User:Theunafish/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Strained yogurt

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I am a large consumer of strained yogurt, both in the context of the U.S. "Greek yogurt" consumer market and also in the context of authentic Iranian cooking in my home. I am passionate about food and curious about its origins, variations, and significances. Overall, the article was informative, although I found the writing at parts to be unclear or grammatically incorrect. It could benefit from better organization, which would give the reader more structure and also reduce repetition of facts.

Lead section
Overall, the lead section can be shorter and more concise. The first paragraph would better summarize the topic if it excluded the last two sentences on yogurt in Europe, North America, and Iceland, and instead included a clear statement on its prevalence in Mediterranean and Near Eastern cuisines, which is arguably more central to the definition.

The section also repeats mention of the "Greek yogurt" market in North America. This should be consolidated and shortened, then elaborated on later in the "North America" subsection of the article.

Lastly, the lead section can be better structured by mimicking the order and sectioning of the rest of the article. Specifically, to replicate the article's overall flow from "geographical variations" to "production" to "nutrition," the lead section should reserve the information on production and nutrition for the section's end, and move up the information on "Greek yogurt"

Content
The article includes information that is relevant to the topic, although it definitely reflects a bias towards "Greek yogurt," which is an Anglo-American variation of strained yogurt. It can reduce this bias by shifting the focus on "Greek Yogurt" from the lead section to a later section of the article.

The article is up-to-date, as it includes mention of brands and variations of strained yogurt that have emerged recently.

In general, the article should reduce its emphasis on brands and focus more on characteristics inherent to strained yogurt in general. Information about brands in the "Greek yogurt" market may need a separate section, or maybe even a separate article, but should not be so central to strained yogurt overall.

Moreover, the article should provide more information on nutrition, flavor profile, and texture – qualities of the food itself. It should be more similar to the Wikipedia page on yogurt, which contains much more information on these subjects. Perhaps the nutritional information can be summarized by a table in the appropriate section.

Tone and Balance
The tone of the article is neutral and does not seem to be persuasive or argumentative. However, in terms of viewpoints, the balance is shifted overwhelmingly towards English and American uses, naming, and markets for strained yogurt, in spite of being prevalent in many foreign cultures and cuisines.

Sources and References
This article has wide variation in the quality of its sources. While some are veritable and scholarly, some are either outdated or unreliable. Specifically, by nature of this topic being food, there are a few references to food blogs that appear unreliable or random. The sources are written by a diverse spectrum of authors and come from the countries that need to be represented, but, as a result, there is variation in reliability of the sites linked. The type of sources leans heavily towards websites.

There is also variation in the number of sources provided per section. While the sub-section on North America is widely sourced, there are no citations whatsoever for strained yogurt variations in Eastern Europe.

There are a few places where there are "citations needed" that should be filled in soon.

Organization and writing quality
My biggest impression of this article is that it is poorly organized, both in terms of writing and structure.

Writing


 * There are several sentences that are grammatically incorrect, whether for misusing punctuation or "dangling" modifiers. The author could fix this issue by simplifying sentence structure.
 * Especially in the section on geographical variations, the author could make better use of parallel sentence structure and lists to clarify the information. For example, in the subsection on West Asia and East Mediterranean, the author should introduce variations in each country by starting each sentence with: "In Iran", "In Turkey", "In Cyprus"...

Structure:


 * I would suggest adding a section on "Commercial Strained Yogurt" to mirror the structure of the yogurt page. This would be useful for containing all the scattered information on U.S. "Greek yogurt" variations.
 * I would suggest potentially dividing the section on geographical variations by country, as opposed to regions, since there are so many variations within regions, especially West Asia and Mediterranean.

Images and Media
The images provided are helpful, relevant, and well-captioned. However, the article could likely use more images, or even a gallery of images, as there are so many variations in strained yogurt across countries and regions.

Talk page discussion
The biggest controversy on the article's talk page is about the difference between strained yogurt and Greek yogurt, and whether they should be contained within the same article. Currently, all searches for "Greek yogurt" get redirected to this page for strained yogurt. This reflects the bias toward the American name ("Greek yogurt") often used for strained yogurt, which raises the question of how to detach the American variation from the global definition of the food.

Otherwise, most of the content of the talk page is about the content, nutrition, and straining process of the yogurt. There is a push to include more information and details on these topics.

Overall impressions
This article is strong in the number of variations that it covers. It includes a surprising amount of detail for the fact that strained yogurt is just a variation itself of regular yogurt. It can be improved with more organization, more concise writing, and better structure. This would make the page's information seem more official and polished, as opposed to just a compilation of facts.