User:Kaitlintowill/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Social media and the effects on American adolescents

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Sophie Murray and I decided to evaluate this article because of its already existing well-written, eye-catching, and well-sourced information along with its potential for improvement. The article is split into sections, positives and negatives, allowing research to be added on both sides. The information presented in this article is cited predominantly from academic journals published no earlier than 2014, with one from 2009, making the information relatively recent and up to date. The links to the cited sources are all available to the general public and come from various published sources. This article leaves room for additions and edits, particularly in the document's Postive' section. This article speaks to both male and female adolescents' experience with social media, with the majority of the research cited none specific to gender or race. By implementing a clear and concise positive and negative section, the article appears to present a neutral voice on the subject as readers can see both sides to a popular societal topic. My partner Sophie Murray and I felt that the positive section of the article was slightly less informative. We, therefore, decided to focus our attention on primarily adding additions in that section.

Lead section
The Wikipedia article title "Social media and the effects on American adolescents" speaks to the positive and negative impacts of social media on adolescents' mental and physical health. Having the article split relatively evenly into two clear and concise sections allows the average reader to navigate the piece swiftly and with ease. The research provided in this article can enable readers to explore the discussed social theories, norms, and more that expand on the lasting effects social media can have on one's psyche and identity. Adolescents who use social media, parents, and readers may find this article incredibly informative and thought-provoking.

Content
The article's content is relevant to the topic as it provides information cited from credible soruces that speak to both the advantages and disadvantages of social media use amongs adolescnece. The content presented in the article is selcted primarily from scholarly sources that are were published after 2009, therefore the research and content presented is relatively recent. The content appears to be quite informative and useful; however, there is undounatable room for edits and additional information as new research is continuously being published. This article deals with the equity gap of gender in technology, particularly how young womens bodies can be heavily infleunced by social media and the unrealistic social norms that are shown across multiple platforms.

Tone and Balance
This article is overall written from a neutral perspective as it looks evaluated both the negatives and positives of the topic. The language used carries a neutral tone is displayed factual information well. As mentioned, the 'negative' section of the article was more substantial than the 'positive; therefore, we decided it would be more prudent to add informative content to the positive section. The article does not appear to persuade readers to view one aspect over another and make visible efforts to remain neutral.

Sources and References
Each source cited in this article is from a scholarly journal. This allows readers to feel confident in the material they are reading and provides them the opportunity to access the journals and further their understanding there. Though I found the sources available quite insightful and helpful, I feel like a greater range of sources ranging in author demographic would be beneficial to readers' overall consensus. However, the links all work and are quite illuminating.

Organization and writing quality
This article is well organized due primarily to its concise and easy to navigate section. The wording and sentence structure are not overly complicated, and the spelling errors are very minimal.

Images and Media
No Images are included in this Wikipedia article.

Talk page discussion
The talk page for this article provides constructive and essential information surrounding the piece. Several comments speak to how the article can be quite vague at times along with biased. The top page's primary commentator suggests that this article be merged into other informative articles to alleviate its vagueness. I feel that there is value to this article standing alone, but do strongly agree that it can be vague at times, and additional research would be beneficial as people continue to add to it.

Overall impressions
My overall impression of this article is that it is a well-organized, concise vessel of information. Its primary strength is its clearness and conciseness. Sophie Murray and I believed this article could be improved by adding factual information to the article's positive' section and touching up a few spelling and sentence structure errors. This article is well developed, but there is absolutely room for it to be developed and or enhanced as more information is published.