User:Statstudent38/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Talk:68–95–99.7 rule

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I looked up C-class articles and this article seemed interesting because I remember learning a lot about this rule when studying for my AP statistics test in High School.

This article is important because this rule is very helpful for newer statistics students to learn about standard deviation and normal distribution.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section: The introductory sentence is very concise and manages to provide a lot of information in a few words. It does not contain lead information that is not in the article itself. It does not directly mention normality tests, but does mention normal distributions which are related to a normality test.

Content: All content is relevant to the topic. Being that this is a universally agreed upon statistical rule, content being up-to-date is not particularly relevant. All content appears to belong, and the addition of a table of numerical values is extremely helpful in showing how the rule works.

Tone and Balance: Given that the topic is mathematical, it is written in a neutral manner. The mentioning of The Black Swan seemed somewhat odd, as it seemed out of place and a talk page suggestion questioned the validity of that example entirely.

Sources and References: Given that this is a topic of a mathematical theory, this article has relatively few sources. The sources listed are books that are not available online, but appear to be books about mathematical and statistical theory.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article appears to be well-written with the only possible exception of the reference to The Black Swan mentioned earlier. It begins by giving an overview of the topic, then explaining how to determine if something follows a normal distribution. It concludes with a table for percentiles based on standard deviation.

Images and Media: The first image is extremely helpful in visualizing this topic. The other 2 images are hard for beginner statistic students to understand, but are relevant and help visualize several aspects of a normal distribution.

Talk Page Discussion: I found it very interesting how people had an issue with the title. The first people that had an issue with the title seemed unaware of where the figures came from, but there was a separate argument of people wanting to change the title to the three-sigma rule. This article is related to both the statistics and mathematics wikiprojects, but is labeled as a low-importance article on both.

Overall Impressions: Given that this is a somewhat unpopular mathematical concept, there is no need to have an excessive amount of content in the article. I like that every part of the article adds information. Most of the talk page has been considered and added in to the page. The one way I would improve this article would be to change The Black Swan example or further explain why it is a good example of the 68-95-99.7 rule. I would say the article is not undeveloped, but rather that there is not an excessive amount of information that is needed to explain this concept.