User:Thea.sar/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Criminology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I clicked on one of the links on where to find articles, and there was a bunch of ones on academic topics including criminology, which seemed most interesting to me at the time. The lead section gives a good overview of what criminology is, what it relates to, and in general what criminologists do.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section:

The beginning sentence gives a short and concise definition for what criminology is, then expands upon other related fields of study that tie in with criminology, and what those fields are. There is no direct reference to the other sections of the article in the lead section. The lead section is concise, but detailed, and gives a good general overview of criminology that sets up the rest of the article. All the information in the lead section seems to be relevant for building a basis to understanding criminology going into the next sections of the article that describe different schools of thought for criminology.

Content:

I believe that the content in this article is relevant to the topic, as it goes into all sorts of facets of criminology, going to its origins but then also more recent ideas related to criminology as well. It also seems to give an up to date look at what criminology is and everything building up to that point. It didn't seem to me upon first reading it that there is information missing, but I'm not an expert on criminology so it would be hard for me to know what would be missing from an article like this. However, it didn't seem like there was anything there that shouldn't have been there, or was out of place.

Tone and Balance:

The article seemed neutral to me. It just talked about what criminology was, the different people who founded different schools of thought, and different social structure theories related to criminology. It does not feel like you are attempted to be persuaded while reading the article, it just reads informatively.

Sources and References:

There are a variety of references and sources that have been used on this article. I imagine not all of them will be considered "current" because this article goes into the history of criminology, going back a decent amount of time to explain its origins. The links provided do work though.

Organization and Writing Quality:

The writing was concise and detailed, but also easy for someone who doesn't understand criminology or doesn't know much about it, like me, to understand. When I read through the articles there were no apparent errors in grammar or spelling that I caught. I think the organization of the article makes a lot of sense, it talks about these big ideas and explains them, then goes into all these little subcategories and gives explanations to those as well.

Images and Media:

The article doesn't have too many images, and while I wouldn't say that the images that are there really enhance the understanding of criminology as a whole, I think them being there doesn't take anything a way and could interest a reader to look more into certain parts of criminology afterwards. The images are also well-captioned. Both images used were a part of the public domain, and their placement in the article made sense as well.

Talk Page Discussion:

There is some debate on the information in the article and how it's presented, and there is also some talk of cleaning up links and organizational things. There are also a lot of questions people are asking related to criminology.

Overall Impressions:

I think the strengths of this article include listing all of the schools of thought and different social structure theories, because from someone who didn't have a lot of background info on criminology, I had no idea those things were/are a part of what criminology is and its history. Maybe adding a section on criminology today could be helpful in understanding fully how its changed over time. The article seemed pretty complete to me.