User:Rhya Evans/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating the article Maternal Health.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen to evaluate this article as I am very interested in maternal health and have some background knowledge in this area. In addition, my preliminary impression of it was that it had a lot repetition and an unbalanced amount of information across subsections.

Lead section
The lead section successfully defined the topic, maternal health, but did not do so concisely. Within the three first sentences the same definition was repeated twice with slight variation in wording. The rest of this section does mention a few the article's major topics including health dimensions/practices, mortality, and solutions. More should be included on other important sections such as factors influencing maternal health.

Content
The article covers many aspects of the topic maternal health. While all of the content is relevant to the topic, too much weight was placed on the importance of oral hygiene. I think this section can be condensed. The article does mention the disproportionate impact of maternal mortality among Black women in the U.S. This could be a section on its own as it is a major equity issue.

Tone and Balance
The article does a good job being written from a neutral point of view. It does a good job providing race and ethnicity as well as minority religion focused viewpoints.

Sources and References
This article used many great sources mostly from academic and peer-reviewed publications that were current. There were many sections that had haphazard parenthetical references in addition to footnotes making it difficult to follow. The links in the reference list work.

Organization and writing quality
The article was poorly organized. As mentioned in the lead section there was repetition as well as a lack of clarity. There were two sections addressing maternal mortality- one at the beginning and one at the end, and some sections were much longer than others yet not more relevant to the topic. The section on proposed solutions, preceding that on the SDGs, mentioned the approaching 2015 deadline for the MDGs. Revisions need to be made to make the article more current.

Images and Media
The article's images are mixed in terms of effectiveness. The figure looking a global maternal mortality rates is great. The one on global fertility rates could be more effective if contextualized and discussed in the body of the article. The logo of the MDG should be in the section titled proposed solutions where they are discussed.

Talk page discussion
The talk page includes many important discussions some raising similar issues to what is listed here. It has been part of three different WikiProjects which have all rated it as C-class and top or high-importance. Many point out the confusing structure, and a too narrow focus on maternal mortality.

Overall impressions
Overall I think parts of this article successfully present major points of this topic. However, a lot of restructuring and organization should be made. The article is fragmented, repetitive at times, and lacks flow. Aspects of maternal health beyond mortality and morbidity could be expanded.