User:Santino1965/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: Authorship and ownership in copyright law in Canada
 * This was one of the assigned articles which professor Akers had made available to us.

Lead

 * Guiding questions

The Lead has a decent introductory sentence. Although it uses the word "important" two times and it has a fragmented structure. This makes it harder to read and follow. That seemed to be a main point of distraction for me while reading. The Lead does include a brief description of the article's major sections, but it is written in a way similar to how a thesis statement is written. For me, that is concerning. Also, the lead is overly detailed and has a lot of wordiness in its two run-on sentences.


 * 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?

Content

 * Guiding questions
 * The article's content is for the most part relevant to the topic. I am unsure if the content is up-to-date. I think there is a need for this Wikipedia article to be updated, because the most recent source cited is one from 2011. I think there's a lot of content in this article that shouldn't necessarily be there. The primary extraneous content is 2 or 3 sentences at the second to last paragraph of the article which give information about the NYT Co. v. Tasini case.


 * 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?

Tone and Balance

 * Guiding questions
 * A big problem with this article is the fact that it is not neutral. There are more than a handful of instances throughout the article where the creator of the page expresses his/her opinion about the information he/she is describing. I would say that this article has multiple viewpoints which are heavily biased toward a particular position.
 * The following quoted chunks are paragraphs from the article which are full of the author's opinions and contain noticeable biased views:

"When taken to its logical conclusion, this view of the law would seem to be clearly inconsistent with section 2.1(2) because to hold that the copyright owner of the compilation has a positive right to reproduce the compilation necessarily decreases the copyright in the constituent works. The copyright in a constituent element is decreased as soon as the compilation is created because there would come to be no copyright infringement remedy as against the copyright owner of the compilation."

"Justice Abella's statement in paragraphs 82 and 83 also raises questions because she justifies the grant of positive rights to reproduce compilations based on the reason that...

she is enlisting contract law in support of the grant of a copyright. However, this reasoning is questionable in this particular case."


 * 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?

Sources and References

 * Guiding questions
 * All the facts in the article do seem to be backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. The sources don't necessarily seem to be that current, given that the most recent one is from 2011. The links do work. One curious thing is that there are an abundant amount of citations for one source, namely the "Copyright Act". Although I don't think there's a big problem with this, but all of those citations refer to the Wikipedia page called Copyright Act of Canada, as opposed to the site of the actual Canadian law (document) itself. Additionally, as is stated in the orange "!" template message at the top of the article, there is an unclear citation style used in the references section for this article. Overall, there are only a few references that contain links that take the user to sites other than Wikipedia.


 * 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?

Checking the talk page

 * Guiding questions
 * There is no conversation going on in the talk page of this Wikipedia article. However, there is a comment about a "title change" made by a wikipedia editor back in 2011. Also, it states that this article "is the subject of an educational assignment at University of Toronto" back in 2011.
 * We have not yet gotten to talking or studying about this topic in my class, but I can imagine there will be differences in the way the material is structured. For example, this is more of an overview of a specific feature of copyright law, while I presume what we will learn in my class will be cases, challenges, and controversies/problems related to this specific feature of copyright law.


 * 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?

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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