User:Kparso11/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cultural communication

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I think it's very important to look at how communication is different in other cultures. The article also has multiple issues that needs to be fixed

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

The lead section does not provide an overview of the topic. The topic is cultural communication and the lead section discusses cultural relativism and ethnocentrism without mentioning communication at all.

The first sentence doesn't provide information about what the article should be about, it just starts with a definition of cultural relativism.

The section also doesn't discuss the different sections of the article. The different sections of the article appears to be intercultural communication, non verbal communication, power distance, individualism, and collectivism. The lead paragraph doesn't reference any of that. I can see how the writer may have been trying to first discuss that it's okay that different cultures do things differently, but it's important to also discuss what the article is about. The lead section is also overly detailed on things that aren't the focus of the article.

Content

Most of the content in the article isn't relevant to the topic. I see how there can be connections made about the topic to other topics, but the article barely even discusses communication.

The content also is not up to date because the last edit was in 2020, and the article was written in 2011.

The section about power distance could be condensed because it isn't extremely relevant and wasn't tied to cultural communication.

Tone and Balance

This article was not written with a neutral tone, it comes off as biased and more of a personal reaction to the topic. The word should is used a lot, especially in the lead section which comes off as telling people what they should think and how they should view the topic. The last sentence of the lead section is very biased and is telling the reader what the "right" way is to view cultural relativism.

Sources and References

This article has major issues with citations and sources. The only "sources" that are linked in the article are wikipedia pages, which cannot be used as a source. The references at the bottom aren't cited or directly referenced in the article at all. The sources are also not current, as every source is from 2011.

The websites cited at the bottom don't appear to be peer reviewed or from academic journals. The second article in the references section doesn't mention communication at all, and is not relevant to cultural communication.

The third article in the reference section is outdated and from 1998.

A source that would be helpful for this article is the textbook called "Communication between cultures: edition 9" by Larry Samovar, Richard Porter, Edwin McDaniel, and Carolyn Roy.

Organization and writing quality

This article is no very concise and seems to bounce around a lot. A lot of it could be condensed down if everything was written more clearly. The article isn't organized in a way that makes sense or is very relevant to the topic. It is also extremely short and doesn't;t actually talk about how people communicate in different cultures.

Images and media

There are no images

Talk page discussion

This article has a rating of 23 for completeness. The talk page is not extremely helpful for this article because there are only 3 short entries (one is from 2014, and one is from 2013). One of the editors talks about the lack of citations in the article, but then goes on to say that it is a good summary for cultural communication (even though cultural communication is barely talked about). Another editor goes on to talk about how the information provided about high and low power distance is incorrect. The 3rd editor discusses how this article doesn't;t actually address cultural communication.

Overall impressions

I think the overall status of this article is that it is nowhere near complete. A strength of the article is how the author mentions topics that could relate to cultural communication, but it is important to make that link clear instead of just giving an overview of each subtopic without relating it to the main topic. The article can be improved by getting better and more current sources, adding citations, and defining and addressing cultural communication. The article is poorly an underdeveloped.