Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/University of Nebraska-Lincoln/English 254 Writing and Communities (Fall 2015)

Courtney Martin Article Revision Critique

(I'm working off of this diff, which compares this version of the article with this one.)

So, for starters, the good:

1. More references are usually good, especially in articles about living people.
2. Better writing is good. Standard style for Wikipedia articles is to use the surname alone where there isn't ambiguity (so changing "Courtney Martin" to "Martin". A more direct style of writing ("Martin identifies as a third-wave feminist" instead of "Courtney Martin discusses the generation gap...")
3. More direct attribution ("As detailed during a public forum with Deborah Siegel, Martin asserts that older generations..." instead of "She notes that older generations...")

Areas where the article could still be improved

1. While there's disagreement within the Wikipedia community as to whether the lead section should include sources, there's general agreement that it shouldn't need sources - all the information in the lead should already be present in the body of the article (and should, of course, be supported with reliable sources). In addition, the lead should be a balanced representation of what's in the remainder of the article.
2. The article could use an Infobox. Not only does this present key information at a glance, it also makes it look more professional.
3. As the banner at the top of the article notes, a lot of what's in the article comes from work written by Martin herself. The things someone writes about themselves are always going to run the risk of being written with an agenda, written to slant things your way. While there is a role for sources like this in an article, they shouldn't be the main source used to write the article, and it should be obvious to the reader when information is sourced from the subject's own writing.
4. The interviews might be better suited for the external links section. Unless there are sources that describe them, there isn't a whole lot that can be written about them.
5. A fairly minor issue: section headers should not be capitalized beyond the first word unless they're proper nouns (so the change from "Work-family balance" to "Work-Family Balance" was not in keeping with the manual of style), and we're supposed to use straight quotes, not curly quotes.