User:Lulenna/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Dear Boss letter
 * This article interested me as I am fascinated by the Whitechapel murders as well as by forensic linguistics.

Lead
The Lead has a good introductory sentence and is quite concise but several sentences could be combined to make the paragraph flow better as they are too short. There is also a sentence that mentions the letter being forwarded to the Scotland Yard which is an additional detail that seems unneeded.The final paragraph does well in mentioning the final section of the article but could be rewritten to be more neutral and more concise.

Content
The content seems up-to-date as far as there is a citation from a 2018 news article about an authorship analysis. It would have been better, perhaps, if the contributor had cited the actual research paper instead of a university news report. All the sections are relevant to the letter and the Whitechapel murders; however, the final section, "Calligraphy and linguistic analysis", could do with some elaboration especially when the contributor mentions a connection between the Dear Boss letter and James Maybrick's "purported diary".

Tone and Balance
The article does not attempt to prove any point to the reader or assert any position. Throughout the article, it is mentioned that the letter is mostly considered a hoax but some people do believe that it is genuinely from Jack the Ripper. The contributor could have done better in elaborating both sides that make up "the opinions of modern scholars" and who those scholars are. The two opinions about the Dear Boss letter seem, at once, both under-represented and overrepresented.

Sources and References
The article's source links are workable and current, the most recent of which were published in 2018. However, several links led me to a websites dedicated to explaining and documenting the Whitechapel murders, one of which being Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Although they are thorough in their information about the letter, their reliability is questionable since the webpages do not seem to have contributors with proof that they are experts on the subject.

Organization
This article is concise and well-organized; each section is directly related to the topic and explains the importance of its connection with the Whitechapel murders. However, the article mostly contains sentences with multiple clauses which are long and are difficult to read. At one point, the contributor writes two "however"-sentences consecutively without explaining their argument for their first point. When the second "however"-sentence is added, it becomes unclear as to what the contributor is comparing. Other than that, the article does not seem to have any spelling errors or any grievous grammatical error.

Images and Media
The three images in the article are relevant to the topic and are all kept to the right side of the article. It seems that it would be more interesting to the eye if one image were moved to the left side to make it more interesting. The captions are detailed and describe which page of the letter the image is from.

Checking the talk page
There is a very detailed comment from User:DreamGuy mentioning the rejection of claims sourced from a television documentary. This seems productive in keeping the article well-sourced and with reliable information. The Dear Boss letter article is a part of WikiProject London and is rated Start-Class as well as Low-Importance. It was interesting to see a comment chain between two users who were debating the legitimacy of the letter in much less formal tone than how we've talked about it in class.

Overall impressions
Certainly, this article could be edited and improved but is consistent and concise enough to stand on its own. The contributor may have reached the limit of finding sources appropriate and detailed enough to add to this article. That is quite alright as the Dear Boss letter is not the most significant part of the entire Whitechapel murders. So we could say that this article is well-developed for the amount of research done on the topic.