User:JackALambert/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Social media in the 2020 United States presidential election

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.)

I have chosen this article to evaluate because I am interested in the use of social media and presidential elections and how the two correlate. This topic matters because in todays world the use of social media is key in developing a campaign for most if not all political offices. Social media offers direct communication between the candidate and the people they wish to represent allowing for their message to circulate the country in a matter of hours. My first impression of this article was that it was going to contain how presidential candidates such as Joe Biden and Donald Trump used social media during their campaigns and how effective it was to their run for president. I also expected that the article would contain how social media users (other than politicians) would react or spread their thought of the candidates.

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.)

The lead sections introductory sentence is brief and simple and highlights the over arching theme of the article that social media was used a significant amount during the 2020 presidential election. The lead does necessarily give a description of the article but rather highlights key points. The lead does have facts and information that the rest of the article does not such as statistics of how many electorates are active on social media and how the Biden campaign utilized the murder of George Floyd to spread their message. The lead of this article is fairly dragged out and could be simplified allowing for the author to add more information into the major sections of the article itself rather than the lead.

The content of this article is 100% relevant to the topic. The content is absolutely up to date as many of the sources the author used were written during the 2020 presidential campaigns and after the election itself. There does not seem to be any information that does not belong in the article as all of the content refers to the use of social media during the 2020 election. I did not notice or see anything related to Wikipedia's equity gaps and it does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations.

The article appears to be mostly neutral however it does seem to highlight more immoral tactics used from the Trump campaign over the Biden campaign. The claim that the Trump campaign used illegal personal data on the platform Facebook to create more persuasive adds to the individuals on Facebook seems to be biased toward the Biden campaign. The major section about Facebook seems to be underrepresented as much of the information from this article is about the app itself. The viewpoint of the app Instagram is not represented at all even though it is used periodically throughout the article as a social media platform that politicians used. There is no description of any view point of any kind. Other than the article making it seem like the Trump campaign seem like it was the only campaign using immoral tactics to advertise, the article does not appear to try and persuade anyone of anything other than the fact that social media was used a lot during the 2020 election.

All of the facts appear to be backed by reliable secondary sources however a few of the sources are tweets from politicians making them primary sources of the message they want to send out. The sources do appear to reflect the available literature on the topic. The sources are indeed current. The sources are diverse as non of them are from the same author accept for the tweets by Joe Biden. There are always better sources that could be used to improve an article. This article could use more evidence from independent sources such as .orgs or .nets rather than news sources such as The New York Times or The Guardian. The links to the sources do appear to work.

The article is concise and very easy to read. I did not notice an grammatic errors or incorrect spelling, but I could be wrong. The article is broken up and organized fairly well as it highlights all of the highlighted points are sectioned. However the information of influencers using social media to push their views was not really highlighted in the introduction.

The article does not contain any images.

There are several conversations about the article on how to improve it such as lack of representation, structure improvements, editing etc. This article has a c class rating and is part of WikiProject Elections and Referendums. Wikipedia discusses the topic fairly similar to the way we have in class as it is constructive criticism and offers improvements rather than highlighting what is wrong with the article.

The overall status of the article is Low-importance to the topic. The strengths of this article is that it uses facts a evidence to prove the overall point, but it could be improved by restructuring the article and highlighting the use of social media by the campaign teams rather than by the social media platform. I also feal that the article could be a little less biased as it does contain more negative facts about one group than the other. The article is fairly well developed but it could use more information and data rather than posts coming from news sources. The article would feel more complete if it highlighted more social media platforms as well as television adds.