User:Mothiswet/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Visual communication

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose visual communication as I am interested in visual media and artwork. It's important as it relates to a central and powerful tenant of how people communicate and connect with each other. My preliminary impression of visual communication is that it encompasses visual representations of ideas and certain other nonverbal communication, like pantomime and signing.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)


 * The first thing I notice about this article is a disclaimer stating that the article lacks sufficient citations, which has apparently been present since August 2013. This makes me immediately skeptical about the reliability of some of the information presented. The article also directly casts doubt on the validity of several sources. One is noted as being self-published, and one is listed as a potentially unreliable source. Most of the sources cited are books, many of which seem to be written to explain visual communication as a teaching aid.
 * The lead sentence would benefit from being split into two separate sentences. The first portion is a concise description of the topic, but it is immediately followed by a list of forms of visual communication.
 * The lead section provides an overview of its sections, but it fails to do so in a concise manner and makes use of exceedingly vague language. It also includes information not included in the rest of the article; it states that "Humans have used visual communication since prehistoric times," but this is not elaborated upon at any point in the article.
 * The article image presents aspects of visual communication which are not discussed anywhere in the article (but probably should be), such as cartoons, comics and visual storytelling.
 * The article overall contains a high number of grammatical errors.
 * Much of the material in the article appears to be closely paraphrased from a few specific sources, namely academic courses and books about visual communication in presentations. For example, the "visual aids" section contains several lines which appear to be teaching advice, such as:
 * "Since a poster board paper is relatively flimsy, often the paper will bend or fall over. The best way to present a poster is to hang it up or tape it to a wall."
 * "The key to showing a video during a presentation is to make sure to transition smoothly into the video and to only show very short clips."
 * The aforementioned lines undermine the neutrality of the article by making suggestions to the reader. The close paraphrasing in general also undermines neutrality by making the article only reflect the views of a few specific sources.
 * The article fails to provide anthropological or historical perspectives on the use of visual media. The article states "The debate about the nature of visual communication dates back thousands of years," which is meaningless on its own and is not elaborated upon any further. As a whole, the article takes an extremely narrow view of the subject matter, focusing almost entirely on its usage as a presentation aid.
 * The article only lists two important figures in the research of visual communication, and fails to adequately describe their contributions to the field. It seems exceedingly unlikely that there are only two noteworthy figures in this field of study, and both of the figures listed are men from the early 20th century. This does not reflect a diverse view on the subject.
 * In the section titled "Components" the article begins describing the basic components of graphic design. Most of this information appears to be completely irrelevant to the broader topic of visual communication. This is probably the most egregious example of useless information:
 * "Additive and subtractive color models help in visually communicating aesthetically please information. Additive color model, also known as RGB color (Red, Green, Blue) goes from dark to light colors, while subtractive color model is the opposite. The subtractive color model includes the primary CMYK colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) which go from light to dark."
 * The images in the article leave much to be desired. The header image, captioned "Image showing the visual communication process" is a photo of some notes taken during what I presume was a presentation about visual communication. This is a notably poor example of visual communication as the image consists mostly of text, and hence mostly conveys its information through text. The only other image in the article, in the "Social media" section, is a tangentially related stock image showing various social media app logos, which are on a keyboard for some reason. Nothing about the article would change if the image was removed.
 * Based on the article talk page, it does not appear that there has been any significant effort on the part of Wikipedia editors to improve the article. There are a plethora of suggestions for improvements or topics to be added, but none of them appear to have been acted on. This is particularly surprising, given that the article is listed as part of a WikiProject for "High-importance media articles"
 * Overall, the article provides a somewhat in-depth view of the usage of visual communication on social media, political messaging, and in science communication. However, it fails to provide a comprehensive and neutral view of the subject. It is extremely underdeveloped, being generally poorly written and only focusing on one narrow aspect of visual communication. It could potentially be improved by including overviews of broader forms of visual communication, such as abstraction, the history of art, interpretive dance, film and visual storytelling.