User:Oreyes92/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Political communication

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
To be completely honest, selecting this article actually took quite some time because of a few reasons. When I began my search for the right article to evaluate, I began by going into each one of the three options of the types of articles that were provided which were: Academic disciplines, C-class articles, and WikiProject. After searching through the three options individually, i was rudely awakened by how many articles Wikipedia actually contained which shouldn't be a surprise, but it did catch me off guard. With that said, there was too many articles to go through so I ended up resorting to only looking at articles with topics of my interest. Once I narrowed down my search, my next issue was actually finding an article that was worth evaluating and I say that because 80% of the articles i wanted to dive into had insufficient content to read so it almost felt like I was not going to benefit from the assignment. My next strategy was to go into the communication category to find something relevant in todays world where I found this Article on Political communication. I saw this specific article to be a great one to evaluate due to the relevancy of todays political tension and believe that how political communication could be a culprit. Not only is it relevant, it was also labeled a "Start-class" article which pulled me in more due to the fact it was an article that could be good practice on editing.

Evaluate the article
 Lead Section 

Once I began reading the lead/introduction section of the article, I would have to say it was good enough to grasp the concept of what the article will be about as well as reading the title itself. However, I don't believe that it included enough details to really explain what may be involved with "political communication". For instance, the first sentence did well enough to introduce the topic at hand by giving a short description of "political communication" itself, but it is then followed by a couple sentences that get into the computational portion of communication and how the world wide web is taking over. i understand the importance of this, but the first few sentences could've been connected differently or maybe could've used an extra sentence explaining "political communication" a little more and then transitioning into the third sentence. Other than that, the lead was not misinforming about the article and hit key topics that will be discussed throughout the article.

Content

As I dove into the actual content of the article, I would have to say that it doesn't have the strongest evidence or areas of research for something so complex as political communication. It does hit on some key points such as the roles of social media when it comes to campaigning as well as elaborating on certain methods a former president used in regard to "political communication, but in all honestly, the article is missing a lot of other more important components to this specific topic. One example of missing information is or content that could be added in to help explain or show the significance of political communication would be to use a wider range of historical examples from all over the world, not just the USA, such as Hitler and any studies on how his communication was successful, or even somehow using Martin Luther King Jr and somehow tying that into the article as well. Aside from more content being needed, I also noticed that the one contemporary example that was included was not really looked at from multiple angles and in a way was looked at the wrong way. What I mean by that is how the Bush example is sort of looked at with a negative connotation and is leaning on the side instead of showing other ways the Bush administration used effective communication. On top of that, I also feel that it goes a little to in detail with the example and almost drifts away from the main point of communication by speaking on what happened instead of correlating the occurrence to communication.

 Tone and Balance 

When it comes to the tone and balance if the article, I would have to say that it is fairly neutral. I did not notice any type of bias while reading the article and it also didn't really have viewpoints that were overrepresented or underrepresented, but rather content that was under looked and other that was overlooked. With that said, there wasn't a position that the writer tried pushing me towards since this article is more of an informative one and was almost written in a way where the writer was just regurgitating information and facts about this specific topic.

 Sources and References 

Finding sources and making sure they are credible along with making sure they are getting cited correctly was never a strong suit of mine in my academic career. With that said, it is also difficult for me to judge or evaluate when others do it. However, upon inspecting the references within this article, I was able to find a few links that lead to missing pages("page was not found") as well as books that i was unable to locate. Maybe I am still trying to adapt to Wikipedia and I may have been navigating the page incorrectly, but for me personally, it has always been a challenge to find solid sources and to cite correctly. From the little knowledge i do have on citations and sources, I was able to find some scholarly journals, Harvard university links, school databases, and a few textbooks which are for the most part decent sources to use for information. As far as how current they are, a majority of the sources are dated from 2013 and newer which, in my eyes, perfectly fine especially with this specific topic. Additionally, these sources all provided relevant information to political communication and all have and can contribute to the available literature regarding this topic.

 Organization and Writing Quality 

As far as organization i would have to give it a 6 out 10 and a 8/10 for quality of the writing. I give the organization a 6 due to a few reasons one being the lack of content within the article as a whole. With not enough content, its almost all written in 3 large paragraphs instead of being broken down into subsections or somehow including subheadings within each of the 3 paragraphs to make it easier for a reader to digest. If there were to be more content and topics to talk about then maybe it would be easier to break it down further. Other than the structure of the writing, I was not able to find any grammatical or spelling errors and the type of language used in the article was easy to follow, and somewhat concise.

 Images and Media 

Unfortunately this article does not include any images or any sort of media which is understandable for this specific topic. However, there could've been some sort of picture that displays a political leader standing up on a podium that could have fit in with the theme of the article. Also, having images could also just help with the interaction of the readers and provides a "heartwarming" type feeling when reading instead of having to read pages and page of strictly words.

 Talk Page Discussion 

The talk page of this particular article is actually not as active as one would assume especially for a topic such as political communication. The talk page only has 3 comments that all have to do with editing the article in one way or another and there wasn't much actual conversation. The article itself is listed as a level-5 vital article and has also been rated a Start-Class which makes sense because it is an article that is incomplete in some ways and does not cite enough reliable sources. This article is also a part of 3 WikiProjects which include: WikiProjects Politics, WikiProject Media, and WikiProject Telecommunications.

 Overall Impressions 

Overall, this article and topic of discussion is one that can be elaborated on greatly and has the potential to be a great article. With that said, this article is definitely a work in progress, but nonetheless, it has began in the right direction and could be a lot better. As mentioned before, the structure of the article itself could be better by adding more contemporary examples of political communication which allows us to hit different angles of this topic, therefore improving the understanding of it. Also, adding more content/examples will allow to edit the written structure of the article by breaking it down into more sections or subheadings and this, in essence, also helps digest the information. All in all, the article has a good basis/platform that can be expanded and it does need some work, but I do not see a struggle in finding more information for political communication especially with multiple studies on communication methods and how they are applied within politics.