User:JaG111/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating an article about addiction vulnerability.

Why have you chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because learning about addiction and how vulnerable you are to it is important, especially during your teenage years. Addiction vulnerability matters because it can impact many lives in a negative way and if we can detect someone's (or our own) vulnerability, we can possibly help them not fall into addiction of any kind. My preliminary impression of the article was that the article might have a lot of reliable, interesting information and it would have many sources that I can visit.

Lead Section
The lead section's introductory sentence defines what addiction vulnerability means, clearly establishing what the article will be about. I know what I will be reading about and what to expect. Unfortunately, the lead section does not include a brief description of all the article's major sections; adolescence and the three-factor model were not mentioned at all. They could have made it clear how the three-factor model are the three reasons they did mention in the lead section. Fortunately, the lead does not include information that is not present in the article, which is good. It also is concise and straight to the point. The only issue I have with the lead section is the last sentence. It made me think there would be more talk about current/future research topics scientists are looking forward to doing, which there was not much mentioning of.

Content
The article's content is relevant to the topic most of the time. The "adolescence" section caught me off guard as it was not mentioned in the lead section. The content does seem to be up to date but more recent sources could arise as many of the sources were from the early 2000s (10 or more years back in time). I do not know much about the topic so I cannot say if there is content that is missing or that does not belong. However, I do believe more information could have been given as I would sometimes be lost as to what was being talked about (there are a lot of big scientific words being used). The article does address a topic that is related to historically underrepresented populations, as addiction affects everyone (race and wealth do not matter).

Tone and Balance
The article does seem to be neutral. There are no claims that appear to be heavily biased towards a particular position nor are there any viewpoints that are underrepresented or overrepresented. Because this article is informing about a medical/scientific topic, there is no need for any minority or fringe viewpoints to be mentioned at all. The article does not attempt to persuade the reader in favor of anything. There are instances where the phrasing could be made better, as it makes it seem like they are trying to persuade/come to conclusions (which is not something that we want). However, I don't know if the vocabulary they are using is acceptable as I have not looked at the sources they cite to see if the sources made the conclusions, or the editor of the article made the conclusions themselves.

Sources and References
All the facts in the article seem to be backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. The sources do reflect the available literature on the topic, as there are a variety of sources included from different publishers/academic journals. Many of the sources are current, while others are a bit outdated, but it is understandable as research takes years to develop, so articles from the early 2000s should still be relevant today. The links do work! And I do believe that there are no better sources available as they used high-quality sources in the first place.

Organization and Writing Quality
The article is well written. It is concise, clear, but sometimes not easy to read (there are a lot of terms that I do not understand, but there are numerous links included that give those terms definitions). I did not see any grammatical or spelling errors. The article was well-organized, but as mentioned before, they should have talked about their sections more clearly in the lead section. I do highly appreciate the vocabulary section they included at the very beginning of the article, as it gives the words and a brief definition.

Images and Media
The article does not include images that enhance the understanding of the topic, as pictures are not necessarily needed for this topic. There is not a universal set of images to represent addiction and images of certain genes are not useful to look at when reading about them.

Talk Page Discussion
There is only one conversation on the Talk page, and there are no replies to the improvement suggested. The improvement suggested is broad but very much needed and it seems to have been partially applied (it was posted in 2014, and only two thirds of the suggestions seem to me to have been applied fully to the article). It is surprising to figure out that this article was part of a Wiki Education course assignment.

Overall Impressions
The article's overall status is that of a C-class article, it needs a lot of improvement and addition of information, but it is a good foundation to work on. The article did great in providing links and pop-ups for words that are difficult to understand/not everyone knows about. I also liked how brief and easy to read the lead section was. The article can sometimes be confusing, so I would work on giving more context, phrasing certain sentences differently, and possibly talking about certain studies to give examples of what they are talking about. The article is underdeveloped but that comes to show how we still don't fully know and are stiving to understand addiction vulnerability.

Feedback
I would look for more sources that are more recent and make certain sections not so heavily dependent on big words (or if they are needed, then adding examples or phrasing differently could make a big difference in the article's readability).