User:MightBeLying/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Plurality voting

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
The subject is part of what my paper covered and I am personally very interested in voting methods and electoral reform.

Evaluate the article
Lead: The introductory sentence does a fair job describing the subject, but could use some more detail to clarify what it is. The whole lead could use some work to simplify and clarify what is being said.

Content: The content is both relevant and up to date, however there is content missing or contradictory within the article. Ex: " Plurality voting is still used to elect members of a legislative assembly or executive officers in only a handful of countries..." vs "Plurality voting is used for local and/or national elections in 43 of the 193 countries that are members of the United Nations." is both contradictory and leaves out the context regarding how many of those 193 countries use different voting systems and how many don't have elections at all. The article does not deal with equity gaps.

Tone and Balance: There are sections within the article that skew against the use of plurality voting, and an entire section devoted to the disadvantages of it yet no mention of who supports keeping such systems in place or why they do.

Sources and References: There are not nearly enough sources provided and quotes such as " Proponents of other single-winner electoral systems argue that..." without any identification of who those proponents may be or what they may have actually said. Of the sources that are provided there are at least 3 which are dead links in need of replacement, but they all do look like they are high quality sources. There just aren't at all enough for an article this long or with this many readily available sources.

Organization and Writing Quality: Some sections are a bit choppy, but other than that the quality of the writing itself is fine. It is not particularly well organized but there are quite a few steps that have already been taken to make it so. The biggest problem with organization is the inclusion of what few arguments there are for plurality voting are included as brief counterpoints in the Disadvantages section. There are also some examples of specific elections that may be over examined.

Images and Media: Some of the images are well placed and add value to the article. Other seem entirely unnecessary and come with captions that are vague or shoehorned into somewhat fitting with the article.

Talk Page: There hasn't been a great deal of discussion on the talk page. The page has been identified as part of WikiProject Elections and Referendums and WikiProject Politics. For both of these the article has been rated C-Class for quality and for Politics it has been rated as High-Importance. There is a To Do List addressing some of the problems within the article, but even that only touches on some of the issues.

Overall Impressions: This article needs quite a bit of work, but it has a good foundation from which to build. Updating and adding sources, cutting sections down to their bare minimum, clarifying uncommon terms used interchangeably, and cutting back significantly on the example explanations could make this a much cleaner page. Overall, the page is very underdeveloped but capable of being built up to a quality page without having to completely scrap it, or even having to completely scrap large sections of it.