User:Zucchinibyday/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
From the name and lead section it seems relevant to our class, digital linguistics. Additionally it is a topic that I am somewhat interested in personally, and as such want to get closer to.

Evaluate the article
The lead section is slim, but then again, the article as a whole is short. The first sentence runs a little long, but it accurately and clearly outlines the topic of computational linguistics. The rest of the lead section provides extra context, but over relies on the list of studies computational linguistics draws on. This list is helpful in getting the reader to understand an overview of what computational linguistics looks like, but it is very long and would be complimented by a sentence or two explaining the general methods and aims of the field. The final sentence is a detail that isn't described in full in the article, and on top of that, it describes a very recent development in the field (without context of where the field started) and is without a citation. Overall, this is a decent lead section; it communicates basic information, but needs revision.

The rest of the article is thin as well. There is an informative section on the origins of the field, but the rest of the history of the field is omitted. There is a general sense that much more could be discussed in this article. The tone is appropriately neutral, with no clear examples of bias that come through. In other regards, however, the writing is poor. Many sentences run on, impairing the readability of the text. The gaps in the history of the field make getting an overview of this topic difficult. Most egregious is the section "Chomsky's Theories", which, content-wise, is only a single sentence long and would most likely fit better in the "Modeling language acquisition" section. There is no use of media such as images, which could be used to display relevant diagrams that aid in understanding complex topics such as the Chomsky normal form (which is at least hyperlinked, so the reader can explore that topic for extra context).

The talk page is an interesting rabbit hole. Most noticeable is a discussion about whether the merge this article into the article on Natural Language Processing, which constitutes about half of the talk page. A major issue, it seems, is that the field of computational linguistics is hard to define (to the point that there's an XKCD comic about it) and overlaps a lot with NLP, which could explain why this article is so thin.

It's classified as a vital article. After researching this quickly, I've learned it means that it is an article which the Vital Articles project wants to improve to Good status or higher by 2030. It is a level 5 vital article, quite low on the totem pole, but nonetheless considered important.