Schieckc

Article Evaluation

Major_depressive_disorder

Questions and Answers

Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

   Everything seemed relevant to me.

Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

  The article seems to be neural to me , stating relevant facts and information. I feel that this article puts perhaps too large of an emphasis on using drugs as a treatment.

In terms of treatment, counseling and exercise are only mentioned briefly and drugs and other electro stimulation treatments consume a much greater amount of text. No potential alternative treatments , such as meditation, diet, social connections, finding joys in life etc are mentioned. I do not think that leaving these out is a problem, in fact wikipedia editors might want to avoid any information that is not universally agreed upon in the psychology community.

Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?

    Yes, this question can be answered by my previous answer. Drug treatments are a bit overrepresented and other ways to be happier are underrepresented or not represented at all.  Also, at the end it has a whole section about how depression is more common in the elderly, which I am not sure if that is true. I have heard of some studies that we can actually become happier with old age. It talks about general ages depression can start and prevalence of a few different countries and male/female sex, but doesn’t go into detail about, children, young adults or mid age or those with non traditional sexual identities. I would like to see a small section on each age range. 

Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?

  Yes

Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

   To me the facts all seem to be cited and when I click on the citations the links take me to ligidament academic journals.

Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?

   I am not sure if all the statistics are up to date because these are always changing, but overall it seems accurate to my knowledge.  As far as adding something, I mentioned this before, I would like to see some alternative treatments and ways to cope with mental health issues. I think that in psychology we are still making use of drugs and of counseling, but we know that there are many other things that can be implemented into a patients lives that can help make it much better either without medication or in addition to medication.

Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?

     It seems to be mostly about people making small modifications, like modifying links or URL, catching a broken link or slightly changing a sentence so that it is more accurate or reads better. Users usually explain why they changed what they did.

How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?

   It says that Major depressive disorder has been listed as a level-3 vital article in Science/ Biology and that it is a featured article and identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. 
            

How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

            I think Wikipedia discusses this topic pretty similar to a psychology textbook, however when we discuss depression in class we get to hear students personal connections to depression and sometimes outside of the box thinking, which probably would not be on wikipedia.      

(Schieckc (talk) 00:29, 23 January 2018 (UTC))