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps.

Tone and Balance
The article is written from a very neutral point of view, and all information provided is an easily verifiable fact about the season. There are no unsubstantiated claims, and there are no over/underrepresetned viewpoints. Overal the topic of the article does not led itself to much debate or the inclusion of opinionated information, so it does not surprise me that the article appears extremely neutral.

Sources and References.

 * Sources are current or were current as of the time of the 2001-02 NBA season.
 * Sources are thorough, with most information coming directly from the NBA website, or from news articles describing the games or events of the season. There may be additional sources on the topic that could provide a bit more heterogeneity; however, this may be unnecessary given that the NBA website is the most reliable and comprehensive source available for neutral NBA information.
 * There aren't any other sources that would provide conflicting information, or that are more trustworthy.
 * The source links do seem to work when testing a few.

Organization and Writing Quality

 * The article is easy to understand, and presents the information in a coherent way. For someone who does not have basketball knowledge, it may be difficult to follow, but in those cases, it provides links to other Wikipedia pages that may be of help to the reader.
 * The article is well organized, but I think that it could benefit if each of the subsections had a short sentence describing the information included in the section. Many times a table is found without a sentence description, which would provide better background to the displayed data.

Images and Media
No images or media are present in the article. The tables found in the article are visually appealing and clear.

Talk page discussion

 * There is no discussion on the talk page. The last article modification was over 2 years ago, which was just some formatting and spelling fixes.
 * The article is rate as C-Class.
 * The article is relevant to three wiki-projects: basketball, the NBA, and the United States.

Overall Impression
My overall impression of the article is that it is a successful and neutral article that contains a suprising amount of information about a relatively niche topic. It does a good job at describing the season of the 2001-02 Indiana Pacers, and provides all statistical information that an NBA fan would need if they were hoping to gather information on previous nba seasons.

Despite being a successful article for an NBA fan, the article might be inaccessable for someone who does not have prior knoweledge about the Pacers of the NBA. The article would be improved if it provided some more general context about the nba and basketball as a whole, and if there were in-depth descriptions for the tables/data included in the article.

Overall, the article is not underdeveloped given the information that most would hope to extract from the page. However, the inclusion of additional sections (such as a contextual background of the Pacers and the NBA) would benefit the article, even if not absolutely necessary.