User:Mlb341/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The Missing (novel series)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This was one of my favorite fantasy novels as a child. I have read the entire series and it was incredibly popular at my middle school. I was surprised to see it is widely unfinished in Wikipedia and I chose to evaluate it for this reason.

Lead section
This lead section does include an adequate introductory section that concisely describes what The Missing is in a technical aspect. However, it takes a few more sentences for the article to get into what exactly is happening in the novel series, which, in my opinion, is understandable. It does not include a brief description of the article's major section outside of the contents table. The lead does not include any information that is not present in the article. I feel the lead is pretty detailed but I wouldn't say overly detailed. Since this is for a novel series, it needs to set up the intentionality of the series, all the book titles, and the overall theme of the novels before going into each novel and character specifically.

Content
The article goes into a summary of every novel within the series, main protagonists, and main antagonists throughout the series which I would consider relevant to the topic of The Missing. The series finished in 2015 and this article has every single novel included with main protagonist and antagonist character analyses for all novels as well. It is indicated in the talk page that this is a combination of the Wikipedia pages for the individual novels. If this is the case, I think there should be at least a Critical Reception section for the series as a whole and how public opinion shifted for the series over time. Also, this was quite a formidable series for a lot of children so I am sure there are literary critiques who have dissected the series and it's impact on child development. This could potentially lead to another section being added but could also be included in the new Critical Reception section if there isn't enough information out there. I would say all the information that is included as of this moment does belong there. The article does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gaps. It does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations or topics.

Tone and Balance
The article is neutral. If this was another series with more nuanced characters for who is the protagonist and antagonist, then this article may be considered biased through the which it organizes character descriptions. However, this novel is incredibly didactic and very clear in regards to who are the protagonists and who are the antagonists in this series. Aside from not relating this series to historically underrepresented populations or topics, I would say the viewpoints are pretty logical and follow the plot of the novels throughout. The shorts are pretty underrepresented in the article but I am personally unsure of their impact. It would be nice to expand that section and hear a bit more about that. There are no minority or fringe viewpoints represented. The article does not attempt to persuade the reader for or against the novels.

Sources and References
All of the facts in the article are backed up by reliable secondary source information. The sources are thorough for the topics covered, however, this does not include a critical reception or literary analysis section so we don't see many literary analysis or academic sources. The sources are current but are majorly based in Simon & Schuster and Good Reads for summary sources outside of the novels themselves. This does not represent a diverse spectrum of authors or a wide range of opinions. Since the spectrum of source authors are not diverse, then they also don't include historically marginalized individuals at all. There are a few literary blog posts available to be linked to this article and bulk up the resource section but I have been unable to find peer reviewed articles as of yet. The links tend to work in the Resource section of the article.

Organization and writing quality
The article is well written and organized into clear and concise sections. There are no grammatical or spelling errors.

Images and Media
The article includes images of some of the book covers for the individual novels within The Missing series. These are helpful to pull readers of the article back to which novels they may recognize as having read as a child. However, I wish there were more images of the covers for later novels in the series as there were for the first few. The images are well captioned but not cited to any particular image source. As a result, they are not adhering to Wikipedia's copyright regulations. The images are laid out in a visually appealing way.

Talk page discussion
The are two conversations going on within the Talk page discussion for this Wikipedia page. First, someone proposed the idea for a full merge of all the individual pages for these novels into this page to hold all the plot summaries and character overviews. They completed the merge in April 2015. Second, someone noticed that there was a section copied from another site for the novel "Sent" within the page. They removed the copied section and correctly sited it. The article is rated as a start-class with low importance to the following WikiProjects: Novels, Children's literature, and Women writers. This is in line with other talk pages I have seen through this class thus far.

Overall impressions
The article's overall status is Start-Class and it is noted at the top of the article page that there is a lack of inline citations throughout the article despite there being an adequate amount of sources listed in the Reference section. The article's strengths are the factual plot and character information which is incredibly extensive given there are 8 full novels and two ebook shorts to be analyzed. I think it could be improved by including more information about the ebook shorts, adding a Critical Reception and/or Analysis section, including more diverse and historically underrepresented viewpoints (in both sources and analysis), and adding a few more inline and image citations to be more aligned with Wikipedia's copyright rules. I would say the article is developed but there is room to grow. Nothing on this article is incorrect or should be removed but there is definitely more to expand upon given it is an entire series.