User:Mbstjohn/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Midwife

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 we discussed midwives this last week in class, and this subject matters because it is quite controversial today. My first impression of this article is that it is very well-organized and provides a ton of great information on midwifery, including perspectives on the topic in several countries around the world.

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.)

The lead section seems great to me, as it includes a strong introductory sentence and a brief, concise description of the main sections of the article. Also I did not see any information in the lead that was not elaborated on in the article, so the lead seems perfect to me.

The content of the article is all relevant to the topic of the midwife, all looks up-to-date, and should be included; I couldn't find anything that seemed to be wrongly included in the article. I found it positive and interesting that the article included men in midwifery, because the field is definitely female-dominant.

The tone of the article seems entirely neutral and I did not see any biased claims made. It did not seem persuasive to any one viewpoint, but more informative to the entirety of the topic of midwifery.

Regarding sources, there appears to be an immense amount of sources to back up the information provided, and they all seem to be useful and necessary. I tried several of the links and they all worked, so I am impressed with the sources of this article.

The article is very organized, concise and well-written, and I find it easy to read while still being interesting. I could not find grammatical or spelling errors either, and I am quite attentive to these kinds of things, as this is one of my greatest pet peeves!

Regarding the media of the article, they are captioned well and laid out in an organized way, with the photos spaced out nicely in relation to the information.

In the article's talk page, there seems to be mostly conversation going on regarding males in midwifery. The article is rated C-class with mid- to low-importance. This seems slightly off to me because midwifery seems to be of greater importance than that rating expresses. Wikipedia offers tons of great information on this topic, even including some useful history on it, but in class we went over a bit more about how midwives have struggled in more recent times to be considered as important/legitimate as physicians today and how there is a real need for midwives that many people do not realize. Perhaps I could add to this article for my assignment; I will think on it!

I would say the overall status of this article is good. I think the article has many strengths, especially how perspectives from multiple countries were included along with men in midwifery. However, I think that it could be improved by better explaining the controversy surrounding midwives and the ultimate need for them today. I think the article is pretty well-developed, but could incorporate a bit more of what I have mentioned here.