User:MilkyWay164/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I'm going to be evaluating the Javadoc page.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I'm evaluating this page because it's one that I referenced early this semester. I found it very helpful to me, but I remembered a banner at the top saying it needed to be improved.

Evaluate the article
My evaluation of the page is as follows.

Lead section
The lead section for this article has a strong introductory sentence. The quality of the lead section sort of deteriorates from there. There is no good summary of the sections of the article, and there are topics touched on, such as what IDEs generate javadoc templates, that are not addressed anywhere else in the article. It does a good job of giving readers a general idea of what a javadoc is.

Content
The content is not up-to-date as of this month. There is a banner noting this fact in the article.

Other than that, I feel a bit conflicted about the content. The banner indicating that the article is written a bit like a manual is correct. However, I'm not really sure what adjustments could be made. With something like this, I think it's hard to draw the line on what information is relevant, and what isn't. Perhaps some of the rules and customs for javadocs could be put into a section about how there are a lot of customs around javadoc usage, rather than sprinkling them around in an instructional way.

Something that I think this article could benefit from having is more information about the ways javadocs are used. For example, the lead section touches on IDEs that generate javadoc templates, but this is not addressed in the main body of the article. It would also be interesting to readers to hear more about how javadocs might have influenced documentation in other languages, and some of the other things mentioned briefly in the article.

Tone and Balance
This article is, as noted by the banner at the top of it, written a bit like a manual. To that extent, it does lend itself a bit towards establishing 'rules,' with no acknowledgement of why those rules are the way they are. Computer Science, in my experience, is a field where there are a lot of disagreements about the 'right' way to do things. It's difficult for me to believe that everyone has accepted the same rules and customs of javadocs without significant debate. This article, however, acknowledges no such discussion.

Sources and References
The majority of the sources used in this article are from Sun Microsystems/Oracle (the company that developed Java, and consequentially, Javadocs), or people associated with the company. While this makes for authoritative sources on the official rules and intent of javadocs, it does not lend a varied perspective. Official documentation seems to me to be maybe too close of a source to use so heavily in a Wikipedia article.

Organization and writing quality
Overall, the writing quality is pretty good, at least when it comes to spelling and grammar. The organization lends itself to fairly easy reading, but does neglect potential topics for the article to cover.

Images and Media
There aren't really images in quite the traditional sense in this article. There are, however, code blocks that I would qualify as a sort of media. These code blocks do lend a helpful hand in helping visualize what a javadoc should look like.

Talk Page Discussion
The talk page seems a bit neglected for this article. For an article that has gone through the edits this has been through, there is pretty limited discussion about said edits. A handful of comments were made around 2010, a couple were made around 2015, and a few since 2020. I learned that a criticisms section was removed by one user, and that they noted it on the talk page. This article is rated as start-class and is considered highly important to the Java WikiProject.

Overall Impression
Overall, I'm disappointed that an article that has been around for 15 years is stuck at start-class. I'm not surprised, though. It seems about right for a software-related article.