User:Rumbleisred/Evaluate an Article

Kaylee Van Huss and Matthew Bright: Article Evaluation
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Mental disorder
 * Briefly describe why you have chosen this article to evaluate. We chose this article to evaluate because we didn't have any prior conception as to what we wanted to do. One of us (Kaylee Van Huss) is a psychology major, and, as such, though it would be useful to evaluate this article and potentially add viewpoints about mental illnesses from non-Western Cultures to the article.

Lead evaluation
The lead has a concise introductory sentence that explains the article's topic, a brief description of most the article's major sections, and it is precise, providing useful information without becoming overly detailed. It does not include any information that is not present in the article. In short, it is a very effective lead to the article.

Content evaluation
The content of the article is very relevant to the topic. As a Psychology Major, I have a pretty good idea of what should be present in a well-written overview of mental disorders, and this article does a good job of including all the major factors, including terminology, a list of major mental disorders, how disorders are diagnosed, the prevalence of various disorders, the sociocultural impacts on and opinions of mental illness, the risk factors for mental illness, and how mental illness presents in animals. There is very little missing content. The content also appears to be up-to-date, with most of the sources appearing to be less than twenty years old, and many being less than ten years old. However, there are some sections, particularly the sections that discuss mental illness and culture, which seem to need some more detail and more sources. (The section on the history of mental illness, in particular, seems to need several dozen more sources.)

Tone and balance evaluation
The article does a good job at remaining neutral. It avoids obvious biases, never appears to argue for or against a position, and is scrupulous to include conflicting theories on almost everything, from the effectiveness of the diagnostic system to the potential cultural biases of psychology as a whole to the effectiveness of treatment to the terminology itself. It actually seems to go out of its way to acknowledge the wide variety of differing opinions on almost every aspect of psychology. That being said, the traditional, Western view of psychology is undoubtedly dominant, probably due to the difficulties in finding easily accessible sources that express different points of view.

Sources and references evaluation
Most of the article's sources are fairly current. Almost all of the sources are less than twenty years old, and a good number of them are less than five years old. With 207 sources, many of which are articles from scientific journals, the article seems to have a very thorough set of sources, which seem to reflect the available literature on the topic. That being said, the parts of the article about the history and societal/cultural effects on and impacts of mental disorders seem like they need more sources. We will probably attempt to elaborate on the part of the article which discusses the views of mental illness in other cultures, as that part of the article has a rather limited number of sources. All things considered, though, the article does good work with its sources-it just needs more of them.

Organization

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article well-written - i.e. Is it concise, clear, and easy to read?
 * Does the article have any grammatical or spelling errors?
 * Is the article well-organized - i.e. broken down into sections that reflect the major points of the topic?

Organization evaluation
The article appears to be well-written, on the whole. It is generally concise and easy to read, and it is easy to understand. It doesn't have any particularly noticeable spelling errors, and it is very well-organized.

Images and Media

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the article include images that enhance understanding of the topic?
 * Are images well-captioned?
 * Do all images adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations?
 * Are the images laid out in a visually appealing way?

Images and media evaluation
The article includes a variety of images. Most of the pictures do enhance the understanding of the topic, and they are fairly well-captioned. There are one or two images that I found to be slightly random, but, on the whole, they are effective and have been laid out in a visually appealing manner. Furthermore, the images adhere to the copyright regulations proscribed by Wikipedia. It is, in short, very effective in its use of images.

Checking the talk page

 * Guiding questions


 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Talk page evaluation
The article is rated as a C-level article, and it is a part of a variety of WikiProjects: Psychology, Psychiatry, Autism, Sociology, and Disability. There are several suggestions about how to make the article more precise (using more exact terminology, providing more details about a topic, removing outdated diagnoses, etc.), and there are also a few complimentary responses to changes that have been made. However, there is surprisingly little discussion on the talk page, all things considered.

Overall impressions

 * Guiding questions


 * What is the article's overall status?
 * What are the article's strengths?
 * How can the article be improved?
 * How would you assess the article's completeness - i.e. Is the article well-developed? Is it underdeveloped or poorly developed?

Overall evaluation
The article is very good at providing an organized overview of the important aspects of mental disorders. It effectively presents an unbiased viewpoint and uses a wide variety of sources, most of them reliable. It is a well-put together article overall. However, there seem to be a few images that may perhaps be out of place, and there are a few sections, particularly in the history and sociocultural sections, where information seems lacking or where facts are not properly cited. The article is well-developed in most places, but poorly developed in those two areas, and we can probably improve upon those areas with our research.