User:UWCLStudentSpring2021/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Online deliberation

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I'm interested in this topic. Online deliberation was one of the reasons I initially was interested in taking this class (Building Successful Online Communities). I found this page through the Academic Discipline page. I had never seen the page before taking part in this exercise. I found it to be an interesting topic and the article genuinely captured my interest.

When I read through the Talk page, I saw the last update was from 2014 when there was discussion of removing the page entirely because it needs work. In some ways this may be a really good page to work with then because it is so out of date. But I am concerned I may not interact with any other Wikipedians since so few people are following it.

However, it is a part of three different WikiProjects (WikiProject Internet, WikiProject Politics, and WikiProject Internet Culture)so maybe that helps. And maybe I'm just overthinking that whole aspect and none of that matters for this assignment.

Evaluate the article
The lead section has too much information in it. The first three paragraphs of the lead provides the most concise definition of "Online Deliberation". However, it doesn't flow together in a natural way. It feels very fragmented as though it has been written by very distinct authors. The last paragraph in that section that discusses the international conferences on online deliberation should be in its own separate section.

The first three sections of the article: Definition and Implications for democracy are written well and have an adequate amount of information in them. They are heavily cited and represent a wide diversity of thought.

The first three sections also have a nice amount of links to other articles as well. That's helpful to be able to navigate and expand the reader's knowledge in relevant areas. However, there is one dead link to "online incivility". This needs to be removed.

The section "Quality of Online Deliberation" is not as well written as the preceding sections. The section adequately introduces "Deliberative Norms". But then it doesn't provide any more details of those norms. I think subsections could be created that elaborate on such norms.

This section is also where I noticed the citing start to not represent the same diversity of research as the other sections. This is especially true in the "Factors Influencing online deliberation" section. One source weighted much more heavily than others. This is especially troublesome because some of the claims made in this section can be viewed as particularly partisan. Here is an example: "Discussions surrounding news of health or abortion topics are more relevant but with fewer genuine questions posed than news of topics on education, crimes or guns, and economy. News of education topics has less uncivil and more relevant comments than the other news topics. People provide less evidence in their discourse when discussing news of economy topics as compared to the other news topics"The integrity of the article falls apart in the last section: Online Political Deliberation. This section only cites two sources. One source is the paper, "Mass Online Deliberation" by Velikanov, Cyril. I cannot determine if this is a peer reviewed paper since such little information has been provided about it. The second source cited is the book, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful by Beth Noveck. However, it doesn't seem to have the correct formatting of the book in the citation. Overall the entire last section makes some very strong statements with little to no citations to back them up.

Lastly, this article needs to be updated. The citation most recently published is from 2013. And as I mentioned earlier, the last entry on the Talk page is from 2014.