User:Natalie5196/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Emma Watson

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the article because I assume that it gets a lot of attention on Wikipedia, so it's especially important for it to contain useful and reliable information. After learning that only 19% of biographies on wikipedia are about women, I have been interested to see how well-written they are, and I'm starting with an article that I would expect has many collaborators and remains updated and correct over time.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of the article is well composed overall. The first sentence informs the reader that Watson is an English actress, and includes her birthday, which provides context for how old she currently is. Additionally, the lead section goes on to discuss Watson's achievements or involvement in other fields, such as foreign affairs, advocacy for gender equality, modeling, and business. It might be beneficial to briefly include these other roles in the topic sentence to give the reader a better understanding of what Emma Watson is known for other than acting. Despite being a bit long, the lead is concise, providing just enough context for each of her roles and listing key information. One thing I noticed is that there are not many citations throughout the lead, but there are embedded links.

The article contains a lot of relevant content, including seven sections on varying topics relating to Emma Watson. It is up-to-date. Some sections are much smaller than others, but the smaller sections are focused on information that is less readily available to the public, like Watson's early life and personal life.

There are images and media, but not so many as to clog the article or make it visually unappealing. There is an abundance of information, and it is unbiased. There is diversity of sources, but some of the sources have links that don't work and some are from websites that are not well known or vetted. The writing quality is good, and the article is concise and easy to read. There are no grammatical or spelling errors that I noticed, and it is noted in the talk section that it is written in British English, so there should be some spelling differences.

The article is rated as a featured article. One debate on the talk page is about whether or not to add Watson's other roles (model, activist) to the first sentence of the article. One user pointed out that Wikipedia's biography guidelines state that the first sentence should highlight what the person is most notable for. The second debate is about whether to include Emma Watson's past boyfriends in the personal life section. This ultimately resulted in deleting a section from under that headline listing her past relationships.

This article is well-developed and full of information. I would suggest adding more citations throughout the article to ensure that all of the information is reliable and well-sourced, and that it is easy to track the sources. Adding a citation after many lines of information is confusing, because it is hard to tell which information is being sited from that source. Most of the article contain sufficient citations, but the lead does not have very many. Aside from that, I think the article is very strong, thorough, and draws from a wide variety of sources and topics pertaining to Emma Watson. The activism and advocacy was particularly interesting to read, as it relates to what we talk about in class.