User:TherealLiamplsc308/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Participatory planning

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I intend to review, and focus my work for the semester on, the article on Participatory Planning for a few reasons. It is central to many of my personal interests. I think the idea of engaging democratic principles in the way we design and create urban spaces--the spaces which determine and define our closest knit communities--is absolutely fascinating. I am fascinated by housing and community development policy, and also about how to generate meaningful community-based sovereignty, and participatory planning bridges those two worlds. Beyond just the fact that I find it interesting, though, this article jumped out at me as particularly in need of support. Much of the information has not been updated since 2010, and the participatory planning paradigm has taken off since then. As such, this article seems likely to be sorely out of date.

Evaluate the article
The lead has a relatively strong opening sentence. It describes the topic broadly in a generally accurate and concise way. Beyond that, though, the lead is underdeveloped. It has no overview of the important sections in the article, and seems to leave out important swaths of introductory information that more effective lead sections would include. It doesn't include any really significant information that is not included in the article more broadly, but it doesn't feel deeply and closely connected to the article either.

The article's content is generally relevant to the article, and it covers a range of important theoretical and practical dimensions of the participatory planning paradigm. It is also focused on representing the way that participatory planning interacts with marginalized communities (of course, those concerns are somewhat baked into the topic, so it would be hard for the article not to address them). However, most of the information does not seem to have been updated since 2010, which is especially alarming considering that participatory planning is a highly active and contemporary paradigm, so there is a great deal of information missing from this article.

The tone is something of a mixed bag. At times it seems like the article is well-balanced, and it includes a section outlining shortcomings of the participatory planning paradigm, which is a good policy for maintaining diverse viewpoints. That being said, at times the article frames certain things as facts that likely should be stated carefully as individual perspectives. For instance the sentence, "Planning needed a structure to allow natural and meaningful input from citizens." Asserts what is likely a single perspective on the issue as a necessary fact. In general, the article seems overly grounded in the perspective of the thinkers that proposed the participatory planning framework in the first place, and may be well served by implementing a more balanced perspective.

The sourcing is a mixed bag. Some sections revolve to centrally around one or two sources, and the citation approach is inconsistent at best. That being said, there are broader issues with this article that likely make the current sourcing a bit of a moot point. The article needs a fairly comprehensive rework, and tat will involve signficant changes to its current sourcing no matter what.

The article is well-written at points and not at others. I won't bog this evaluation down with a complete catalog of the problems, but there are certainly some awkward points and poorly phrased sentences. The organization is a more concrete problem. The sections of this article are very poorly organized, and make relatively little sense as a cohesive whole. There are two distinct sections entitled "theoretical basis" and "principals" which overlap in important ways, and their different scopes are poorly defined. There is a section called origins, which is very brief, and no comprehensively organized history of participatory planning. Information about the paradigm's development is rather scattered throughout the article. There is a section called "Managing forests with participatory planning" which seems like it would work much better if incorporated to a different section. All in all, this article needs an organizational overhaul.

There are no images and media included in the article. While this is a theoretical concept, and images are not necessarily essential to communicating the main content of the article, it is worth exploring where some images might be incorporated into the article just to make it more engaging.

The talk page discussion was once lively and collaborative exploring and implementing a range of improvements to the page, but it has not been used since 2010, and the article seems somewhat dormant.

Overall the article includes some valuable information and useful sources, especially about the theory behind the participatory planning paradigm. That being said, it is disorganized and out of date, and needs a rather extensive redevelopment.