User:Nat2026/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Virginia–Virginia Tech rivalry

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I am interested in the UVA - VT rivalry and am a student at the University of Virginia. This matters if someone wants to have a better background understanding of the rivalries between the schools. My preliminary impression is that the article appears well made and very informative with non - biased information and a number of references at the bottom as well as wikilinks.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead includes a strong introductory sentence that clearly describes the articles topic by explaining how the rivalry is between two American colleges. There is a slight difference in the second part of parenthesis where they do not include (in sports media) for Virginia Tech which may be seen as bias as the article is further evaluated over time.

They do not provide a brief description of the article's major sections and you would need to scroll down and physically read the headers to understand what information i being discussed. I did come across a small grammatical error in the first paragraph unless they are speaking from present (would still want to reword it).

The lead is very concise and goes into a lot of detail to allow someone with no background knowledge to read the first paragraph and gain a decent idea about what the rivalry is. I still feel like the introduction section could explain more about the fan culture rivalry and describe what sports these rivalries are occurring in.

Content

The articles content is relevant to the topic and provides a mostly un-biased view of the information of the Virginia - Virginia Tech rivalry. The content is not up-date although there was a recent edit on Feb 5, 2023 where they updated that Tech did win a game. Not updated enough to include the UVA shooting information to provide clarity for why the Basketball season was impacted. All Time and ACC series results section is not updated to current standings. We were unsure as to why a former Ohio State player was mentioned in the "Intensity and Pranks" section when he seems to have no affiliation with either University. It does not deal with any equity gaps based on surface reading. If they discussed the origins of the rivalry it would be a lot better. They outlined 3 specific iterations of the commonwealth clash but all happened in different years but there were other games that happened that did not happen during the commonwealth clash left unmentioned. Large break between 2007-2014 and its unclear on whether they kept playing or not. In other words, lots of gaps.

Sources and Reference

NBC article reference link does not work as well as the Cavalier Daily link. Smithfield Times is a reference on there that works. They are using pages that discuss the Commonwealth Clash all of which do not work and Washington times is one of there bigger sources. A large amount of there sources do not work and close to none of them seem to be peer-reviewed secondary articles that the Wikipedia community prefers to have.

Images and Media

They do not have a lot of images but they do have a decent amount of charts. We feel it would be better to include more images to give a visual understanding of the two teams.

Organization and Writing Quality

It seems to be decently organized and it is good for a general overview. It is good but can go into a lot more detail about the history. It would be nice if they outlined everything mentioned in the article in the lead so you do not have to scroll to find out.

Talk Page Discussion

Not very extensive, it seems like there is some controversial arguments where someone with a Blacksburg IP deleted a section that discussed UVA's success in sports and what teams they have or do not have. A lot of the edits are removing words that seem biased or may make the article misleading to an uninformed reader.

Overall Impressions

Seems incomplete and is missing a lot history as well as updated information. There is a lot missing that could provide clarity to the active rivalry between the schools. Adding more information and avoiding gaps would be the best improvement that is needed currently for this article. Including more pictures would help add interest. This article is slightly under-developed but with some thoughtful editing and accurate updating as well as better sources, it may be much better in the future.