User:Ltgoncal/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
National Report

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because my current college class has taught us about discerning reliable from unreliable information and I have a general understanding of the topic of fake news. This article is important because many people do not know that websites like the National Report are not reporting facts but instead spread misinformation. A title like the National Report can be misleading because people read the word "national" and automatically assume that it's an official news site. As far as initial impressions go, I found that it lacked deep detail about the site itself and instead focused on how the National Report has been viewed and used by other news companies.

Evaluate the article
After reading the content of the National Report article, I have some suggestions for edits that would help improve it.


 * The content contained within the article is all relevant to the topic which is good, but it is slightly out of date. The most recent citation provided is from 2016 and as we are now in 2021, there could be some changes to how the website is run and the types of articles they publish. I would recommend researching around to find more up-to-date information about the National Report. While on the topic of the content, the history and disclaimer sections lack some information.
 * The history section starts nicely with when the National Report became a site and who seemed to lead it. It falls off when the article moves to talk about a Facebook experiment and an opinion of someone who works for the fact-checking website emergent.info. This information isn't relevant to the history of the National Report and doesn't matter much to the article as a whole. I would suggest removing that part of the history section completely and research some information that focuses more on how the site has evolved since its creation in 2013. Some things to include would be the history of lead editors over the years, how the site has evolved in choosing its article topics, and even how it came to be so popular.
 * The disclaimer is admittedly short and seems to lack any details on why this disclaimer is important to understand what the National Report is. My biggest suggestion for this section is to remove it completely and instead combine it with the history section. This way the reader could understand that the creation, removal, and general obscurity of the disclaimer is important to how the National Report has developed over the years. Another way to improve this area would be to look more into the disclaimer and why the National Report still posts satire with the intent of trying to be taken seriously despite the disclaimer saying they are anything but.
 * There is a pretty decent amount of bias within the article. It is written in a way that pushes the opinion that the National Report is a bad news site instead of just informing about the type of information present on the site and just general information. The quotes like "duping gullible Internet users with deceptively newsy headlines." and "not driven by trying to do comedy or satire, but by what kind of fake stuff can we spin up to get shares that earn us money" state a clear bias against the National Report and should be removed in order to prevent this.
 * As I mentioned before, the current sources are slightly outdated but they also aren't all reliable. For example, the first citation is to an article by the Tucson Weekly which is an Alternative newspaper that states in their terms and conditions that there is no guarantee that their information is reliable or even accurate. As per Wikipedia's rules, sources should be neutral and verifiable and many of the sources used are blog posts that have little to no reliability within their sites. Remedying this will require a huge rewrite of the article in order to fully remove the bias present with the information provided.
 * My suggestion would be to go through all 26 sources and determining which ones are reliable and which aren't. After weeding out the bad information, go in, look at the sources that are left, and pull from them all the information that is important to show what the National Report is. Most likely, after the removal of sources, there will be a lack of information needed to write an article which means researching more sources so it's important to use ones that are reliable and unbiased in order for the reader to gain the most from the article.
 * Overall, this article needs to be completely revamped in order for it to fit into Wikipedia's expectation for their articles to be neutral and informational. The discussion's on the talk page debated on whether or not to completely delete the article due to all the errors but ultimately decided to keep it because it does allow readers to determine that the National Report is satire. I agree with this consensus but definitely think that there should be a type of warning placed before the article that not all the information within the article is accurate. I do believe that this article has some hope with some major editing as it is currently poorly developed.