User:Ree73/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Rorschach test

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the Rorschach test is something we talked about in class that I was surprised to learn about, and it is something that occurs in popular media often and that people (myself included, prior to our discussion of it in class) may have incorrect ideas about. My first impression of the page is that it is very detailed and appears to have a lot of information, but it also includes "popular responses" to the actual test stimuli, which strikes me as potentially problematic given that it could influence readers' responses if they ever take the test themselves.

Evaluate the article
The Lead Section

The lead section of the article has an introductory sentence that defines/explains the article's topic, and the full section provides a good introduction to the topic. It also provides a balanced assessment, acknowledging the many criticisms of the instrument in the second paragraph. The lead is concise and does not include information not included in the article, but is not totally organized around the article's major sections, which could lend a little more direction to the article.

Content

The article's content is relevant to the topic, but some of it appears to be somewhat out of date (e.g., information about usage of the Rorschach test -- citations about its use in the United States tend to be from 2009 or earlier). It does not appear to be missing any critical content, but the content that it does have could be updated (especially considering more recent discussion of the use of the test in court settings and for diagnostic purposes). I would say that this article does not address any of Wikipedia's equity gaps, and if there is specific information about the use of the test with members of underrepresented or marginalized groups, it is not discussed in the article, though there a brief discussion of cultural differences in the scoring of the test/responses to the test in the Method section.

Tone and Balance

The article does a good job of presenting controversy about the test in a neutral way, and it usually reports the sources of its critical claims (though there are some places where references should be added; e.g., "It is also thought[by whom?] that the test's reliability can depend substantially on details of the testing procedure, such as where the tester and subject are seated, any introductory words, verbal and nonverbal responses to subjects' questions or comments, and how responses are recorded"). Overall, though, the article does not seem to have a persuasive tone but an informative one, and fringe or minority viewpoints are clearly presented as such (e.g., "Cancer is mentioned because a small minority of Rorschach enthusiasts have claimed the test can predict cancer").

Sources and References

As stated, many of the sources could be updated/more recent, but they do seem to be largely reliable (most of the sources are from books from reliable publishers or peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Personality Assessment), and the links I tried do work. However, in some places, "citation needed" has been added to the article, or citations are simply missing (e.g., "The Rorschach test is used almost exclusively by psychologists"; "Supporters of the Rorschach inkblot test believe that the subject's response to an ambiguous and meaningless stimulus can provide insight into their thought processes, but it is not clear how this occurs"). Some of the sources aren't entirely neutral either -- for example, John Exner's book is cited when discussing the reliability of the Exner scoring system. Generally, however, there appear to be solid citations for most statements, and if citations to news sites or public opinion pieces are used, they are usually included to describe public opinion/media controversy, not to provide factual information about the test.

Organization and Writing Quality

The article is somewhat well-organized, and has many subheadings, particularly in the Method and Controversy sections, which are very long sections. Many of the sentences in this article are extremely long, and it could be beneficial to break them into multiple sentences to improve readability (e.g., "More than any other feature in the test, content response can be controlled consciously by the subject, and may be elicited by very disparate factors, which makes it difficult to use content alone to draw any conclusions about the subject's personality; with certain individuals, content responses may potentially be interpreted directly, and some information can at times be obtained by analyzing thematic trends in the whole set of content responses (which is only feasible when several responses are available), but in general content cannot be analyzed outside of the context of the entire test record"). This single sentence takes up an entire paragraph in the article, and is very difficult to understand. Breaking sentences like this up into multiple shorter sentences would greatly improve the writing quality of this article.

Images and Media

The images in the article are informative, well-captioned, and seem to all be in the public domain. However, there have been several debates on the article's Talk page and in various media outlets about whether or not to include the images from the actual test in the article (see below).

Talk Page Discussion

This article is of interest to the Psychology, Medicine, and Skepticism WikiProjects and has been rated B-class by all three. Many, likely even most, of the conversations on the article's Talk Page have been about the controversy regarding whether publishing the actual images from the test and common reactions/interpretations of them on Wikipedia is damaging in that it could invalidate the test for those exposed to this information before they take it. There have even been journal articles published in the Journal of Personality Assessment and other peer-reviewed journals about this debate, and several such articles are cited in this article.

Overall Impressions

Overall, this article is well developed, but it could be improved by the inclusion of updated sources and some more recent arguments about the Rorschach test's usefulness, particularly in forensic and diagnostic contexts. The section "In art and media," which is currently very short, could also be expanded. Perhaps some of the media controversy regarding the publication of the images could be moved to this section so that the main Controversy section could be purely focused on controversy and skepticism regarding the reliability and validity of the test itself. The writing quality also could be improved by breaking some of the very long sentences into shorter, more easily understood, sentences. As we discussed it in class, the Rorschach test can be useful in therapeutic settings, but should probably not be used for diagnosis or in court. The article notes that the Rorschach is not often challenged in court, but, as we learned in class, that does not mean it is reliable. More of those arguments should be emphasized in this article and the sources should be updated to make it more accurate and informative.