User:Nickbrisket/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Speech Act
 * Briefly describe why you have chosen this article to evaluate.
 * speech acts seem interesting to me in the way that we can perform multiple actions through one action of speaking

Lead

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the Lead include an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic? yes
 * Does the Lead include a brief description of the article's major sections? not really, not all sections are introduced and it focuses mostly on two people's perspectives rather than laying out the contents
 * Does the Lead include information that is not present in the article? no, but it also does not include even an introduction to some of the information that is later presented in the article...
 * Is the Lead concise or is it overly detailed? its both, in the wrong ways.. it is too concise in that it does not at least briefly introduce the main information to be presented later, and it is overly detailed in presenting Kent Bach's and JL Austin's respective perspectives, which could be saved for later.

Content

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article's content relevant to the topic? yes, the content talks about speech acts
 * Is the content up-to-date? mostly, there are sources from as recent as 2018, but it seems they are not as prevalent in the citations as sources from before 1987
 * Is there content that is missing or content that does not belong? not entirely missing but sections 8-12 are very short; if they had the whole source for section 8 - titled "in language development" - why is there only a bulleted list of speech acts and no explanation beyond that or any examples of evidence given in that text....

Tone and Balance

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article neutral? yes
 * Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? no
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented? J.L. Austin comes up a bunch of times, and less "meat" is given to sections mentioning other theorists
 * Does the article attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another? nope!

Sources and References

 * Guiding questions


 * Are all facts in the article backed up by a reliable secondary source of information? not all of them... the entire "indirect speech acts" section is not cited; parts of the computer science section are heavily supported with citations while others are lacking; wait one of them is also just a blog - not a reliable secondary source, if I remember correctly.
 * Are the sources thorough - i.e. Do they reflect the available literature on the topic? no; a quick UTA library reference search shows there is all sorts of information about social media/twitter and speech acts, presumptions and speech acts, and memes and speech acts; there is a mountain of current, peer-reviewed literature on speech acts that this article fails to mention
 * Are the sources current? some are? I think it may be important to keep some of the older early research for historical purposes but there are more current sources that could be used
 * Check a few links. Do they work? yes! the references with links work to download pdfs or to jump to the site

Organization

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article well-written - i.e. Is it concise, clear, and easy to read? - it feels jumbled, disorganized to read, like the paragraphs don't flow into each other or have any logical sequence to them, as if they just added new sections to the end instead of working them in
 * Does the article have any grammatical or spelling errors? not that I noticed!
 * Is the article well-organized - i.e. broken down into sections that reflect the major points of the topic? no? it just seems random to me after the history section

Images and Media

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the article include images that enhance understanding of the topic? NONE
 * Are images well-captioned? N/A
 * Do all images adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations? N/A no images :(
 * Are the images laid out in a visually appealing way? N/A

Checking the talk page

 * Guiding questions


 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic? oh wow... lots of conversations about disagreements in father-figures of speech acts and who to include and why, theorists of other language backgrounds (namely German and Dutch); also remarks about order and structure of the article and more organizational than theoretical discussions
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects? "level 4 vital" or "start-class" ? and part of "Wikiproject Linguistics"
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class? goes into more detail about the theory than we have so far, and more about the figures and different applications; but we haven't gotten to speech acts yet!

Overall impressions

 * Guiding questions


 * What is the article's overall status? needs work!
 * What are the article's strengths? a good amount of information to explain the phenomenon
 * How can the article be improved? more sources to support the existing information presented; a more appealing organizational structure: all subsections are presented the same as main sections so it gets confusing
 * How would you assess the article's completeness - i.e. Is the article well-developed? Is it underdeveloped or poorly developed? its medium-developed; I think many sections are poorly developed or not given enough room and detail to stand alone they way they are formatted and some are noticeably more beefy, which makes it feel imbalanced; It does not give me the feeling of "a completed article where I am not more confused after reading"

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