User:Eungjeonglee/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

edit

John Yoo

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

edit

I chose the article about John Yoo, intrigued by the figure's short yet critical portray in Vice (2018 film), bringing the film's climax and drafting the Torture Memos. My preliminary impression was that Wikipedia's timeline was filled with the figure's achievements and the hyperlinks were particularly helpful.

Evaluate the article

edit

The article is rated as C-class on the WikiProject Biography and the WikiProject California / San Francisco Bay Area. It is part of the WikiProject Korea; however, it has not been rated.


Everything within the article is relevant to John Yoo, the topic of the article. The article remained neutral with an sufficient amount of quotations. The claims are without adjectives involved, yet dedicated a massive portion to the figure's controversy and dissenters. The links from the citations are all working except one pdf under the bibliography section, where stated that John Yoo has contributed the chapter "Enemy Combatants and the Problem of Judicial Competence" to the book Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases by Peter Berkowitz, published by Hoover Institution Press in 2005. The sources listed are all related to the comprehensive understanding of the figure. Nevertheless, the source variety is inadequate as the span of commentaries is entirely critics towards John Yoo's policies. It was intriguing to observe a lack of policy defenders' response. The information from the citations is all up to date, with the newest archived from the original on January 31, 2021.


The Simplified Chinese and Korean version of John Yoo's Wikipedia page is significantly shorter with only a one-sentence introduction, one sentence of his early life and education, and career up to 2009--outdated comparing to the English version of the page. The latest publication on the simplified Chinese page is "Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare," published in 2014, yet the English version states that John Yoo's latest book is Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power, published in 2020. The citations for the simplified Chinese page have 24 items and two citations on the Korean page, while the English counterpart has 144. The English version of the page is more updated, with the last edit being August 19, 2021, at 09:10. The language servers lack syncing updates for further accuracy.


The article's Talk page is filled chiefly with modified external links with archives from university publications by InternetArchiveBot, an edited calculation of John Yoo's exact age during stages pursuing education by Stevemidgley, and a suggestion from Snooganssnoogans stating the writings of the figure are interpreted too frequently and that the page should use more reliable secondary sources.


This Wikipedia page presents the topic adversely from what one expects to learn from a political figure's page, especially the non-English pages. The simplified Chinese page is significantly biased, citing John Yoo's quote claiming he regards the Berkeley students and faculties who disagree with his political views as primitive cave-dwelling humans remaining during the Vietnam War. However, the citation for this quote from a Los Angeles Times article, "In Berkeley, Yoo feels at home as a stranger in a strange land" by Carol J. Williams, is unavailable through the provided link. The original article on Los Angeles Times and updated the external link. However, the original quote from the news article is, "It is like looking at the panoramic displays of troglodytes sitting around the campfire with their clubs. Here, it's tie-dye and marijuana. It's just like the 1960s, with the Vietnam War still to protest." [1], proving the misleadingness of the simplified Chinese page upon this topic.