User:Rjrno3300/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Search algorithm

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article as the topic of search algorithms is something I've become more and more interested in recently. The article is fairly dense, but in terms of structure, tone, and some things related to the content, it can definitely be edited to be more effective and informative.

Evaluate the article
The lead section provides a good introduction but I think it focusses too much on the wrong things. First off, the introductory sentence is very good. While it can maybe be simplified a little bit further, the external links provide ways to understand any unfamiliar terms. Where the lead section gets messy is the elaboration provided directly after the introductory sentence. While practical applications of search algorithms are important, it's placement in the article and nature of the writing/content makes the article very confusing very quickly and does not ease in to the more specific and complex information for this topic. This section would be a good spot to do overviews for the articles sections and subsections and a more concise manner. Overall this section could be a little bit shorter and provide more of an overview and introduction rather than jumping right into the content.

While the body of the article is good and contains relevant and up-to-date content, the structure makes the article feel empty. It uses the section "Classes" to organize multiple sub-sections, but the one umbrella topic encompasses all of the content currently in the article. If there was more content and other overarching topics, this would be a great structure for these sections. But, since it is all one section, it should be 4 different main sections. Additonally, the final 2 subsections could be expanded upon to be on par with the first two, but all content currently in there is relevant, up-to-date, and informative.

While the article is written neutrally and are not biased toward any specific viewpoint, the article could have a more accessible tone so any uninformed reader would learn and benefit from reading the article. Aside from that, this article does not have issues regarding tone and balance.

This article definitely suffers from a lack of diverse sources. There is one article and one book that account for the 6 citations included in the entirety of the article. While the sources are likely recent enough to provide the information they're used for (one source was published in '98 and one is '02), it is highly likely there are more recent sources with new information that can be added on to the current content. Finally, the in-article links do work and lead to other functioning wikipedia articles.

In terms of organization and writing quality, as stated before, the structure and writing quality can be altered to be more clear and allow people with limited understanding of the topic to benefit more from the article. There are minimal grammar errors with the current writing.

There is one image currently in the article and it is informative and captioned well. It's only issue is its placement in the article. It should be moved closer to the discussion of hash functions and not at the very top of the page. More images and graphics like this one would definitely be very helpful for the article.

Many of the talk page discussions include structure issues and a couple of examples of misinformation included in the article. It is currently rated Start-Class and is in the WikiProject Computer science.

Overall, this article is decent for what it is, but can use many improvements to reach its full potential. It's biggest weaknesses are structure, language, and lack of content and working on those things will drastically raise the quality of the article. It's strengths lie in the current content included in the article, even if much more can be added. I would currently asses this article as under-developed.