User:K.Kubs/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Documentary film

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because we are focusing on City Symphony, Documentary, and Essay Films in these two courses and I wanted to look at something that was related to our topics in class. There is also quite a lot covered in this article so I figured that it was a good place to start when evaluating articles.

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.)

Lead
The first sentence is the sort of dictionary definition of a documentary film and thus is very helpful to someone if they just wanted to open the article to quickly see what a documentary is. The rest of the lead is very concise and has quite a few links in each paragraph. And yet, there is a lack of a summary of the page - it could be improved with a better overview.

Content
The content is mostly a timeline of the history of documentary film making but it does briefly touch on different types of documentaries and, interestingly enough, the act of translating documentaries (and why it is so difficult). The timeline begins with the inception of this type of film and ends in the modern day, so it is very thorough, although the last substantial addition seems to be in the last 10 years and it does not address an equity gap (that may also be due to the very white male-centric industry, however).

Tone and Balance
The article is very neutral in its tone in that there are a lot of lists - whether that be of films or filmmakers - and quotes and very few sentences in-between explaining anything. So, while it is good to have many facts and names, I, as the reader, barely know what they are in reference to. This, of course, is not true throughout the whole article, but there are some places where it is notable. Furthermore, there are no overarching viewpoints that seem to be influencing the audience or claims that are biased that I can find. Overall, the article seems to be very balanced in tone or perspective.

Sources and References
The first half of the article is rife with links and citations but the section on types of documentaries is greatly lacking in this department. The latest sources are from 2002, but the majority are from the nineties and all seem to be from male writers. The unfortunate truth may be that these are the only sources that are available, but it would be good to have a more diverse set of scholars that are backing up the data in the article. This also means that all sources are basically analog, but the links within the article to other articles do work.

Organization and Writing Quality
This article is well written in that it is easy to follow the timeline and the language is simple for a reader to understand. The History section was organized early on and a great choice as the grouping makes it nicer to look at and find exactly what one needs. As far as I can tell, there aren't any major grammar or spelling errors, either.

Images and Media
Images are utilized in order to add further meaning to the paragraphs in the article, usually building off something mentioned. They are captioned with exactly what is in the picture and occasionally another interesting tidbit (like that the referenced film won an award).

Talk Page Discussion
The discussion behind the scenes is lacking, but there seems to be a lot of concern over cleaning up the article for clarity. In addition to this, the article is rated at a level 4 and C-Class so it is middle ground in content and seems to need a lot more contribution. That is why it is unsurprising that it is a part of three WikiProjects.

Overall Impression
This article is clearly far from finished and could use a lot more information about the creation of documentaries and more diverse filmmakers/creators. The strengths of the article, though, are that there is a wide array of surface level information and data - it's just deeper dives and more citations that are needed.