User:JQGRAY/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Starbucks

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I referred to a list of articles needing copy edit sorted by last month's page views, figuring it'd be a good way to contribute some helpful improvements to commonly sought-after pages.

Evaluate the article
The lead section for Starbucks may present too much information to be comfortably read by someone seeking broad stroke familiarity with the topic. I would consider shortening the history portions of the lead and migrating the information to the dedicated “history” section of the article.

The lead could also benefit from editing in tone and style. Sentences like “Starbucks is seen to be the major representation of the United States’ second wave of coffee culture” may be factual, but could be modified to support the informative, thorough, neutral tone of Wikipedia. Beyond the clunky phrasing, it’s also hard to say what exactly is being communicated here. Who sees Starbucks this way? And what exactly is a “major representation”?

I checked the citations on this claim, and these too could be improved. One is a GeekWire article that interviews several Seattle startups, and one such interview paraphrases the co-founder of Joe Coffee casually referring to Starbucks’ ushering in of the second wave of coffee. The other source is an essay in Fast Company which, while surely an interesting and well-crafted read, does not seem to meet the requirements for sourcing.

Again, the argument could be made that both of these articles do in fact reflect a belief that Starbucks defined the second-wave of coffee culture, but there is no reference to who exactly maintains this view. I’d be curious to know if there are any well-researched, peer-reviewed publications on coffee culture that could be obtained so that this point could be rephrased and resourced rather than removed altogether.

The most glaring issue, however, is the complete lack of sourcing in the aforementioned history portion of the lead. The 211-word paragraph does not have one citation. I think that this portion is unnecessary regardless, given that the dedicated history section presents this information, but if it is to stay, it needs citations.

The third and final paragraph in the lead needs some citations as well. For instance, the claims that “[Starbucks’] franchise has commanded substantial brand loyalty, market share, and company value.” Or, "The company has received significant criticism about its business practices, corporate affairs, and role in society.” Again, both of these statements may be true, but they are wholly unverified. Wikipedia’s Good Article criteria states that citations should be provided for “direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons” . I would argue that these statements could be viewed as controversial (criticism over unethical business practices), statistical (claims about market share, company value), and potentially contentious about living persons (unsourced discussion of Starbucks’ various owners and their individual approaches to running the franchise).

Although there is perhaps too much information in the lead, I appreciated the amount of information and detail presented in the rest of the article where it was better categorized. I was particularly impressed with the thoroughness of content on various products, with plenty of information on the production and sourcing of Starbucks’ menu items.

I do believe more could be put into the “Criticism and controversies” section, especially on account of its mentioning in the lead. There is a thorough entry for “Criticism of Starbucks” which catalogs many different instances, while this article only mentions a few. I could be argued that this section is thorough enough for a shorter article, but given the amount of attention paid to Starbucks’ philanthropic efforts, it seems especially wrong and imbalanced to gloss over criticism the company has received.

Furthermore, the thoroughness of information, while helpful and interesting, may serve a more sinister purpose, whether intentionally or not. I found this somewhat chilling article from Business.com’s Director of SEO which discusses techniques for burying Wikipedia content that reflects poorly on brand reputation. It lists such techniques as:


 * using excessive photos to distract from text
 * pumping article leads full of positive content to “push down negative copy far below the fold”
 * literally “bury the bad stuff in noise”

These recommendations (of which there are more) blatantly laugh in the face of the neutrality and reliability the Wikipedians have fought so long to preserve. Furthermore, what makes this article especially chilling is that it repeatedly commends the Starbucks Wikipedia article as a good example of an inflated company page that serves as a strong example of good-PR Wikipedia. Yikes.

The article is long and has many areas in need of correction, but these were the ones that stood out to me most. I may come back and add to this evaluation as I notice more issues.