User:Lily.Weissman/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

Medical education in Scotland

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

I chose to evaluate this article because it was listed as a c-class article, and the topic of medical schools in Scotland was interesting to me. It matters that this article is accurate and well-written because it is important that reliable information pertaining to medical education is free and available to everyone. My preliminary impression of the article is that it is on the shorter side, does not have a comprehensive lead section, and overall is features language and abbreviations that are not adequately explained to the reader.

Evaluate the article

Lead section:

• There really is no lead section to the article, and the introductory sentence simply states that medical education is the practice of educating medical professionals - an explanation that seems unnecessary and serves as a poor lead into the rest of the article.
• The lead section does not give an overview of the topics covered in the rest of the article.

Content:

• The content included in the article, including the information on the five medical schools in Scotland, the courses offered, admissions statistics, postgraduate training, and specialty training options is all relevant.
• The page was last edited in 2023, and features up-to-date data from the past several years.
• While no content is necessarily missing, all the sections are rather brief and could be expanded upon in greater detail, particularly the courses section. Increasing the length of these sections and including relevant examples and comparing them to other education system would improve the readability of the article.
• The article includes a brief section on the Reach National Initiative which targets low-income people and aims to increase the representation of these people in medical school. Other than this there is no mention of other equity gaps or historically under represented populations.

Tone and Balence:

• The article is written with a neutral tone.
• No claims in the article appear to be biased toward a particular position or view.
• The article comes from a neutral viewpoint and states facts about the Scottish medical education system in a way that incorporates unbiased information to synthesize a somewhat cohesive narrative.
• The article does not try to persuade the reader or convince them in any way.

Sources and References:

• All the facts in the article are backed up by a reliable and relevant secondary source.
• All of the sources are thorough and are from relevant institutions, like the university programs in Scotland.
• The sources are current.
• The majority of the sources come from the medical university programs i.e. the University of Edinburgh or University of St. Andrews. There are also some outside sources that offer a review of these university programs like the British Medical Association.
• They appear to have collected facts from a good mix of sources. While most of the information is coming from the universities themselves, there are some outside sources. The article only has 16 references and it would probably be beneficial to include a few more from outside sources to add potentially new perspectives.
• The links are active.

Organization and writing quality

• The writing in the article is grammatically correct and concise, but not the most professional. The biggest example of this is the lack of lead in section.
• The content is pretty organized but the second section jumps into using an acronym (MBChB) without explaining what it stands for which makes it difficult to understand.
• Overall the article is relatively well organized but it needs more background and summary information at the beginning of the article, and at the beginning of each section to make it more easily digestible for the reader.

Images and Media

• The article include 4 images that somewhat help understand the topic. It includes a map of Scotland showing where the universities are located which is helpful for the reader. It also includes 3 images of the various schools which are less beneficial to the reader but are still nice to have in the article.
• The images are adequately captioned - they are not particularly detailed but they get the point across.
• The images adhere to the copyright protocol and are laid out in an appealing way breaking up the text of the article.

Talk page discussion

• There are no conversations on the talk page.
• The article is in the class-c Scotland category, and is a part of the medicine WikiProject.
  

Overall impressions

This article is not the most comprehensive. It's writing style leaves something to be desired in the way of professionally and digestibility. At best it is a relatively brief overview of the medical education system in Scotland, drawing mainly from facts listed on university websites.

The article could be improved with further research, and a more developed comparison between the different medical schools. In its current form the article is underdeveloped and under researched.