User:Noriyucky/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Wikipedia article on Tumblr.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
We were advised in our 1pm Friday discussion section to pick a topic for this assignment that was related to online communities. I felt that Tumblr is a social networking site is especially relevant to this topic because of the unique culture cultivated within and across its userbase over the years. I felt as though Tumblr's userbase itself functions as an online community of its own, and that studying it as a community is both more interesting and more meaningful than looking at just the technical side of things (i.e., "it's a social media site that isn't particularly popular anymore").

Evaluate the article

 * The opening sentence of the lede feels flawless, like a textbook example of what an opening sentence on a Wikipedia article should look like. However, the rest of the lede section does not give a particularly meaningful overview of the article itself.
 * Compared to the ledes from articles about other social networking services, such as Twitter or 4chan, the lede on the article on Tumblr is quite small and contains little information regarding the unique qualities of the website, its userbase, its history, or its significance.
 * On the other hand, it does (confusingly) contain information as to the ability to make one's blog on Tumblr private. While true, this feature is not unique to Tumblr, and doesn't influence enough of the user experience on Tumblr or the website's identity to be worthy of being in the lede.
 * The content is mostly up-to-date. The article contains statistics pertaining to usage of the site throughout Tumblr's history and cites data from as recently as July 2021.
 * However, there is a current, ongoing controversy regarding Tumblr's response to updated App Store policies that has caused posts with certain tags to disappear from the iOS App, including posts made to raise awareness about social justice issues, offer resources to disabled or mentally ill users, or posts tagged with warnings so those with photosensitive epilepsy do not accidentally trigger a seizure that is not addressed anywhere in the article.


 * The three most substantial sections of the article are its History section, its Criticisms section, and a subsection within the Usage section specifically written about Adult Content posted to Tumblr.
 * The History section was written very objectively and is the exact length/contains the exact amount of information I would expect from such a section in this type of article.
 * The subsection on Adult Content is probably the most glaring example of this article's lack of balance. The subsection itself is the same length as the entirety of the article's History section.
 * Granted, the presence (and later prohibition) of Adult Content has had a profound impact on Tumblr's culture and history, and having such a long section on this topic is not entirely unreasonable. However, this does indicate, more than anything, a severe lack of detail in the other sections and subsections within this article.
 * The Criticisms section, despite being the longest section, was probably the one most lacking in detail.
 * Tumblr, its userbase, and the culture it has birthed have come into fire many times, so it's somewhat laughable that there was only one named example in the "Userbase Behavior" section, which was a single user's attempted suicide following a bullying incident in 2015 that occurred within Tumblr's Steven Universe fan community, especially since:
 * The incident, as described in the Vice article used as the citation for this incident, was actually much more complicated, and both the factors leading up to it (a sitewide obsession with moral purity and a crusade-like approach to social justice) and the event's aftermath (instances of stalking, doxxing, and further death threats) are paramount examples of other problematic behaviors that plagued Tumblr's userbase.
 * While I'm not certain other articles have been written on the matter, having used Tumblr for as long as I have, this is far from a unique incident and plenty of other users have attempted suicide following similar incidents, to the point some controversial users would even fake their deaths (that is, make a final post under that username while posing as a friend/loved one to inform the users' followers that the blog owner has "committed suicide" and/or pretend to be a friend/loved one and personally attack whichever user they had gotten into a disagreement with, only to still be alive and simply begin posting on a different blog) in order to garner pity (again, not sure if there is any recorded evidence of this, especially regarding the faked deaths, but considering how common of an occurrence this was there really should be more in this section besides this one incident).
 * Given Tumblr's notoriety for its users' approach to social justice, I'm shocked to see the only examples mentioned under the Politics section were evidence that the site had been utilized by Russian trolls to influence the 2016 election and hate speech content posted by a fringe population of Nazis and other white supremacists.
 * I just don't typically think "Nazis" when I think "problematic and/or controversial politics on Tumblr." When I think of political issues on Tumblr, again, I think of the userbase's obsession with moral purity and use of manipulative tactics to get people to "prove" that they "cared" about an issue, and the ways in which Tumblr's userbase has contributed to this problematic mindset wherein we believe that performative activism (i.e., reblogging a picture that says "reblog if you care about [insert issue here]" but offers no resources or advice on forwarding said cause) actually does much of anything at all.
 * There is a section in the article's Talk page titled, "Tumblr has been criticized for its liberalism content and high social justice warrior population?" pertaining to a (now deleted) edit made of the same name, but because it was 1. not ever properly cited 2. a politically-charged statement, it has since been deleted.
 * This is also fundamentally not the same criticism I feel needs to be referenced in the article.
 * Certain parts of the article (namely the "Features" section) read more like advertisements for Tumblr as opposed to neutral descriptions of the website's features.
 * The writing of the article can be a bit unclear or disorganized at times.
 * In the Inbox and messaging subsection of the Features section, it is stated that the Fan Mail feature is now defunct, but a sentence earlier on in the same subsection implies the Fan Mail feature is still operational.
 * The 2018 Adult Content Ban is discussed in two separate locations within the article. There is information about this incident that is present in one section of the article but not in the other (and vice versa), which prevents readers from getting the full picture as effectively as possible, and there is also information present in both sections written about this incident, which can feel repetitive.
 * Images are adequately-captioned but better images could have been selected to improve understanding of the website's format, especially of the Dashboard feature and a typical post format.
 * Most of the sources come from online news articles.
 * This is not particularly shocking, as news about social media sites with notably younger userbases are more likely to be covered in online news sources as opposed to, say, TV news. Additionally, most developments involving or regarding Tumblr happen very quickly, again reinforcing online news outlets as being the main source.
 * The Talk page is relatively small. Some of the things people tried to include in the article were funny, and the ways in which people responded to these requests was also funny.
 * The article on Tumblr is a C-Class article and is listed on the Companies, Websites/Computing, New York City, Blogging, Internet culture, and LGBT studies WikiProjects.
 * Overall, the most glaring thing to me about this article is its lack of balance. While the section on the history of the website's development, finances, and acquisitions is well fleshed-out, for a social networking service with as unique and notorious of a community as Tumblr's, there is very little in the article to paint a picture of the website's user culture.