User:Ptgeleg/sandbox

Article Chosen: Change.org

Article Length: 2013 words

Sections: 7

Review:

The Change.org Wikipedia article is organized well, has good content, and offers both positive and negative outlooks on the website; however, I believe that it is missing content. Although the page is easy to navigate, I feel as though there isn’t enough content to actually navigate through. For example, in the section of notable petitions, it is divided into seven countries. The United States has eight listed petitions, and every other country has only one or two. There is only 15 petitions listed and a majority of them only have a one or two sentence explanation. For a website with over “180,748,325 people taking action”, as of February 21^st, 2017, I feel there’s very little information on notable petitions.   

Their “business model” section is only one paragraph. It has one link, which is the organization, “Amnesty International.” It could include more, for example, since the company makes money through ads, there could either be an explanation of how, or at least a link of how ad revenue based businesses operate.

It is great that they included a criticism section. It covers five different criticisms that the company has received. Some sections, again, feel too short. For example, the section, “Selling of personal data” only has a one sentence write up.

Looking into the article’s sources, a lot of them violate the guidelines presented by our “Evaluating Articles” training module. For example, it tells us to avoid blog posts and social media sources. This article cites Twitter as well as the website “Things that matter,” which appears to be a small independent blog page run by two writers. It also tells us to avoid self-published sources or sources tied to the subject. This article cites not only tweets from Change.org’s personal Twitter account, but the actual Change.org website itself.

Our training module also covers lead sections. It states that a short lead section may be indicative of staggered contributions, leading to less comprehensive information. This article’s lead section is only four sentences long. A lot of details of the company and web site are omitted because they’re in other sections, but I believe briefly mentioning them in the lead section would be helpful as well.  All in all, the Change.org article is organized very well, but the amount of content to digest leaves you wanting more. I recommend elaborating on details, including more detailed examples of notable petitions, and using better sources.