User:Jessicajwhelpley/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Vocational school

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I found this article by looking through the C-class articles provided through this exercise. I wanted to look at a topic related to education, and found that the information about vocational schools was not very expansive, and there was some activity on the talk page that I found interesting. Additionally, I have family that teaches at a vocational school, so I was interested in what biases I might have about the topic, and thought it would be a good exercise in avoiding letting my biases impact my evaluation of the article as a whole. Lastly, when I took a closer look at the article, I found that it provided information about education internationally, which I found intriguing.

Evaluate the article
The introductory sentence does a good job of defining the topic and giving an overview of the information that the rest of the article covers. The remainder of the introduction, which is only one paragraph, elaborates on these ideas and gives the reader an overview. With regard to the individual sections, which are generally broken up by country, each one is formatted differently and this lack of uniformity makes the article clunky and unbalanced. Some countries are further broken down into different types of vocational schools, while some are just a short sentence on the topic. Additionally, some of the writing is awkward, using phrases such as "old antiquated" that are redundant. The writing in some sections also uses "he" when "they" would be more appropriate.

With regard to the citations, the most recent ones are from 2018. In 2019, someone on the Talk page referenced the need for more reliable sources, but it is apparent that since that comment was made, there has been no effort to update the sources used in the article. When I take a look at the sources cited myself, I do notice that there is a lack of academic sources that should be addressed. The article does contain images, but as one person on the Talk page points out, they are almost all of the exterior of vocational schools, which does not add much to the reader's understanding of the concept.

Overall, this article definitely needs some work, so it is good that it is included in various WikiProjects, but it has been years since any discussion has occurred in the Talk page, so it is not clear that the necessary progress is being made.