User:Yuwei19/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Astro Boy

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the 2009 Astro Boy movies was one of my favourite movies as a kid. Astro Boy as a franchise also has huge importance in the international animation industry as a whole, so it struck me as odd that the main article of such a significant property could be classified as "C-class".

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The lead section of this article is easy to understand and loosely outlines the article's major categories. It is a bit lengthy but is mostly concise and to-the-point about the property's origin, publication, and overall significance.

Content, organization, and writing quality

While most sections are well-organized enough, other sections are not, such as the 'Plot' section which is cluttered by attempting to outline details about multiple versions of the story simultaneously, making for a disjointed reading experience. There are an excessive amount of bracketed statements pointing out minor differences in plot points and character names in almost every sentence, something that could be avoided by simply listing signficant differences in each adaptation all at once in dedicated paragraphs after outlining the original manga's plot. At the end of the day, this article is chiefly intended to give an overview of the original Astro Boy manga, and comparisons between the differing plots of the many adaptations should be organized more effectively or omitted entirely; many of these adaptations have their own dedicated Wikipedia pages where divergences from the source material can be more thoroughly discussed.

There are also some confusing organizational choices made in connecting this page to other articles. In the 'Characters' section, a selection of what can be assumed to be major characters in the manga are listed, nearly all of the names linking to the same page: List of Astro Boy characters. This article is also given as a link at the top of the Characters section, so it already comes across as excessive; none of these characters are being linked to separate pre-existing articles dedicated to them, but the same page over and over again, just with direction to a specific section. Another issue lies in how only some of the character names are linked to List of Astro Boy characters even though all of the characters listed in this section have their own sections on said page, adding another layer of inconsistency. If each character truly requires its own link to its specific section on the List of Astro Boy characters page, then every single character in this section should have a link or none at all. This section is also inconsistent in its punctuation, missing periods at the ends of several character listings.

There is a brief section of a paragraph in the Production section and English-language subsection discussing the racially insensitive content of the original property. This information could be better contextualized if any sort of mention was made of racially insensitive content beforehand, but dodgy content is not mentioned otherwise before or after this brief section in the article.

Sources and References

There are numerous statements made in the article that are not properly followed by a citation or source where the information was found, such as the claim that a live-action movie is in the works as of 2017. This information is not properly cited and does not yet have a 'citation needed' flag. There are a couple more uncited statements that can be found throughout the article.

Some of the information presented in the article comes across more anecdotal than factual. For instance, in the section on the Famicom Mighty Atom game, there is the uncited statement, "It is known for its extreme difficulty level attributed to a one-hit death rule." However, the sparse Mighty Atom page makes no mention of the game's difficulty or who exactly it is known by for being extremely difficult.

There are no sources on the article from the years 2020 to 2022. Most sources are media outlets and few are academic in nature. There are also a few times when Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka's website is cited as a source in-text, which seems aligned with citing the official promotional website of a property.

Talk page discussion

By far the most extensively debated aspect of this page is whether or not Astro Boy is to be referred to as a "robot" or an "android", an argument over semantics that effectively ended in 2010. More recent issues have been brought up since, but major issues with the article beyond the 'robot/android' debate are not outwardly evident from a brief overview of the talk page.

Overall impressions

The Astro Boy article provides a great amount of information about the Astro Boy franchise as a whole, which is both a strength and a bit of an organizational flaw. At times, it attempts to describe all adaptations of the source material at once, and the excessive attention to name changes between adaptations in the 'Plot' section detracts from the true purpose of the section, which is to give a brief overview of the original manga's plot. When the information is well-organized, it comes across as fairly comprehensive, but there are a few statements that lack proper citation and it does not appear that there are any sources cited from the last 2 years.

Overall, the article does not lack information as much as it lacks organization and it could benefit from an update.