User:Kkaitlyn0304/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article to evaluate because my degree is in iSTEM education, and this was the most general article about STEM education I could find on Wikipedia. By quickly skimming it, I could tell that this article provides a general overview of STEM, its effect in different countries (including the US), and touches upon the field in other aspects. I am curious to see how in detail they go about STEM education and what they chose to include about it.

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 section
I believe the article begins on a good note by defining STEM as an acronym. It then goes into how it is used, which helps describe its place in the world and part of the purpose of the article. However, I do not think the lead section does a good job of covering the topics the article talks about. It actually only mentions one of the article's sections, which is a brief debate on what is actually included under STEM, but goes into detail about what different organizations think about STEM. This concludes the lead section. Overall, the lead section has an informative introductory sentence, but is lacking in summary of the article and its sections, and is overly detailed about others.

Content
I think the article does a good job in providing an overview of STEM, with a heavy emphasis on STEM in the United states. In the section that covered STEM in different countries and how they use it, some countries have charts to support their claims whereas others are lacking citations, which also makes it somewhat untrustworthy. In the United States section, they dive into different organizations surrounding STEM, its place in education, and in the workforce which I feel is a necessary addition. However, these are not always mentioned in the other countries, and many programs mentioned under the United States go into detail about what they are, whereas programs in the other countries are briefly mentioned. I also felt some programs included sounded like they were for included for promotion. For example, the "Department of Defense programs" discussed more of what they were versus what they do and seemed like military propaganda. The "recent progress" section is fairly updated, with the newest information being from 2019. Much of the overall content covers underrepresented populations, such as their women in STEM section, LGBTQ+ section, and immigration policy regarding STEM. I feel that while some sections were appropriately detailed, others such as countries Turkey, Nigeria, and France could have used more information if they authors felt they needed to be included.

Tone and Balance
The article is mostly neutral and contains mostly facts and quantitative data backed up by charts and citations. It includes a criticism section to stay unbiased, and these statements are backed up by citations. France and China currently requires further clarification and updated citations, and it seems like the contributor wanted to seem more rounded by including them even though there were no sources to back up their claims. The country with the most information about STEM is the US, with many organizations, education inclusions, and workforce data included. This makes the article seem very US-centric, even with the other countries included. The article also includes many underrepresented populations and was sure to include political and educational viewpoints about STEM which seemed to have a nice balance.

Sources and References
As stated above, in the China and France sections, one was missing sources and another needed clarification. Additionally, two other sections of the article (education and the American Competitiveness Initiative) were also missing citations. Under "recent progress", the most recent citation is from 2019, which may need to be updated soon. However, many sources are from the last few years which shows the article has been updated recently. Some sources are from websites that end in .com, .edu, or .gov, and some are from journals. They are written by a wide range of authors of different races by looking at their names, and the titles of the sources reflect what the authors were writing about (ie: in the geographic distribution, many articles match the country they were supporting). When clicking on some of the resources, they come up as "not found". However, most of the linked text within the article will bring you to the corresponding page.

Organization and writing quality
Aside from the lead section, the article is well organized. It seems like the second paragraph of the lead section was used to segway into the next section. The article has clear sections that are easy to follow, with appropriate use of headings and subheadings. It is well rounded and many sections connect with each other in discussing minorities in STEM. I enjoyed that many of the sections linked to other articles that discussed more on the topic. I also thought the criticism section was appropriately placed as last.

Images and Media
The article has many images and graphs that are used to support the text. The images are all appropriately placed, captioned, and copyrighted. There are a few graphs that could be adjusted size wise as some would be easier to see if they were larger or smaller.

Talk page discussion
This article was part of a few education foundation-supported course assignments between 2019 and 2023. It is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale, and is of high-importance in the education WikiProject. It is also of low-importance and low-priority in four other WikiProjects. There are a few conversations going on about this article, with only one or two from 2020-2024, and most being from 2018 and earlier. Many conversations mention that the article is US-centric and is lacking information about the other countries. Some discuss updating the article as it is a bit outdated, with many new findings in STEM emerging within the last ten years. Some also discuss changing the article to focus on the acronym itself versus including the information that it does about the topic. Many of the conversations are short and seem to have been resolved. It is interesting to see what edits people propose and how different people analyze the article.

Overall impressions
As a whole, the article covers much of the general knowledge about STEM. It covers underrepresented populations within STEM as well as how it is represented around the world. There are relevant articles linked after some of the sections if the reader wanted to learn more about that particular part of STEM, which was a nice addition and helped keep the article simple and well rounded in regards to the amount of detail included in each section. Although some of the citations could be updated/need to be added, most of them are from recent, reliable sources and are from a wide range of websites and journals. The images they chose to include support the text well, especially the graphs, and are appropriately placed, although some could be adjusted size wise to improve the legibility of them. When regarding detail, I believe the sections about other countries using STEM are missing some, with the US having much more detail than the other countries listed. This may need to be its own article as it dives into the workforce, education, and many different STEM programs offered in the United States. Although I enjoyed reading about them, it made the article very US-centric. I was left wondering why certain ones were included, such as the "Department of Defense programs". The article also needs to update their citations, since some sections were lacking them and some needed to be clarified. With updated details and citations, the article could provide a better overview of STEM.