User:JoeyCalzo/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Bishop Sycamore High School scandal

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 the article about the Bishop Sycamore football team scandal because it was a big deal last Fall that took over the sports world news for awhile, and showed a big scandal that involved adults pretending to be high schoolers in order to play a high school football team from Florida. The crazy part about it all and why it was so important is this made up high school team somehow got one of their games aired on ESPN, without anyone having any idea that they were fake.

Evaluate the article
I think the lead introduction perfectly describes the article because it really gives a good background to how the school portrayed themselves to the public as one thing, but caused major suspission soon after their appearance on ESPN. Although it starts strong I do not believe the article really gives a clear and brief description of all the subjects they talk about because it seems there is more to the story in the sub headings and the introduction does not really talk about the full story, but only the way they got caught. The lead only includes stuff that is talked about in the article however so there are not any major holes, and along with it it is very concicse and right to the point, and the sub headings seem to go into more detail well.

The article's content itself though is very thourough, a lot more detailed and accurately up to date then I though it would be. Although this incident was a big deal there didn't seem to be much public knowledge of what actually happened. Especially when it has to do with events that led to the scandal and the aftermath, but the article really gives great detail of the before and after which expands on what many news and sources originally put out about the scandal which gives even more follow up on the aftermath of the incident which hasn't really been talked about much.

The article seems to be pretty unbiased mostly because it is just stating exactly the events that happened, not actually giving much more than the stuff that was reported or the background information oof the people who were involved. I although believe the viewpoints of the people involved (the ones who played in the game) were not very represented in the article. But then again it was a crime and the natural bias of the scandal being very frowned upon is very present because of how dangerous this could of been and how the team ended up getting beat by 58 to a high school team when they were a bunch of adults.

The sources they used are all from big name sources like the New York Times, ESPN, and USA today. These articles are all also only a couple months old because the incident only happened a few months ago, but they even use resources from before to help give more background info and show some more context to the situation at hand. These articles seem to be pretty unbiased and even though there isn't much perspective for the people involved still it gives facts and a lot of details.

The article isn't written that well in the context that it just seems like really simple wriitings and could easily be re-written to make it make a little more sense. And even though there aren't really any spelling mistakes I can find the grammar isn't perfect and seems to be a lot of paraphrased writings that make up this page. But overall besides that, which could use some help, it overall doesn't have many mistakes that involve spelling.

The article lacks heavy on the pictures. There is only one small image of a game that they played in, but the image only includes the stadium and not even the actual team. The one image does include a caption that explained what game it was and the outcomes, and seems to fit the copyright rules but just the fact that it doesn't even show the team or the Coach (who is heavily talked about), I believe the article could really improve in that aspect.

The talk page is pretty simple, not much discussions going on but the two people who reviewed it seemed to give thorough research and insight and corrected a few mistakes regarding spelling and grammar already. Along with that they both agreed the article had a strong hook and had good references to back up all the information they presented.

Overall, the article is really good because it gives a lot of information with plenty of credible citations to back it up. And even though it lacks strong writing the information is mostly unbiased and really gives the truth about what happened. They definetely could improve getting more perspectives from the people involved and adding a lot more pictures. Because I think they need to give more context using photos because this scandal has some interesting photos where you can see how these men clearly do not look like high schools and would give the scandal more truth because a lot of this information was noticed through watching the game and not by reading articles.