User:Alexandermmmmmm/Evaluate an Article
 | Evaluate an article
Complete your article evaluation below. Here are the key aspects to consider: Lead sectionA good lead section defines the topic and provides a concise overview. A reader who just wants to identify the topic can read the first sentence. A reader who wants a very brief overview of the most important things about it can read the first paragraph. A reader who wants a quick overview can read the whole lead section.
ContentA good Wikipedia article should cover all the important aspects of a topic, without putting too much weight on one part while neglecting another.
Tone and BalanceWikipedia articles should be written from a neutral point of view; if there are substantial differences of interpretation or controversies among published, reliable sources, those views should be described as fairly as possible.
Sources and ReferencesA Wikipedia article should be based on the best sources available for the topic at hand. When possible, this means academic and peer-reviewed publications or scholarly books.
Organization and writing qualityThe writing should be clear and professional, the content should be organized sensibly into sections.
Images and Media
Talk page discussionThe article's talk page — and any discussions among other Wikipedia editors that have been taking place there — can be a useful window into the state of an article, and might help you focus on important aspects that you didn't think of.
Overall impressions
Examples of good feedbackA good article evaluation can take a number of forms. The most essential things are to clearly identify the biggest shortcomings, and provide specific guidance on how the article can be improved. |
Which article are you evaluating?
[edit]Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area
Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
[edit]I chose it because it is directly related to my topic, and could easily be a first read for someone curious about why homelessness in the bay area is particularly bad. However, my first impression of it was that it was not particularly comprehensive and struck me as something which certainly could be biased.
Evaluate the article
[edit]The lead sentence of the introduction does not succinctly summarize the topic and instead provides information which though perhaps relevant is definitely not the first piece of information which should be conveyed on the subject.
The lead does not particularly represent the rest of the article, provides significant information not in the later part of the article, is not concise, and is in many ways overly detailed.
The article's content is relevant to the topic, and relatively up to date, but it seems there is a lot of content which is missing regarding other causes of homelessness and other perspectives on its solutions. The article as it exists now presents a very narrow view of the causes for homelessness. The housing regulation viewpoint seems to be overrepresented and taken as fact without sufficient support while other hypotheses are given less time. In this way the article seems to attempt to persuade the reader.
Some claims are missing explicit citations and some are explicitly tagged as needing citations. The sources are not complete but there is a lot of literature on the subject so it would be difficult to include all of it. The sources are current and from a diverse set of backgrounds. The links do seem to work.
The writing quality for the latter half of the article seems to be fairly high, but there are parts where it is more lacking. There we no grammatical or spelling errors I was able to find. The article seems to have a fairly logical structure of historical background.
There are a couple images in the article but they are not particularly helpful. The images are generally well captioned however. The image layout is fine though they should be larger, and appears to adhere to copyright.
The talk page for this article is pretty sparse and the article was rated b class. It is part of the California wikiproject.
Overall, the article is impressive in its historical depth, and provides a lot of interesting statistics and context for the problem. However, it oversimplifies some aspects of the problem and does not provide adequate representation of other viewpoints. The introduction is also problematic in multiple ways. As a whole, I would consider it to be somewhat complete.