User:StephenWeiss1/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Civil liberties

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it looks well-developed and relevant to law, and I want to see what well-developed legal articles look like on Wiki so that I can model my own article effectively.

Evaluate the article
LEAD: The lead of the article is brief and easy to understand. It gives a good overview of what civil liberties are by providing examples, and without going into detail that would make the actual "overview" section redundantt. It does not, however, provide an overview of the major sections of the article.

CONTENT: The content certainly looks relevant — it provides information on many of the world's major regions, and gives descriptions of civil liberties in specific countries in those regions. The article starkly leaves out Africa, though, which is a major information gap.

TONE and BALANCE: Some parts of the article make me think it is not entirely neutral. Aside from leaving out Africa, the author seems to be inputting thoughts that may be their own opinion. For example, the article states that Japan has a "seemingly strong bill of rights." That is an opinion — it "seems" to the author that the bill of rights in Japan is strong. That is not appropriate in my opinion.

SOURCES: There are many sources cited and also linked in the article, and the links work. The sources seem to be scholarly and academic, which is promising for this article. Most of the academic sources look to be written within the last ten or so years.

ORGANIZATION and WRITING: The organization makes the article easy to understand — it makes sense to me to split up by region to discuss civil liberties around the world. Writing quality is also easy to understand, despite their use of sources that are pretty academic. It seems the author was able to effectively translate difficult ideas into writing that is comprehensible for the average reader.

IMAGES and MEDIA: There are only two images, both in the India section. The author could have added more images to help illuminate other sections.

TALK PAGE: The talk page is pretty blank — it looks like not much consultation or collaboration went into this article. If more than one person edited, the talk page does not make that clear because nobody time stamped or signed their name.

OVERALL: The article is a good source of information, but certainly could be added to. Mainly, they should build and add more sections for more areas of the world, and remove any language that might simply be the author's personal thoughts.