User:Kate H. Vo/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Income inequality in the United States

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I first chose this article because income inequality has long since been a pervasive issue within the US and holds far reaching effects such as its impact upon access to healthcare, education, housing, and more. Thus, I believe this topic holds a rightful place in today's political and social discussions. Economic fairness is something I believe is important to the well-being of all individuals and communities and should be a topic that we should be aware of and advocate for. Prior to reading this article, I always knew that I was passionate about advocating for issues like income redistribution, funding welfare programs, expanding health insurance, raising minimum wage, and more. However, I do want to educate myself more on the more technical realities and history of these issues, so I thought this would be an interesting article to evaluate.

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 lead of the article begins with an introductory sentence that provides a simple and concise contextualization of the history of the fluctuating state of income inequality within he US from a 2018 UN Report. While it does a good job at summarizing the impacts of inequality and providing background, it doesn't directly include a brief description of its later content/ major sections (one paragraph focuses on the impacts, then how it is measured, and then focuses on specific tax policies). The lead was concise up until the last paragraph and a bit before where it starts to narrow down on numbers, specifically in regards to taxes and transfers.

Content

Everything contained in the article was relevant to the topic. It contained sections such as definitions, a chronological timeline/ history of income inequality fluctuations, the causes, effects, the role of democracy and society in regards to the topic at hand, public attitudes, international comparisons, and policy responses. However, the article "relies excessively on references to primary sources" which add a biased perspective to the topic and also disrupts its supposed neutrality. Further, some of the information is outdated and relies on data mainly from ~2019. There is also a warning box above the article that warns about these issues. There are no noticeably misrepresentations of marginalized populations. I like how the article chooses to categorize its topic and sub topics; however, I think that some of it can be made more concise to improve its "digestibility".

Tone

When initially reading the article, the tone comes across as very neutral and objective. There might a slight "liberal" lean, but neither viewpoints are over or underrepresented.

Evaluating Sources

When going through the article, all the links work and majority of the sources support the claims int he article. However, it was brought up in the Talk section that there was a contradiction in two of the citations used. The Economist article used contradicts both the PIketty-Saez and CBO article. Further, there is multiple uses of primary sources which can be noted to contain prejudice. When using some research journals, it is noted that they would agree a certain way about some specified impact of income inequality. However, the sources are diverse in their authors and publications.

Talk Page

When consulting the talk page, I noted that the conversations were very collaborative and were focused on sources and how best to go about collaborative editing. This article was originally in the Social sciences and society good articles but it was removed. It's now apart of the WikiProject Business articles. Further, the subject of this article is controversial and has often lead to previous arguments being restated and disputed.