User:Pebbles-310/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
American Eagle Outfitters

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose American Eagle Outfitters because it is a store in which I shop at from time to time. AEO (as it is often referred to as) had made many commitments and have marketed themselves as sustainable and making efforts in order to better the planet. The company has tons of efforts that are supposed to accumulate to help the betterment of the planet. Overall, my preliminary impressions of the article was that there is not much information on the improvements and strides that they as a company have presented into their global commerce.

Evaluate the article
The lead of my article does well at providing an overview of American Eagle and the foundations on which it was built. However, as it will be a common theme throughout my evaluation the article there is no indication of the company's work in sustainability and its climate efforts. Each section in which the article goes into more details of the development, headquarters, subsidiaries, and controversies to name a few; each subheading and lead gives information into the subheadings will be about. Moreover, the overall lead does not give any information about any of the other subsections.

The original article contains content that is directly connected to the topic of the company. The content includes its history, AEOs finances, its stores and sister companies and the issues that have arose over the years the company has been established. The content present is relatively up to date, the newest date/ research statistics that I saw on the site was 2020. So in terms of relatively, yes the site is up to date. However there was a lot of research that has been done since that was left out of the article. For instance any of the current financial statements would no the on this site. Additionally, in my own research I found the 2022 fiscal report that not only gave more recent research of their contributions but it also showed more of the progression and strives that the company has been after. In relationship to Wikipedia's equity gaps, the article I selected does not dive into the topics in regards to underrepresented topics or populations.

The article in itself was very neutral. It was factual and gave a timeline and information regarding the company. The majority of the article is more factual based upon how the company progressed and came to be. With this in mind there was no room for bias towards a stance or position. This also allowed for the content to be more factual as it is presented rather than an informal presentation of the information. Since the tone is neutral and focused on facts and evidence rather than onion, the article does not attempt to persuade the reader to believe one viewpoint over another.

When reviewing the sources where the evidence was cultivated for this article, it appears that the information comes from reputable sources. Many of the sources include evidence from the company as a whole such as its revenue forms such as ones that AEO files as well as from the government. It also sites sources that have reported on the company such as large news companies like USA Today and Wall Street Journal to name a few. Since the information is coming from reputable sources, this is where the history comes into play. There are well known journalist within the companies that are reporting however, there does not appear to be large and historical names within the article by themselves. With this in mind the information is relatively current. The articles are within the past 5 years which to many information is relatively current. The information could be updated as the 2023 fiscal year reports are filled as well as the company's ESG report as it is filled in the coming months. When looking through the links, at least the ones that I clicked on they work.

The article is organized and concise. If a viewer were look at the left hand side of the article they can see the topics that are covered within the article that flow well into each other without repeating the same information. Furthermore, the article does not appear to have any grammatical nor spelling errors.

The article utilizes photos of brick and mortar stories to show what the company itself looks like. Other than photos of the stores, there is a lack of diversity among the photos in the article. Although the pictures are nearly identical, the article gives a brief write up about where the photos were taken as well as the difference of the photos between headquarters, Aerie, and AEO storefronts. In my personal opinion the photos seem t be haphazardly thrown on the sides of the article rather than being actually intergraded into the article.

The most recent discussion on the talk page of the article is to have article have an audio version of the article be produced. This falls under the WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia and has the rationale since the company is a well known clothing manufacture and retailer within the United States, so the information should be more widely accessible for consumers and possible consumers to be able to access the information.

The article does well on giving an overview of AEO and its sister companies. This also includes giving information that dates further back covering a wider scope of information that the common reader may not have known such as the strikes that the company has been on, as well as its lawsuits that have been brushed off over the companies history. Although it does well in informing the average viewer of the companies past, I think that the article needs to be updated with recent information since much of its information comes from around 2020 which is slightly dated when you dive into how much the company has grown and progressed since the start of the pandemic sand the years that followed it. Disregarding the slightly outdated information, the article is very well developed. And gets a lot of information forward to its viewers over a wide verity of topics regarding AEO as a company.