User:Irattner/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Abortion in the United States

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because the topic of abortion has been a key topic of debate in American and other politics for many years now, and I was curious how impartial the page on abortion would be.

Evaluate the article
Lead section:

- The lead is concise and sets the scene for the reader that this is a decisive topic. It doesn't specifically outline what the rest of the article will be, but it does offer a condensed history of the topic and notable states' current policies. The very first sentence/short paragraph does not give the reader much substantial information, though, so the reader would have to read more of the lead section to actually get some information about the topic of the article.

Content:

- Content seems to be up to date, which I was curious about because of the recent overturning of Roe v Wade. There have been 6 edits made this month so far, which signifies that it's being constantly updated and revised.

Tone and Bias:

- The article seems to be mostly unbiased from what I've read. I think this is partly due to how many contributions and edits it has received as that leads to more double-checking that the content is unbiased. There's a large section on the different political parties' views but not nearly as much about how different ethnic, religious, and age groups relate to the issue of abortion. There's another section that has public opinion polls that are by gender, age, and political view but none on how ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and other factors may affect people's support of abortion. Overall, I think the article stays neutral, though, and does not try to sway the reader one way or another - main purpose is to inform.

Sources and references:

- Almost all facts, statistics, and court case informations are backed up by reliable sources - a lot by Oxford University Press, New York Times, other reliable news sources. However, a lot of the sources are not “neutral” sources (ex. from a prochoice or prolife leaning article) but some of those seem to be used to write the informational section on the different political opinions surrounding abortion, so I think it’s possible to use some parts of a biased source to inform in an unbiased way. There are almost 400 references and around one third seem to be from 2022 or 2023. Links I clicked on work.

Organization and writing quality:

- Writing is easy to read, I didn’t catch any grammatical or spelling errors, and the article is well organized with clear section headers.

Images and media:

- The images are: color coded maps showing differing levels of legality of abortion in different states, pictures of the SCOTUS, and graphs accompanying the statistics. Apart from the pictures of SCOTUS, the images enhance the understanding of the topic - the maps and graph make an immense amount of data/information easier to consume. I don’t think there would be any copyright issues with the media. Only thing is that the images may not be accessible to those who are color-blind since they all rely on color-coding.

Talk page:

- Article policies are neutral point of new, no original research, and verifiability, which is important to state for this topic. Most of the conversations on the talk page are about updates that need to be made on certain state’s abortion policies, but there is one comment about one particular view being overstated in the article. Wikiprojects = abortion, law, feminism, medicine, sexology and sexuality, human rights, death, women’s health, and the United States. Wikipedia tags this article as a contentious topic and there’s a special procedure associated with that.

Overall, the article seems to be well-developed, thoroughly researched, and mostly unbiased. The article’s strength is its detail and good organization of the information. However, it could be improved by making its images/maps/graphs more accessible to those who are color-blind and the article is flagged as having a lot of alt text missing or unorganized.