User:Mrobbi18/sandbox

Article Evaluation

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Wikipedia article I chose to evaluate is the one about the Stanford Prison Experiment. I am majoring in sociology, and in one of my classes we were discussing the ethical implications of this experiment. Just as journalists have a set of ethical standards to abide by, researchers have to abide by ethical standards as well, and this experiment was one example of a violation of those ethics.

Evaluation

Most of the information included in the Wikipedia article is relevant to the topic. The article provides general information about the goals, process, and results of the experiment along with conclusions and criticisms. One section that discussed the experiment in popular culture did not add anything to the article, but most of the information present, in my opinion, was relevant to the topic and added context. The article was overall neutral and explained both the pros and cons of the experiment. However, because it is widely agreed that this was a definite violation of ethics, the viewpoint that this experiment caused unnecessary and undue harm was over-represented to some degree. The sources included in this article all seemed reputable, and the links I clicked on all were legitimate. The article included information from over 40 sources, all of which seemed to add to the accuracy. One problem I had with this article is that every fact was not individually referenced, so it would be hard to match up the information to its appropriate source. When I was looking over the talk page, I saw that this article was part of five WikiProjects, all of which gave it a C-class rating. This article most likely received this rating partly due to all of the facts not being individually referenced. Despite this lack of referencing, the sources for the article that were listed were generally unbiased and provided accurate information. Overall, this article was generally good but could be made better with the referencing of all of the facts used and the elimination of unnecessary information.