User:Kmorr26/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sandra Fluke

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I was unfamiliar with this activist, and I thought reading it would be a good opportunity to be informed about a prominent figure in the reproductive justice movement.

Evaluate the article
This lead section of this article was concise, with a good summary of why Fluke is noteworthy, and what information is covered in later sections. There were no superfluous or irrelevant details included in the lead section. This article focuses on Fluke's involvement with birth control regulation, specifically the lack of gender diversity at a hearing on how insurance companies should handle contraception coverage. Since the panel on contraception coverage does appear to have consisted entirely of cis men after Fluke's exclusion, this highlights a lack of representation of those who are affected by birth control legislation in the legislative process.

All content in the article was related to Fluke's life, with a strong focus on her time in the public eye. All sources used are from 2012 to 2016. While this is not especially current, I could not find any recent sources about Fluke that could be used to update the article, as she is no longer a prominent figure in public discourse. I would say the the article represents Fluke in a somewhat positive manner, as opposed to being completely neutral. Some sources such as an archived version of Georgetown University's biography section, and a book titled "What Will it Take to Make a Woman President" were written with the clear intent to portray Fluke in a positive light. However, the majority of the sources used were reputable news organizations. This seems like the best-case scenario, as I found no peer-reviewed articles on Fluke, and news organizations are more credible than faculty biography pages. The only source link that appeared to be broken was the link to Fluke's mother's obituary, which was likely no longer hosted online as a result of being old content on a small local server.

The article was organized into manageable sections covering Fluke's life in chronological order. The sections about newsworthy incidents in Fluke's life had much more content than her early life or later political career, which seems appropriate. However, the length of the paragraphs and sentences within these sections was inconsistent. Additionally, the article appears to rely heavily on direct quotes where a summary or paraphrase might be more appropriate. This reliance on long quotes negatively affects the flow and length of the article. As for visual elements, all images were appropriately captioned and cited. These images also appeared to be nicely spaced throughout the article.

The talk page repeatedly points out the same issues with sentence length and structure that I noticed. One reviewer, Hurricanehink, offered suggestions about how to improve the majority of the sentences in this article. He notes that the overall writing quality could be improved, and that the article should really include more specifics about major events. For example, more details could be provided about the timeline of Fluke's educational career, or the media coverage of her speeches. This article was nominated for redirect, as it focuses primarily on the Rush Limbaugh–Sandra Fluke controversy, which already has a page. The article was also repeatedly nominated for deletion, but this was overturned by a slim majority. The general perception of the article seems to be that it is incomplete, and the writing quality leaves much to be desired. I would agree with this assessment.

Finally, I feel that I could have picked a better article to fit the themes of this class. This article boils a debate on contraceptive coverage down to the experience of one white woman. While her experience is valid, and shows a media bias against women in this context, it is not a complete intersectional examination of this issue by any means.