User:Jis39/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The Phantom Tollbooth

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was mentioned in our list of fantasy books. This article is written about a well-known fantasy book and should show me what a great evaluation looks like. My preliminary impression of it is that it looks very detailed with a lot of external links and citations.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section:

The lead includes an introductory that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic. If I wanted to just identify the topic I could easily understand it by the first sentence, but I could also read the first paragraph and understand what the book is about. The lead is a bit long though (i.e. 3 paragraphs). The lead also includes a brief description of the article's major sections, for example plot, writing, and themes.

Content:

The article's content is relevant to the topic and up-to-date even though the book was published a while ago in 1961. For example, there is a section on later history, editions, and adaptations. There does not seem to be missing content or content that doesn't belong. The article does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps largely because of the subject matter of the book.

Tone and Balance:

The article is neutral and does not seem to be biased in any particular way. I do notice that there is not really anything on the book's negative reception, but that may be because it was really well-received.

Sources and References:

All the facts in the article are not backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. For example, in the second and third paragraphs of the lead section there are certain quotes and events mentioned that do not have citations. The sources are mixed in terms of their dates-- some are from closer to when the book was published in the 1960s and some are recent in the past 10 years. The sources are written by a diverse spectrum of authors-- some are from educational websites like the National Education Association and others are from book reviews on websites like The Independent. I do think that because of this book's huge recognition the citations could have incorporated more scholarly articles or journals. The links seem to work.

Organization and Writing Quality:

The article is well-written-- it is long but also concise in a way, given how much information is included and needs to be covered. There does not appear to be any grammatical or spelling errors and the article is broken down into sections that reflect the major points of the topic.

Images and Media:

The article includes a few images, for example of the book cover, an image from the beginning of the book, and an image of the illustrator. The images all have captions so that the viewer understands what the image is. They are laid out in a visually appealing way, but perhaps there could be one or two more images from the actual book given that the book contains illustrations in addition to its text.

Talk Page Discussion:

The article's talk page contains a number of discussions but none seem to be more recent than four years ago. One alarmingly discussion was from 2006-2008 where people were discussing that the plot summary seems to be taken from Sparknotes-- someone updated it in 2008, but plagiarism is definitely a violation of Wikipedia's policies. The article is rated as a featured article by Wikipedia. It has been rated FA-Class on the quality scale within the scope of WikiProject Children's literature and of Low-Importance on the project's importance scale. Within the scope of WikiProject Novels it has been rated FA-Class on the quality scale, mid-importance on the importance scale and it is supported by the fantasy task force.

Overall Impressions:

Overall this article is in great shape. It touches on major topics and seems to be well-developed. It contains a lot of detail but is also not overly detailed. In my opinion the article should have more images because the illustrations are an important part of this novel.