User:MuthanaAlhadrab/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Dialogue (Bakhtin) - Wikipedia

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 did my "Communication as Presentation" assignment about Bakhtin's Dialogism theory. I thought it would be interesting to read and evaluate a Wikipedia article about it.

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.)

This article could use a better Lead section. There is no introductory sentence to describe dialogism theory, and most of the introduction talks mostly about Bakhtin himself. The lead doesn't include any description of the major sections in the article. The lead has information that is not present in the rest of the article. There are a lot of quotations that are not seen anywhere else in the article. I feel like the Lead isn't the best place to write direct quotations about a topic. The lead section is concise, but it talks mostly about Bakhtin's relationship with his theory, rather than the theory itself.

In terms of content, I'm not sure about my feelings about the article. The stuff that I have learned about Bakhtin were barely or never mentioned in the article. There was no or little talk about the implications of his theory that focus on: diversity, meaning-making, relationism, or "the social between". Instead, the article focused a lot on Monologization and Dostoevsky. While these might me an extension of the topic, they were given a lot of importance in the article that I felt like the article was deviating from the original topic.

Moving on, the article offered a neutral view about the topics it had discussed. It talked about the major theories that are a subset of Bakhtin's Dialogism, like dogmatism and relativism within monopolization. However, due to the underrepresentation of some of the content that I learned, I have the feeling that there might be a big content gap in the article. I have that feeling also because most of the edits were made by a single person. I feel like the lack of content about the implications of Bakhtin's theory like "Locating the difference at the center" in terms of the importance of diversity within Bakhtin's dialogue might be an implicit bias in the article towards diversity. It might not seem that way, but from what I read about Bakhtin, his theory mainly involves around accepting and acknowledging our differences. Underrepresenting this perspective can raise some red flags.

The sources and references could use a little more work as well. More than 50% of the information were extracted from 2 sources that are not well-cited either: "Bakhtin (1984)", and "Morson and Emerson (1990)". I'm not sure which exact piece of work the author extracted the information from, but well-cited sources are needed in the article. Also, I feel like there could be a better use of sources. I would recommend using the same Communication as Dialogue source that I have used for my assignment. It's a secondary source but it contains very useful insights about the theory. Also, there are no weblinks that are connected to any of the sources in the article.

In terms of organization and writing quality, the article didn't have major grammatical or spelling errors, and was fairly easy to read. However, the article felt more like a new report rather than a Wikipedia article. There was an excessive use of direct quotations from Bakhtin, and these quotations are what is mainly explaining the topics. There is no analysis of the quotations, which leaves them containing most of the ideas of the article. The sections were broken down in an organized manner, but I felt like some more points will be helpful.

Moving on, the article contains no images. I have expected to see an image in the introduction at least. I don't think that there is a good image that can act as a visual introduction to the dialogism theory itself, but image of Bakhtin himself would be sufficient. There is also no talk page discussing on the article. It doesn't seem like that this is a highly-read article, which explains a lot.

Overall, I found this to be an interesting article. I enjoyed reading it despite all the points of critique that I have written. It is a good introduction to the topic, but it could use some more work. The article is ranked as a "Start" article. Some more review of the article as a team-lead collaboration is needed, especially with a poorly developed article like this one. The article needs complete rework to stand as a "good" article in terms of Wikipedia articles.