User:Jacob k 2022/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Reality therapy)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was a rather interesting topic that I have no prior knowledge of. I feel this approach matters because it can help a limited number of people with their issues that other approaches may not be able to affect. Instead of looking at the future or past, it focuses on what is occurring in the present moment. It helps individuals determine what they genuinely think is best for them. While the article was an interesting read, I felt that the author was subtly trying to persuade me that this type of therapy was great and should be used more often. The article does bring up some interesting points, but overall, I feel relatively neutral about this article; it was not great but wasn't too bad either.

Evaluate the article
 Lead Section 

Once you open the page, there is a banner saying issues with the article. The first issue being the article needs more citations for verification; the second issue is that the article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay. So I have a serious concern that the author may have been biased when writing the article. Moving on, the introductory sentence was good; It gives a very brief and clear explanation of what Reality therapy (RT) is a part of. The starting paragraph also mentions what will be discussed later in the article. It does not include anything not in the article and is concise.

 Content  The article's content seems to all be relevant, and the content is based upon practices from the '60s; however, the article still seems to be revised to this day; the latest revision occurred on the 13th of January 2022. There is, however, some content that is missing; more specifically, one link seems to lead to an empty page, the link being control theory. Another notable item is that there are some links that, when opened, the new article also has warning banners such as the choice theory link. This topic does not deal with any underrepresented populations.

Tone and Balance

Next, when considering the tone and balance, as I had mentioned earlier, a warning was posted at the top of the article. From this warning, it was determined that the writing was not neutral. When I read the article, it seemed to be more personal/argumentative in the application section, principles, and the process. The statement of how controlling other people is an ignorant hope seems to be a rather biased viewpoint. In other forms, some control is needed and can be used successfully, so to entirely outright reject it seems to be somewhat unfair. The viewpoints seem to be over presented throughout the article. The article slightly tries to persuade the reader that the therapy technique is good.

 Sources and References 

When considering the sources and references, my major issue is that of the fifteen references, only three of them have links; however, one link is to a book from 1965, and the two other links are ISBNs that, when clicked, do not actually bring you to the proper location and once searched in the book search bar it redirects you the exact page you are on. This makes it hard to determine valid references and source information with few links. It gets narrowed down, even more when the link does not work. Six of the fifteen references seem to pull from books written by William Glasser, the man who thought up this form of therapy, so some of the sources reflect on the current literature. The other references seem to be audiobooks and reality therapy practices in certain scenarios. Out of the fifteen references, eight are from the 2000s; the rest are from the 1900s. The sources do not seem the include marginally individualizes. There seems to be a few sources that could have been better added to this article. One such article is from the Journal of Fundamentals of Mental Health; this source talks about a study showing the effects of group counseling while using reality therapy on students in crisis. As I stated before, some of the links do not work.

 Organization and Writing Quality 

The article is rather easy to read, and it is clear and concise. The article does have grammatical issues such as needing punctuations changes and additions. However, there are no notable spelling issues with the article. The article is well organized and in places that give a good flow.

 Images and Media 

There are no images used in the article at all.

 Talk page 

There are discussions about how to best edit specific sentences in the article and how to improve the readability. Another interesting comment seems to be that someone wanted to move something to the Reality Therapy article; however, I still cannot determine what was moved. One major concern seems to be that a portion of the first section was copied from a website and may not have been acknowledged. The following person who commented said the article seemed more like an advertisement for Reality Therapy; they also mention how few cited sources are in the article and how it sounds like it was copied from a website. Finally, there is a mention of how there is little to no empirical support for the therapy methods talked about. This article is part of WikiProject Psychology and was rated as Start-Class in terms of quality with a Mid-importance rating on an importance scale. We have not discussed this topic in class before, and I do not believe we will

 Overall 

Overall I think the article's status is relatively poor in its current state. There must be more work done to help improve the quality of the article. More research and information must be conducted and gathered to improve the article. If I had to name a strength for the article, it would probably be how easy it is to read and how natural of a flow the article has, thanks to the organization. Unfortunately, I would rate this article as being poorly developed in its current state.