User:Mbour181/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Mediatization (media)

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 because it relates to the course material and I have already learned what this subject is, therefore, I can know if the content is good and complete. This topic matters because it is an important theory in media and communication. My first impression of the article is that it seems very credible and well researched based on the number of sources present and it seemed to follow all of the aspects for a good Wikipedia article.

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 does include an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the articles topic. It did not contain any information that is not present in the article. However, the lead did not feature a brief description of the article's major sections (the only place where this was mentioned is in the table of content).

Overall the lead was clear and concise, but was missing the a description of the topics dealt with in the article.

Content

The article's content is very relevant to the topic and includes all of the key aspects related to the subject; It deals with the origins of the theory, its different schools as well as sociocultural change and media materialism. The content is up to date; it contains most of the same information that I have in my recent notes and textbooks. However, I did notice in the origins of the concept that there was no mention as to when this concept emerged, which would be important to mention. It does not deal with any of Wikipedia's equity gaps; it does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations or topics.

Tone and Balance

The article does a great job at remaining very neutral. It deals solely with facts and these facts are presented in a completely impartial and unbiased way, meaning that the article did not try to persuade the reader in favor of a certain position. No viewpoints were under/over represented; most sections of the article contains approximately the same amount of information. However, the last section (media materialism) was a bit underdeveloped compared to the other ones; it contained a bit less information (for example: the concepts of waste, energy and resources were not explained into further detailed after they were mentioned). *There wasn't any minority or fringe viewpoints to deal with in this article.*

Sources and References

All the facts in the article are based on reliable secondary sources. The sources are cited after every single direct quotation and when there is no citation there are still approximately 2-3 references cited per paragraph. The secondary sources are almost all academic journals, therefore the facts are reliable and all of these journals are very thorough in their explanation. The sources are for the most part current; the dates tend to fall in the range of 2008-2018 which is fairly current but they could be even more. Two of the references are from 1964 and 1999 which are a bit too outdated to use. The links do work; however many of them did not have a direct link to their respected article and a manual search was required. There is not a big variety of authors. Every single source cited is different, but one author seem to be a contributor in many of them (Hjarvard, S); his name appears in 7/18 sources cited. When doing my own research for sources about this subject, I found a few academic journals that were much more current (2017-2020), therefore few more relevant and recent sources are available.

Organization and writing quality

The article is very well written. I did not notice any grammatical or syntax errors and the article as a whole was well organized (each topic has its own section making it easy to read and very clear).

Images and Media

No images and media are present in this article. Images and media are always helpful when learning a new subject; however, I did not feel like this article would benefit from any images or graphs as it does not deal with subjects that can have an image to demonstrate them.

Talk Page discussion

This article is part of 2 WikiProject the first being "WikiProject Media" that aims to improve the coverage of media in Wikipedia and the second "WikiProject Sociology" aiming to improve the coverage of sociology in Wikipedia. In both of these projects the article is rated as Start Class for quality and Mid-importance for importance. The only conversation happening in this Talk Page is about the origins of the subject. One individual stated that the topic has been around for much longer than the article described it to be. The other information present on this talk page is about an external link that was modified. Wikipedia discusses this article in about the same way we have talked about it in class; however, new scholars or contributors to the concept were mentioned in this article that was not mentioned in class.

Overall impressions

Overall, I believe this article was very well written and fairly complete. Its strengths are the quality of writing, organizing and the very neutral and unbias tone of the article. What can be improved is adding a bit more description in the lead about the major topics of the article, expanding certain sections to make the article more complete (origins and media materialism) as well as having a more diversified list of authors. Except for a few details that could be added which I just mentioned, I believe that this article is relatively well-developed.