User:Patriciatrinidad19/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The article that I am evaluating is Cancel culture.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
One of the main reasons why I chose to evaluate this article is because the process of "canceling" people has garnered a lot of attention from a lot of people on different sides of the spectrum. Not only has "cancel culture" become a spectacle in society, but it has also become very normalized and accepted in mainstream media. As someone who participates in social media, I cannot escape cancel culture, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to assess the Wikipedia article on this topic. To me, this matters because my generation (Gen Z) has played an instrumental role in the revival of cancel culture. Because of this, I want to figure out what has driven Gen Z to want to hold people accountable for their actions, and in turn, "cancel" them in the process. When I first heard of "cancel culture," my preliminary impression of this topic was pretty plain and simple. I thought it meant that people criticize people, specifically non-famous people cancel famous figures, when their actions do not align with the public’s morals.

Evaluate the article
From the beginning, the article details "cancel culture," and the contributors included four different references, which supports their definition of the concept. These citations included links and DOIs from websites and scholarly articles. The article also does a good job of summarizing its content, however, it seems to be lack a sentence around the header: "Academic analysis." One major inconsistency that I noticed in the lead section was that there are many references to "critics" and "others," showing that we need to find sources that corroborate these statements. Aside from that, the lead section lays a good foundation for what is to come in the article.

In terms of content, this article seems to be in line with what is prevalent in today's modern society. For instance, under the header "Origins," the article mentions the following impactful movements: the #MeToo Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement. These movements are used in this article to demonstrate how oppressed people want to hold parties responsible for their harmful actions toward them. As I have mentioned before, the header "Academic analysis" is left out in the lead section, but it serves as a great source of information. This is because, for the most part, the sources used are from scholarly journals and articles and there are many professors providing their input and research about how the concept "cancel culture" or "call-out culture" has taken shape and embedded itself into our society. One more note I would like to make is that, the term "call-out culture" distracted me because I was unsure of whether it acted as a synonym to "cancel culture," but after re-reading the article, it does. If I could improve something on this article, I would edit the definition of "cancel culture" and incorporate "call-out culture" to not confuse readers.

The majority of this article seems to be neutral as it does not use adjectives that gives the impression that it is biased. In fact, contributors have incorporated a section devoted to statistics of how the American public has reacted to "cancel culture." However, I think one overrepresented viewpoint is that some claim that "cancel culture" is not a "phenomena," so I think incorporating a portion that contradicts this could balance these statements.

After looking through the reference page, I noticed that all the links I clicked on worked. I think it was great that some DOIs even took me to Sage Journals and different University databases. One popular source that is used throughout this article is The New York Times, and from my experience, that website has always been trustworthy source. However, something I noticed in this article is that not all the facts have a reference at the end of the sentences.

One major thing I noticed in this article is that most sections have the same amount of content, except the headers "Consequence culture" and "Open Letter." I think the most concerning is "Consequence culture" because this term is allegedly trying to replace "cancel culture" so I do not understand why the passage is not bigger. I believe that if they are trying to retitle this concept, we should know why people are doing it.

In this article, there are no images or media; however, if I were to work on this article, I would add images of different events, people, or things that have been "called-out." For example, I would add pictures of public figures like Woody Allen, Kanye West, Donald Trump, or Brett Kavanaugh, who have all experienced being "canceled."

My overall impression on this article is that the base and ground is there, but it needs some improvements, particularly around verifying statements to really make it a reliable article. While this article is classified as a "Start-Class" article, it has the potential to become popular in the U.S. and in Internet Culture. The article's strengths to me is that it provides different perspectives of how people perceive this concept. Finally, I think this is an underdeveloped article, but with some edits here and there, it will make up for its current flaws.