User:Roggemaj/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Schizophrenia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because it is one of the psychological disorders that we cover in our class readings and I wanted to gain a better understanding on it. My preliminary impressions of the article is that it is very well written, it is a featured article, and it is obvious that a lot of time has been put into developing it. It is very detailed and well put together.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The lead section of the article on Schizophrenia contained a concise and clear introductory sentence. It included a brief description of the major sections and all information was presented in a properly cited manner.

Content

The content is very relevant to the topic and covers key aspects such as signs and symptoms, diagnosis, prevention and history. The content is up-to-date with info provided being as recent as 2019 & 2020. There does not seem to be any missing content and everything within the article fits its story line. This article does not deal with one of Wikipedia's equity gap or does not address topics related to historically underrepresented populations

Tone and Balance

The article is written in a neutral point of view. There aren't any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position but the section on substance use referred to a marijuana strain incorrectly, saying that "One of these strains is well known as skunk." This small mistake could erode the effort of highlighting the detrimental effects of adolescence usage of marijuana to certain readers that view marijuana as good simply because it seems the author isn't well educated on the subject. All the viewpoints had equal representation. There were no minority or fringe view points and the article did not attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another.

Sources and References

All facts in the article are backed up by a reliable secondary source of information and the sources are thorough, written by a diverse spectrum of authors and the necessary information such as data is current. The article does not include historically marginalized individuals where possible. Over 300 sources where used in the writing of this article varying from a wide range of peer-reviewed article to government data websites. The links provided for the sources work.

Organization and writing quality
The writing was clear and professional and the content was organized very clearly. It was broken down into important sections with most of them having a link to more information for the reader. It was not the easiest article to read due to a lot of complex statements that necessitate a deeper understanding of the topic.

Images and Media
The article contained images that helped enhance the understanding of the topic, all were well captioned and adhered to Wikipedia's copyright regulations. The images could have been laid out in a more visually appealing way and more images could have been utilized in more sections.

Talk page discussion
The article is FA-rated which means its a featured article. It is part of multiple WikiProjects. There where a couple conversations in the talk page. Three discussions revolved around changing either a sentence structure or word. One discussed how they believe that Schizophrenia is a "hypothetical disease", this person was strongly refuted and a limit was put on his editing capabilities. One discussion brought up the same point as myself and pointed out that skunk weed is not a strain of weed but more of a street name for it as a whole. Finally, the last discussion had a problem with a source used for data and thought it wasn't acceptable but the author responded with a proper reason.

Overall impressions
My overall impression of the article is that it is very well written and well-developed. The strengths of the article are the proper coverage of all the sections that relate to the disease and the plenitude of sources for readers to follow. The article only needs small improvements such as keeping up to date on current statistics, improving on the section of substance abuse and adding in more images for a better visual flow.