User:Scienceman1936/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
1912 United States presidential election

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the 1912 Election since it is one of the most interesting Presidential Elections to me - it was the main election which caused the Progressive wing of the GOP to break from the party. Wilson's victory due to vote splitting directly influenced 20th Century History - his election directly impacted US policy up until the present. Due to the importance of the election, it important that the article for the election is accurate and up to Wikipedia's standards

Evaluate the article
Lead Article


 * The introduction sentence clearly defined the topic of the article.
 * Generally provided a good overview of the article in the lead section.
 * Some sections which include information not in the article, but mostly facts/historical records
 * Pretty concise
 * Hardly any citations in the lead

Good Parts

The content of the article is pretty up-to-date with modern historiography, and the content of the article is largely relevant to the topic. Most of the topics covered in the article include stuff like statistics, data, and events directly relevant to the election. The tone of the article is also largely takes an unbiased tone, with the tone not favoring a particular viewpoint, candidate, or party. The article is well organized, clearly separating the background, campaign, and results sections in a logical manor. The images are all either period-images in the public domain, and are relevant to the section.

Bad Parts

The article has a massive lack of citations during large portions of the article. In particular, the convention sections for all 4 candidates have little to no citations about the narratives (The raw vote numbers have citations). Except for the section on the assassination attempt on Roosevelt, there are only two citations on the entire general election section of the article. There are multiple citation needed warnings as well. The article has an issue with the amount of focus given to each candidate. For instance, the Roosevelt sections are currently pretty underdeveloped compared to the sections on Wilson, Taft, or Debs (Who was a minor party candidate). Something that I question is the large amount of focus given to the Debs campaign compared to their vote count and impact on the race - especially compared to the relatively less time given to the other three campaigns (Over half of the general election section is on Debs - someone who only got 6% of the vote). While Debs's 1912 campaign is historically significant - it was the most successful Socialist Party campaign in American history - I do think that the sections on the other campaigns could be expanded to be as detailed as the Deb's campaign. There is a massive list of books in the further reading - maybe integrate those sources as citations?