User:Khaley93/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Restorative practices

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it is an area of interest for me but also a subject that has different meanings for different people and various applications. I know it is an area of growing interest for a lot of educators and I am curious how the new research is a part of the article. I am also curious about the bias in the article as I know at time this topic can be controversial.

Evaluate the article
This article overall does a decent job at defining some of the key terms related to restorative practices, but has many areas for improvement, notable in organization and sourcing, especially as it relates to balance.

The lead section offers a basic introduction to the article topic, but could be improved in providing an overview of the article itself and how it is organized. The contents of the lead related to the various fields that have contributed to restorative practices is seemingly important ( as it is found in the lead) but is never again connected, even in the History section, where the origins of restorative practices are discussed.

Overall organization is an area that could be improved. For example the section head on "Social discipline window" explains the four approaches to social norms and boundaries that exist in criminology studies. As written, the section explains how restorative practice came to be, and thus would be better served as a subheading in the "History" section. Conversely, the history section (History and terminology) contains various examples of applications of restorative practices. I believe the article would be better served with the information on social discipline window housed within the history and a separate section created with the heading "Applications" or "In Practice".

This ties in with content as well, as some of the content in the article doesn't seem necessary to explaining restorative practices. The section on "social discipline window" goes in to a lot of detail that does not serve the article itself, and content that would better serve the article, like examples of applications and information about the success and failures of restorative practices is absent. To improve balance within the article, more information should be available regarding function and application, especially across various fields (as eluded to in the lead).

The largest issue however, with this article, is found within the sources and also on the talk page. The sources, though seemingly diverse and fairly extensive, are overwhelmingly pulled from the same organization, The International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP). This organization does have valuable information on the topic of restorative practices, but it is not the only place to find information. The article site information from IIRP 15 times across the 47 citations and the same author, who is the founder of the Institute, 8 times. This in itself is a red flag, but when looking at the talk page and investigating the primary author of the article (to date), it gets worse. The primary author, user Joshwachtel, works for IIRP. Both copyright and objectivity have already been brought up on the talk page because of this issue, and as I examined the sources, it was clear that this has a major impact on the content of the article

In regards to writing quality, overall I noticed no major flaws. The article appears to have been edited thoroughly and does not contain erros that interfere with the reading and understanding of the content. However, there is room to improve the transitions across the article, which aligns with the previous concerns aimed at organization. The images would also benefit from captions or descriptions, to give them more context within the article.

Overall the article does explain what restorative practices are but does have a lot of areas to grow.