User:NatashaVij/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Mass surveillance

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I've chosen this article because I am interested in the topic. Mass surveillance is a topic that is important in detecting illegal activity. My overall impression of this article was that it was very thorough. However, upon closer examination, I noticed that the article is broken up by nation. There are 23 countries listed, meaning that could be further potential for research on other countries for this topic.

Evaluate the article
This article seems like an overall useful article. The lead section gives a very general explanation on what mass surveillance is, why it's used, and the most notable case of mass surveillance. The lead doesn't discuss a brief description of the major sections; however, it does a good job explaining the overall concept of mass surveillance. The content, as mentioned above, is split up by country, commercial, surveillance, and pop culture references. In this article, some countries have the content posted directly in the Wiki page. However, other countries' information on mass surveillance is listed on separate page. The article seems up to date for the most part. Some countries have content has more up-to-date content than others; however, most of the latest content is from the 2010s. The tone of this article is fairly neutral and seems to back claims up with facts. I feel as though there was a heavier focus on mass surveillance policies in the United States.

I clicked on a few random links throughout the article. Many of them opened; however, just as many of them did not open. I recognize that I clicked on a random sample of about 10 sources, but it seems questionable that some of the sources aren't working. There is a diverse sampling of sources. This doesn't surprise me though because this article pulls from a wide variety of countries. Therefore, it should be expected that the article would've been a diverse group of articles. The writing style of this article is professional and neutral in tone and writing style. I believe that the article is broken down well. It makes sense to organize the article by country. It allows users to easily find each country's mass surveillance information. There are images throughout the article and each image has some sort of caption to help users understand the purpose behind the image. The talk page of this article is comprehensive. Like the article, it is broken down by country. Users then respond to each other's ideas within the subsection of each section. Wikipedians write about their potential ideas. For example, there is currently an idea being discussed about privacy issues with iPhone fingerprint scanner.

Overall, this is a comprehensive article. However, there is room for improvement. Some improvements include adding information about non American information about mass surveillance in the lead section of the page. Another improvement can include adding more information on other countries. A third improvement can include adding more information on other topics beside country-based history. Topics like the iPhone fingerprint scanner could be interesting additions to the article.