User:Jo.cottrill/Evaluate an Article

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

Post-structural feminism

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 chose this article because this is a subject that we've touched on in class, and because post-structuralism seems to be a pretty notable feminist framework, meaning Deb and I may want to incorporate it into our article later. I also chose it because it seemed a little skimpy at first glance, and I wanted to evaluate it and assess what could be improved about it.

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.)

The opening sentence of the lead is clear, but it does use the word "post-structuralist" in the definition of post-structuralist feminism without giving an explanation of what that means-- however, it does link to the Wikipedia page for post-structuralism, so maybe that is sufficient for clarifying. The lead is very concise, but I almost wonder if it's too much so-- it's only three sentences long, and it doesn't really describe what the sections of the rest of the article are going to be about, specifically because almost the entirety of the remainder of the article focuses on French thinkers, and there's no mention of France/those people being of particular influence to the field.

The content seems generally relevant to the topic, but it's not always made clear how specific points are directly related to post-structuralist feminism as opposed to just feminism more broadly. It's definitely generally limited in that it only highlights French feminists, and only a handful of them, as the main figures of the post-structuralism thought, so it seems that there's a lot more that could be added in diversifying researchers mentioned or discussing different places of origin for these ideas and where they've been most widely used. The content seems to be bordering on outdated, as there are inclusions from feminists born in the 30s/40s, and a semi-dangling mention of Freud, but nothing from more recent times/research. As the article is about feminism, it does seem to be dealing with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps.

The article does seem to be written in a neutral tone, without claims that have a heavy bias in any direction, and it does not appear to be attempting to sway the reader toward one viewpoint or opinion. There are surely underrepresented viewpoints given again that the article only highlights a few feminist thinkers, and all of them are French. The article does not specifically note any of the viewpoints presented as being minority/fringe, though maybe there's an inherent implication given that the presented researchers are feminists (assuming feminists could still be considered a minority group).

It doesn't look like all facts in the article are accompanied by a citation, although the ones that aren't typically do have links to other Wikipedia pages. It's challenging for me to gauge if the sources used fully reflect the literature on the topic without having had researched it myself, but because there's such a limited amount of information in the article generally, I would suspect that they don't (though I'm not sure if this is more an issue of less sources being available on the topic). Many of the sources are from the mid-2000s, and others primarily from the 80s/90s, so it seems that they are generally current. There is a relatively diverse range of demographics of the authors/contributors for the sources, including some who have been historically marginalized. The sources used are almost entirely academic books, so it doesn't seem that the type of sources would need to be improved, although maybe some diversification would be beneficial (i.e. also including articles). The links that I checked did work, though not all of the courses have accompanying links.

The article is concise and easy to read with no notable spelling/grammar errors. The organization seems to be a main shortcoming for the article, as it has very few sections and is limited to primarily discussing French feminist post-structuralist researchers, which is a quite narrow overview of the topic. The only two main sections of the article are "Areas of Interest," which is a very brief two-sentence overview again of post-structuralism feminism, and then "France," with associated subheadings for French thinkers and feminist work.

There are no images within the article aside from a picture of the feminism symbol, by which it's mentioned that this article is part of a Wikipedia series on feminism.

One interesting conversation happening within the Talk Page on this article was a conversation about and then decision to merge French post-structural feminism into the post-structural feminism article (this one)-- this makes me wonder if there previously had been more information about post-structural feminism generally, and was replaced by the French research. It was noted that neither article (when they were still separated) was long and there was a lot of overlap, so it seemed to make sense to combine them, although it appears to me that doing so wasn't particularly beneficial to either topic. Someone mentioned that a merge would require the article to be "beefed up considerably with content on non-French feminists," but that obviously didn't happen. This article is listed as of interest to the WikiProjects on feminism, gender studies, politics, and philosophy/social political/continental/contemporary. It's rated as start-class, mid-importance for feminism, and then start-class, low-importance for all of the others. These groupings / associated projects from Wikipedia seem pretty accurately aligned with how it seems that post-structuralist feminism would be categorized based on what we've discussed in class.

Generally speaking, I think the article is quite underdeveloped, with very minimal depth to the information presented. The definition of post-structuralist feminism is brief and lacking thorough detail or extensive examples, and the examples that are presented are too narrowly focused on French researchers/feminists explicitly to give a comprehensive understanding of the topic. It could be improved by diversifying the mentioned researchers and giving a much more in-depth overview of this branch of feminism. One strength of the article was that its sources were relatively diversified in terms of their contributors, but this didn't carry a lot of weight in comparison to the overall shortcomings of the writing.