User:Commonsj/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

GTK. This article is about the software package of the same name.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

I chose this article randomly from the selection of C-class articles provided by the Wikiedu exercise. This article stood out to me because I had heard of GTK before and wanted to see if the article was on the same topic. This article is actually super important because anyone wondering what this software package is and does will likely Google it, and one of the first results is this Wikipedia article. It is likely that people have used the information contained in this article to make a decision on the GUI package they would use, or even try to figure out how it works.

Evaluate the article

Overall, this article is serviceable, and it contains a lot of useful information that people who are likely to click on it might care about. However, there are certainly improvements that can be made.

• Starting with the introduction, while the first sentence does its job well, the rest of the section could benefit from a simple roadmap of the rest of the article. It is unclear after reading the introduction what exactly the article contains.
• Most of the information is pretty up to date, which is impressive since software version numbers are constantly changing. However, there are references to other Wikipedia articles that do not exist. I would suggest either remaking these articles or expanding on the information that should have been provided by these other references.
• The article focuses primarily on what GTK is, and it does not specifically advocate or warn against its use. In other words, the tone is very neutral, which is a good thing for Wikipedia articles. Even thought there is a criticism section, it reflects real world reasons why people have switched from using this package. The one thing I will say is that the inclusion of a criticism section means that negative viewpoints are slightly over represented in this article, but I don't think the section should be omitted, so this is a necessary drawback.
• This article uses a lot of sources. However, many of them would not be considered particularly reputable and certainly not scholarly. For example, the article uses GTK's own description on their website, but the information is also cross-referenced when appropriate (i.e. when going beyond just what GTK is). Many of the sources are release notes and other materials disseminated by projects like GTK and GNOME (another package that uses GTK). Given the subject, these type of sources seem mostly appropriate, and the fact that the they are interspersed with more formal sources (like reference books). The one think I would certainly change are the GitHub and GitLab references. I think it would be more appropriate to reference official documentation than the raw source code and READMEs.
• This biggest issue I have with this article is the writing style. A lot of the sentence come across as a bit stilted, and I found myself having to reread a couple sentences before I understood what the author was trying to say. There are also some odd uses of punctuation. For example, there is an overabundance of semi-colons when other sentence structures would do just fine (I may be biased, I hate semi-colons). I think what happened is that many people contributed small fragments, so the article just needs someone to go through and make the writing voice continuous. There are also some weird formatting things, like bullet points where they don't necessarily make the most sense.
• The images included in the article are fine. They are not very interesting (but neither is the topic). I do think they add useful information to the article, and they are captioned well. Perhaps more images could be included in the uses section to get an idea of the what some of the applications listed look like (since GTK is specifically a GUI framework).
• The talk page is very nerdy, and there are some admonishments from other users for including original research (that was removed). I don't have much to say about the page, it seems normal.

Overall impressions: the article's biggest strength is its thoroughness. I would say it is mostly complete. I am not all too familiar with the subject, so I don't know if there are any glaring omissions though. The article's biggest weakness in my opinion is just the prose. Overall, the article is fine. It gets the information out there is an unbiased way.