User:Weinshel/sandbox

Link to all sandbox pages

Internet censorship circumvention
One article I'm interested in improving is Internet censorship circumvention.

Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
The content that exists is relevant, but it is mostly focused on technical tools that exist for censorship circumvention, and doesn't really discuss any of the implications. The "Methods" section has few citations, is out of date, and doesn't discuss countermeasures that could be taken by censors.

There's a large table with specific software and links, but it isn't well presented or complete. Something to keep in mind, though, is that people might use this page as a place for suggestions for software they should download to dodge around censorship. In fact, the page is the first Google result for "censorship circumvention". I imagine that the goal of Wikipedia isn't to provide software recommendations, but there is likely value to users in having this information, so to improve this article I'll probably have to evaluate whether this table should be included at all, and if so then try to improve it a bit.

The article is mostly technical and doesn't discuss the policy and other implications—though there are other articles, such as Internet censorship and country-specific articles that do. This article probably needs a bit more of that type of content, though I'll have to see exactly what related articles cover.

Is it written neutrally?
I'm not seeing any huge problems with neutrality, this article is mostly presenting a list of tools and methods. But there isn't much discussion of consequences of censorship circumvention.

Does each claim have a citation?
No, and the "Methods" section is especially lacking in sources.

Are the citations reliable?
There are some reliable media sources, but also a number of first-party sources to describe software, which aren't necessarily the most reliable. There is lots of peer-reviewed academic literature out there evaluating circumvention tools, their effectiveness, and countermeasures that would be valuable to add.

Potential sources
https://benvds.com/papers/quack-security18.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04044v2

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-circumvent-online-censorship

Parental controls
NOTE: I wrote this review, but then after looking at the talk page I realized that User:Ceciliasheppard who is in the same course may also be planning on editing the page, so if they take this page I would not likely edit it.

This article discusses a smaller-scale aspect of information control. If I was to work on this article I would likely make a few targeted improvements, such as adding a section on security and filling in missing citations, as opposed to restructuring the entire article.

Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
This article's content is mostly relevant, though as discussed below it doesn't cover some important areas. I thought the list of video game consoles was not relevant though—there isn't any background into the list (such as what exactly game console parental controls do), and the rest of the article is more focused on web filtering.

Is it written neutrally?
Not really, there is not much discussion of the negative aspects of parental controls, both in terms of their impact on children, their impact on parent-child relations, and also with security and privacy issues in the software.

Does each claim have a citation?
No, and there are a number of places that are already marked [citation needed] or have infoboxes.

Are the citations reliable?
The ones that exist are, with a mix of news articles and academic papers.

Potential sources
https://journals.lww.com/jan/Fulltext/2018/04000/Does_Parental_Control_Work_With_Smartphone.8.aspx

Internet.org
(Also known as Free Basics). This discusses a program that Facebook and partners offer to provide free internet access in developing countries with a small number of sites.

Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
Yes, though the article is a bit out of date, there isn't any information from after 2016. The article lacks discussion of more recent issues that have come up with Free Basics and Facebook, such as ethnic violence in Myanmar. The drone program (beaming internet through drones) has also subsequently been cancelled, so the article should be updated to reflect that.

Is it written neutrally?
Generally yes, the section about India is more negative, but overall is the article is relatively balanced. Looking at the talk page there is some discussion of neutrality (particularly in the lead section) from 2015 and 2016 and changes were made. If I end up editing this article I'll have to be careful about making sure the article stays neutral, especially if I'm adding negative content such as discussing ethnic violence in Myanmar.

Does each claim have a citation?
Mostly, there is one point (the list of services provided) that has a [citation needed], but most of the rest provide some citation.

Are the citations reliable?
Yes, though they are mostly news sources, and there don't appear to be any academic articles.

Potential sources
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2909663

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2987485

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets

https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free-basics-in-myanmar-and-other-countries?zd=2&zi=iludoxae

Article evaluation (week 3 assignment)
Evaluating Data Encryption Standard (discussed in class as an example of government control over code and communication by standardizing a weak encryption scheme).

Evaluating content
The article covers most of the important things discussing the standard - a history of development and NSA interference, a technical overview, and a discussion of attacks. However, there are some sections that could be improved: the "NSA's involvement in the design" section uses many blockquotes when paraphrasing would be sufficient, and in the "Description" section there is a link to another page (DES supplementary material) that has a bunch of tables with little description, which is not a format that I've seen before on Wikipedia.

Evaluating tone
The article is at least relatively neutral in my opinion. The description of NSA interference probably causes a slight bias against the NSA, but the presentation at least attempts to be neutral (and the literature and sources back up the article's claims).

Evaluating sources
The article is light on citations, which is pointed out with infoboxes in a few places. The article can be dense with information, but the citations are sparse and the dense material relies on a small number of sources. The sources that do exist, however, seem to be of good quality, with the links still working and a number of books and peer-reviewed academic publications.

Evaluating the talk page
The article is rated C-class, yet at one point was a featured article. One comment on the talk page claims that there were lower citation standards for featured articles at the time, which at least provides some explanation. There has not been much recent activity, it seems that most of the discussion on the talk page is from 2005-2008. There is good discussion of the substance of the article though, and good faith efforts to improve the content and citations.