User:Jtur0963/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Criminology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I picked this article because the topic stood out to me as the most interesting. I am intrigued to learn more about it since my undergrad minor in psychology was specifically geared towards my interest of learning about the minds of criminals.

Lead Section
The first sentence defines criminology in a way that is easy to understand followed by a first paragraph that supports the definition. The lead section does not provide an overview of the section of the article but in total it is concise without becoming overly detailed.

Content
The articles content is relevant to the topic. Starting with the history it provides an overview of criminology from its creation to 2000 where the article mentions it was a turning point but does not elaborate on what that was. Now in 2023, there is two decades of history missing from the first section. The following sections breaks down the school of thought and the theories of criminology. These theories include those pertaining to underrepresented populations.

Tone and Balance
Overall the article seems to be very neutral and for newer theories or those pertaining to underrepresented populations, there is explanation of the arguments for legitimacy on both sides. This maintains the balance and does not draw the reader to conclude one side over the other based on the article alone. There does not seem to be anything over or underrepresented as each explanation seems fairly balanced. There are some sections that could potentially use more information but for where the article currently is at, it does a good job with tone and balance.

Sources and References
On first glance there were a few descriptions or explanations of the topic that seemed like they should include a reference but did not. When reviewing the citations, there were one or two sources for 2021 and 2022. The most recent source after that was 2017 so some newer information could be beneficial. All of the references did appear to be from scholarly publications, journals, and other trustworthy sources. The reference links that I clicked did work. I think under this area, the thing I would edit would be finding some newer sources of information to build on what already exists.

Organization and Writing Quality
The writing is concise and to the point with explanations that make the topic easy to understand. When it comes to organization, I think there is room for improvement since I believe there is a point where the article is on a new topic but it is not abundantly clear. Some formatting updates could help this become clearer. During the first couple of read-throughs, I did not immediately notice any writing or grammatical errors but that does not mean there are none. I think taking the time to really focus on each sentence and section could bring errors to light but it is a good sign that they were not obvious.

Images and Media
In the entire article there were about three images. While they fit the content, there could be more images to help break up the text since there is a lot of content that could generate useful media to refer to. The photos that did exist were captioned and followed the guidelines.

Talk Page
The Talk Page covers a lot of discussion around the citations, organization, and images. Some users have added links while others have removed or updated references. When it comes to the organization, there is talk about how it does not flow well and is just a bunch of rambling. When people have edits around content, they have asked for people with specific knowledge to add to it since even researching independently, they still don't have the expertise to properly write it for the article. There did not appear to be a lot of conversation with each update. Based on the conversation I did learn that vandalism is a thing and the template has been updated to protect from any issue in the future.

Overall
The article is a B-Class and overall the references are reputable and have been the area of the most edits. The strengths are that the article does provide a lot of information that is written in an easy to understand way. The first improvement that could be made is formatting. The sections can be designed to make more sense and some more modern information could be added. Images can either be improved as well by adding at least one other relevant image to help break up the text but also create a deeper understanding of the subject. I do think the article is underdeveloped but not by much. I think some sections could use additional information and there is room for some more recent updates to the history of the subject since criminology didn't end in the year 2000. Since this is a subject I don't have a deep understanding of, I think my contribution would be to help with formatting or to continue checking the resources and grammar.