User:Racheljoffe/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_culture

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article because we were discussing culture as a general term in class and applied it to our family dinners. I wanted to focus more specifically on Internet culture. This concept is important since the number of active Internet users is at an all-time high, with technology being such an important influence on society. These active users influence Internet culture through their everyday online actions and communications with each other. In order to positively impact Internet culture, one must understand what it is and its influences. Internet culture is also impacting everyday off-line life, and it's worth understanding its effects. My preliminary impression of the article is that it has a good-sized, unbiased overview that sets as a roadmap for the rest of the article. It is organized and split up in a chronological manner that helps the concept make more sense for the reader. Overall, before diving deep into the evaluation, this article seems to be considered a good-quality article.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The article provides a concise lead that focuses on the main topic of Internet culture by defining it. However, it does not provide a brief description of the article's major sections. I found that the content explicitly regarding culture was relevant to the topic. Other topics such as the history of the Internet, the social benefits of the Internet, and the social negatives of the Internet, were dragged out with information not relevant to the main topic of Internet culture. For example, the discussion of ARPANET and ISPs would have been more relevant in an article focusing on the Internet in general. The section titled "Identity – 'architectures of credibility'" fails to clearly define cyberculture and focuses on online community and credibility instead. Besides these issues, the content is up-to-date. The article maintains a neutral tone and does not try to persuade readers to believe a specific opinion. Different viewpoints are included in the description of various subcultures. In terms of sources, there are a lot of areas, especially at the beginning of the article, that say citation is needed. There are also areas that say unreliable source as a citation. The lack of strong and constant citations takes away from the article's credibility. On the other hand, the links included in the article do work. The article is well-written and organized in chronological order. I wish that more images were included to illuminate the different subcultures. Pictures of social media sites would have been helpful for the social media culture section, or pictures of memes would have helped the viral phenomenon section. While looking at the Talk page, I saw that the article was used in two Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignments, making it a seemingly good educational source. Past discussions mentioned how the article should provide a list of defined culture groups which the current article does possess. Someone else mentioned that the article does not relate to Internet culture at all. Overall, this article has the potential to become a valuable source. The structure and lead/overview are clear and concise. However, the content of the article is not all related to the specific concept of Internet culture. The history portion should be cut back and incorporate more ideas regarding culture directly. Cyberculture should also be defined and not used as a general umbrella term that confuses the reader. Although the content could have been better and lacked citations, the article was interesting and related to topics in our DTEM class.