User:Jep224/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Family purpose doctrine

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I am an aspiring future personal injury attorney. By choosing an article about the family purpose doctrine, I will learn about an area of negligence torts that I am unfamiliar with. It also has potential to be a great conversation starter at personal injury law firm social events and job interviews.

Evaluate the article
It is immediately apparent that this article needs improvement. Among many other issues, the salient appears to be sources, or a lack thereof. The article is limited to three citations total. Two are legal cases involving the family purpose doctrine; the third is an online blog published by a Colorado law firm website in 2007. Furthermore, the article features a large box with warnings that the author “relies excessively on references to primary sources,” and the content “needs additional citations for verification.”

The fact that this article cites just three sources provides context for why its content is weak. There are only three paragraphs of information about the family purpose doctrine. The first paraphrases the common law rule in a confusing way. An "Overview" section follows, with short and vague explanations of how a few states have applied the doctrine. To get a more clear definition of the family purpose rule, I searched “family purpose doctrine” under "all jurisdictions" on LexisNexis; at the top of the page under “answers” was a more clear definition from a recent Georgia Appeals Court case, Logan v. Younusbaig, 880 S.E.2d 304 (Ga. App. 2022). My brief time researching showed me that this doctrine is somewhat complex, containing numerous elements and particular definitions that this article should explain. Moreover, recent decisions, such as the Logan case, may have changed how the doctrine is applied. Thus, without reporting about them citing them, the article may be outdated.

If there is something positive to mention, the article's tone matches what it should be. It is neutral and seeks to explain a rule of law that different states define and follow in unique ways. But the tone of the article does not save it from the famine of sources and content. In fact, it's difficult to properly analyze the tone with how little information is presented.

With regard to the "Talk Page," no one has started a discussion yet. However, the article is "within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia." For WikiProject United States, the article has a "stub-class" rating on the "quality scale" and has not received a rating on the "importance scale." In addition, it is "within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardi[z]ed, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and subjects encompassed by it." The project received another stub-class rating on the quality scale but was rated "low importance" on the importance scale of WikiProject Law.

Finally, this article is different from what we have talked about in Advanced Legal Research class because it lacks the essential details and number of sources to educate readers. Yet, it nevertheless aligns well with the goal of this assignment because it presents an opportunity to transform the article into a quality piece of work from scratch.