User:Mileskellam/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen this article to evaluate because it is part of the process of the assignment and I wanted to choose an article that was related to my literature review.

Evaluate the article
For the lead section, the introductory sentence does make it clear that social media during a pandemic era is the main topic at hand. The lead section at large also does provide brief descriptions and mentions of much of what is upcoming in the main article, but I did notice that there were two subsections that were not mentioned in the lead section at all (that of online business during the pandemic and visual arts). However, overall the lead section is fairly concise and does not contain discussion of any material not found in the rest of the article.

All of the content is relevant to the article, although the article itself is a somewhat broad topic so not all of the subtopics touched upon go into massive detail. The content is up-to-date, unsurprising considering how the entire article is about the affects of the ongoing pandemic and fairly recent technology being used throughout it. It does not really seem to fill Wikipedia's equity gap as even this early plenty has been written about Covid-19 and plenty of articles of talked about people being social and using things like social media to stay connected and informed. However, the article is still very important and the topic one that definitely needs to be talked about, and as far as I can tell there is no content that does not really belong or is irrelevant to the article.

I would say overall the tone of the article is mainly neutral. The article is somewhat heavy in statistics, and so there does not seem to be as much room for being as bias in tone the way there is in a lot of other articles. However, I did notice that many of the statistics were about some of the same big companies (such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) over and over and there was not as many statistics about some of the smaller or newer companies that could have added to the overall scope of information and made every point that much more accurate. I did not get the feeling that the article was trying to persuade its reader but rather that it was genuinely just trying to inform how social media has been affected and changed during the pandemic. I do not feel that very many minority viewpoints were really shown, as it was mostly just statistics about percentages of people using social media and information about specific posts some celebrities and organizations were documented as having made.

When it comes to sources, there does appear to be quite a lot of them (74 or so in total), and the links for these sources do work. I did notice that while all the sources were current (nearly all the sources were from 2020) and they were written by what appears to be a varied range of authors, they also appear to mostly be from magazine articles. While this both understandable and technically acceptable, having more academic journals or sources from more educational sources would be ideal, and I hope to rectify that in my edits. I have even already found a source or two that is not a magazine, such as something from the CDC itself that talks about social media and the pandemic and an academic journal/study that takes about how people use social media.

The writing is, for the most part, fairly good, with it be quite concise and being broken down into multiple subgroups that are not ever too long and have good data. However, there are multiple grammar and spelling mistakes in several sections. Not to the point where it completely ruins the article, but they definitely make it a little more sloppy.

The article only has one image. The image is captioned and put in a spot that makes sense, but there is only one. Particularly in the section that is taking about meme usage, more images that were the examples of the memes and other social media being talked about would have been helpful. Even just one or two images per section would have helped readers visualize the social media usage far better than just reading about it.

On the Talk Page, I found that there was actually some arguing going on. Two users were arguing about whether memes should be posted or talked about as much, with one user thinking there was no need to "anthologize" meme jokes and hand washing songs while the other user thought that there was actually good data within the source about memes that could and should be used. There was also talk about changing the title of the article to something more accurate that would not cause people to get confused about whether the pandemic itself uses social media or not. The article is, according to the Talk Page, assigned to both my Wiki Project as well as one other user's. There was also some talk, particularly early on, about how the article needed more peer reviewed sources that gave better and more in depth examples about how the pandemic has affected social media and caused people to use social media in certain ways. The article itself is rated a C as it has some well-documented information but is still quite short and does not have as much as it good have after about a year of being in existence.

Overall, I consider the article to be a good one and to be about a very relevant topic to the world, but it also has few images, not enough peer reviewed sources, and has multiple spelling errors. With some information and sources added and a bit of a clean up to the grammar and spelling of the article, I think the article would become significantly better. I think overall, it is under developed and more sources and information can and should be added.