User:Jelotan/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Star Trek

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 thought looking at an article that was previously featured would be interesting, would the talk page be civil or full of drama? Additionally long running franchises might have fans who are more adamant, though they might filter into official fan wiki pages.

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.)

Lead Section

It is immaculate it seems to do everything that a leading section should do, this is unsurprising considered the page was once featured. I think it should meet all of the checkmarks in many of the front facing sections if it's caught attention enough to be featured.

Content

I confess that I do not know nearly as much about Star Trek than I thought. Which is to say that all the information is as correct as I can tell. It is more up to date than I realised, I did not realise how many current Star Trek series were on the air. I do not know if it deals with a Wikipedia equity gap, Star Trek as a franchise has not been afraid to show off marginalised people in leading roles so I wondered if this would be addressed but it is only mentioned briefly. I wonder if this would tilt the tone too far in the positive though. Perhaps there are some dissenting voices though

Tone and Balance

It feels as neutrally positive as an article can be. The overall tone is definitely in favor of Star Trek especially under the "Cultural Impact" section though within this section is only states facts sourced under Wikipedia's guidelines. There is no section for dissenting voices which I know some articles have. It does feel like it's written to persuade but it does feel like it's meant to give you a sense of positive impact of the series. Being generally in support of Star Trek too it's hard to tell if they're missing anything really bad.

Sources and References

It surely seems like nothing is wrong here either, with almost 200 sources for the article it seems to be well researched. There is a fair mix of interviews with people not just articles by pop culture sites. A lot of the weblinks work but the book links lead you Wikipedia pages about ISBN numbers and types of books, it would be nice to link directly to an online library for the book itself.

Organization and writing quality

Again the front facing elements of this article are really well done. The timeline is a very cool feature and displays the series with a clarity I did not know I was missing.

Images and Media

Yes, the images are present and well captioned. All 5 captains taking a photo together was a highlight. Once again, I think that I picked a bad article for this.

Talk page discussion

This is where I found the most interesting things. It seems like the page has undergone many changes to achieve the quality it currently has. A part of the talk page was entitled "Explaining the LACK of Gayness?" with a lengthy talk about many part of real world culture and Star Trek's canon. It feels like there's a whole community here and frankly it makes me a little scared to attempt to join in on this or any other type conversation considering how serious people take it. I don't feel nearly knowledgeable enough about anything to be an editor in this way.

Overall Impressions

I was interested to see the steps it takes to make an article one of Wikipedia's great articles. Perhaps being featured gets us to the other end of the spectrum, where just as many eyes are looking at this article as a more controversial one. It's interesting how an article can feel mostly positive while still presenting facts in a neutral way.