User:Jessicawhita/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Communication studies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I am getting a master's in Communication Studies. My preliminary impression was that this article was a bit all over the place. Instead of giving a well-rounded explanation of this field of study, it focused on communication studies in the US and Canada only. Overall, the writing seemed choppy, overly detailed, and disorganized.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section has a good introductory sentence that describes the article's topic well; however, the lead section does not include a description of the article's chief sections. The lead discusses communication theorists, which doesn't seem to apply to any later sections of the article. The article's lead was a bit overly detailed and appeared choppy overall.

Content

All of the article's content is indeed relevant to the topic; however, there appeared to be a lot of outdated sources for current descriptions that could use updating. There is a section for the United States and a section for Canada, which I find strange because it is excluding all other countries by doing so.

Tone and Balance

This article was written from a neutral point of view and there are no claims that are biased towards a particular position; however, the US and Canada's viewpoints have clearly been overrepresented in this article. There were no instances in this article that seemed persuasive.

Sources and References

All the facts in this article are backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. Most of the sources I checked were thorough and diverse; however, there were some that were a bit outdated. The sources were all from academic journals, textbooks, or revered news sources. All the links I tested worked great as well.

Organization and Writing Quality

Overall, I think the article was written pretty well; however, some sentences were very long, overly detailed, and a bit confusing. I did not notice any glaring spelling or grammatical errors; however, the article was not organized well. The lead section was not representative of the article's major sections and the over emphasis on the US and Canada was puzzling.

Images and Media

There were no images used for this article, which made it less interesting. There was an outline that organized the many aspects of communication studies that was helpful and a content list that further organized the article.

Talk Page Discussion

The conversations going on about this article mirrored much of my preliminary impressions about it. It was mentioned as disorganized, vague, and lacking research. There seems to be a general consensus that this article needs a lot of work and is unfinished. This article is rated in the Talk page as "Start-Class" and has been noted as "high importance." The article is also a part of 6 wiki-projects. The way Wikipedia discussed this topic differs from how we have discussed it in class. Communication Studies is a very broad topic; therefore, Wikipedia has discussed very broadly. Communication Studies is taught in class through small subsections of the field of study. An example of a subsection would be the subject of my current class: Social Media Engagement and Analysis.

Overall Impressions

The article's overall status is a level-5 vital article. The article's strengths are its neutral language, quality of sources, and its introductory sentence. The article can be improved by organizing the contents. The lead section needs to provide a description for each of the main sections; moreover, the main sections need to be more representative of this field of study around the world as opposed to just the US and Canada. Some sources need to be updated. Overall, I think the article is very disorganized and underdeveloped.