User:Splaster01/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
General strain theory

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article because it relates to my Criminal Justice class: Theories of Criminal Behavior. It's a theory that is trying to figure why people commit crimes in a general sense. My impression of this article was that it was very short article of such a broad topic to explain why people commit crimes.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead Section:

The lead section of this article is very concise and has great detail but the introductory sentence is too short and just basic in my opinion.

Content:

The article's content is very relevant to the topic on why people commit crimes. It's up to date in a sense that the last edit was in 2017. The content I believe that is missing is that there are no criticisms of the theory on why it works and why it doesn't work.

Tone and Balance:

The article is very neutral in how it presents and shows what the theory is and when it was tested. There seems that there is no bias in the article. The viewpoints of the article that are overrepresented in the article are the differences of how males and females commit crimes and the similarities between them are underrepresented. No persuasion that I see in the article and no minority or fringe viewpoints.

Sources and Reliability:

The facts in this article are backed up by some reliable secondary sources but some I cannot access because of having to pay to see the whole article. The sources are very thorough on describing the topic at hand. Only one source is current and it's from 2017. The rest are from early 2000s. The article has sources that are very diverse in how they understand the topic. The best source that I know immediately off the top of my head is the textbook: 5th edition of Criminology: Theory, Research, and Policy by Gennaro F. Vito and Jeffrey R. Maahs.

Organization:

The article is very easy to read and has no grammatical/spelling errors. It's broken down very well in my opinion.

Images and Media:

No images in this article except a few tables that explain the differences between males and females.

Talk Page:

There is no talk page discussions from what I see at all.

Impressions:

The article is good overall but can be improved on in the inclusion of images and criticisms of the theory itself. It's a little bit underdeveloped in what I stated above.