User:Sammy Tavassoli/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article
This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.


 * Name of article: Face perception
 * Briefly describe why you have chosen this article to evaluate: It's a C-Class article (on a topic I'm interested in) that's related to human perception processes.

Lead

 * Guiding questions


 * Does the Lead include an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic?
 * Does the Lead include a brief description of the article's major sections?
 * Does the Lead include information that is not present in the article?
 * Is the Lead concise or is it overly detailed?

Lead evaluation
The Lead's introductory sentence is concise in terms of just length, but it does not accurately describe the article's topic because it omits information, such as the fact that a key part of face perception is the ability to distinguish human faces from other objects or animal faces. The lead overall also overemphasizes details not particularly emphasized in the article, such as infant facial perception and prosopagnosia (i.e. only details discussed in the first few sections), while failing to mention any details about facial perception's relationship to memory recall, genetics, or ethnicity. And, it doesn't even begin to cover sections on AI technology and facial perception, or how the latter is affected by schizophrenia and autism, which all constituted major sections of the article.

Content

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
 * Is the content up-to-date?
 * Is there content that is missing or content that does not belong?

Content evaluation
The contents in the first few sections are holistically detailed and relevant to the topic headers they fall under. However, there was one instance of traumatic brain injury being briefly discussed in the section on facial processing in individuals with ASD. Additionally, the content was mostly up-to-date, coming from articles as recent as 2019, although the singular 2019 article reference (Nemrodov et al.) was listed only in the body of the article, not in the references. The articles listed in the references were published as recently as 2017. In general, the article sometimes delved very deeply into information about the drawbacks and methodological errors in particular face processing studies, which was interesting but could've been better summarized to reflect a focus on the actual article topic over research methods. Some smaller sections were also left with only a few sentences when there was more information I could see out there from a simple google search.

Tone and Balance

 * Guiding questions


 * Is the article neutral?
 * Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * Does the article attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another?

Tone and balance evaluation
The majority of the article maintained an objective tone, with a neutral approach that included numerous research studies and experiments surrounding the same subtopics to summarize the general body of research surrounding them. As an exception, the section on artificial intelligence systems of face processing focused primarily on two studies by one research team, Nemrodov et al., supplying much "original research" in the sense of a singular group's conclusions being phrased as though they were absolutely factual. This misrepresented the current state of research on artificial face processing by leading readers to favor the aforementioned research team's conclusions, as hardly any others were represented. The Development section similarly fell victim to much original research and included direct quotes, as opposed to paraphrases, from primary research studies. Other subsections or smaller sections (e.g. the sections on self-perception and other animals) focused on only 2-3 studies' conclusions, but none were as biased as the former two as it appeared the author at least made an attempt to paraphrase multiple sources for just a few sentences' (as opposed to paragraphs') worth of content.

Sources and References

 * Guiding questions


 * Are all facts in the article backed up by a reliable secondary source of information?
 * Are the sources thorough - i.e. Do they reflect the available literature on the topic?
 * Are the sources current?
 * Check a few links. Do they work?

Sources and references evaluation
Most of the facts are backed up by a source of information, but a significant portion of them seem to be from primary source articles with only one study's conclusions. The source links in the references I clicked did work and were open access, excluding some with permanent dead links that need to be replaced. The sources, much like the content provide historical information on facial processing, as well as studies conducted within the last five years. But, as stated previously, there was heavy source bias in a few sections that led me to believe the sources did not reflect the range of available literature on each subtopic, like artificial face processing and even some portions of the Development section, which went as far as to include direct quotes from primary articles that were not under a creative commons license. Meanwhile, some portions of the Adult section included numerous sources for each sentence and strayed away from referencing only one or two studies' individual findings as standalone ones.

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 organization of the overarching subsections (headers) is actually quite well done, and there are few minor spelling/grammatical errors, most of which can be understood though simple intuition (such as "face" being in place of "fact"). The language was usually concise and clear enough, but there were some overly technical sections (such as the ones that discuss individual experiment specifics and research methods). There were few to no few long and windy run-on sentences, meaning the content was relatively readable for a person with some technical research background, with some blips here and there. The subsection were aptly chosen and covered much of the important information about face processing, but some of them were a bit unbalanced, just because of the types of content emphasized within them (i.e. only focusing on a few studies and not including enough information to cover the topic holistically). The Development and Adult sections, though with some bias and sourcing issues, actually included enough breadth of content to fully reflect how pertinent those subtopics are to the field of facial processing in the brain.

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
There are exactly zero images in this article. They have no captions, aren't visually appealing, and do not adhere to copyright regulations because they don't exist.

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
Most of the conversations regard sourcing errors, altering content for conciseness/readability, and adding additional information to existing content, including sections on animal facial perception, the relationship between Chinese characters and facial recognition, and face blindness. There are also a few arguments about the amount of racism inherent to studies on ethnicity and facial perceptions, along with the language used to discuss such studies. Additionally, the top message indicates the necessity for altering the Lead. The article is rated C-Class, mid-importance, being of interest to the WikiProjects on Psychology and Neuroscience.

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 indeed needs much work, especially to balance out the sections/subsections, improve the Lead, decease source bias, increase readability for the average person, and expand on the body of sources referenced. The article's strengths lied in its degree of readability for those with a technical background, relevance of information, and the sheer amount of information it contained in the more expansive sections on Development and Adult face perception. It also was well-organized in terms of the section headers it included, but not in terms of the information those sections contained.

Optional activity

 * Choose at least 1 question relevant to the article you're evaluating and leave your evaluation on the article's Talk page. Be sure to sign your feedback

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 * Link to feedback: No.