User:Meganllawrence/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_guardian

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the legal guardian article because it addresses my assigned competency for my Wiki course, and Wikipedia reports that this article has multiple issues. Guardianship is an important topic because it involves the loss of one's rights, and people who are considering seeking guardianship or had someone petition for guardianship for them should be familiar with how this process works. My initial impression of this article is that it is missing some key elements (e.g., how a guardianship is assigned, what evidence suggests guardianship might be appropriate, alternatives to guardianship).

Evaluate the article
There are sections of the article that do not have a citation when it is necessary, such as the first two sentences of the "rules applicable to all guardians" and "guardian ad litem" sections. However, for the citations that are provided, many of them are recent, published within the last 5 years. At first glance, it appears that most of the references are appropriate for Wikipedia. For example, the sources appear to be neutral and informative, without relying on findings from single studies.

There are critical elements of the article that are missing. For example, there is a section on guardianship for incapacitated seniors, but there is little ot no information explaining guardianship for the other three populations typically involved in guardianship cases. In addition, multiple sections are very limited, spanning one or two sentences. After these holes are filled in, the article could also be organized more appropriately. Specifically, it is not clear that the first three sections cover three examples of guardianship cases. In addition, the article provides information that may only apply to the United States in the main sections of the article, but the United States label is located under the "Guardian ad litem" section, and the justification for this is unclear.

In terms of tone and balance, one could argue that the article is not neutral because it presents examples about when guardianship goes wrong without going into detail about when guardianship is appropriate or produces better outcomes for the ward. However, I wouldn't consider this to be one of the article's most glaring issues. The writing quality, in my opinion, is fairly average for what can be found on Wikipedia pages. There are some instances where small changes in wording would make the article's message more clear.

Overall, this article needs improvement due to a limited amount of information on the topic.