Talk:Email
discussion
Feedback to MediaWiki Article “Email”:
In the article, the author introduces the concept, developments, benefits and drawback of emails to us. The article has a word count of about 1700, which is way less than the requirement of 3000.
The article has an opening paragraph that gives the concept and definition of emails, and gives some instances of email providers. However, the opening paragraph does not illustrate the concept very well. Suppose a person who does not know email read the first paragraph, he will feel confused and still cannot understand what is email. Adding some visual aids, such as images of email mechanism or email user interface, can help with understanding. It may also be beneficial to draw a bit of analogy between email and tradition mail.
The body of the article is divided into 5 parts: technical developments origins, popular providers, benefits, drawbacks, and scandals. However, some parts are still not finished, especially the scandals section. The author should also reconsider whether the “Schlissel email” should be included, because it is not as influential as the other two scandals, and choosing such scandal may be a personal bias which is bad in a MediaWiki article.
Several statements are made in the article, and most of them were backed by reliable sources. However, in the “benefits” section, the author said that “users can communicate across continents without additional delay”. Admittedly email is fast, but sometimes it still has some significant delays that negatively impacts communication efficiency. Therefore, the author may need to elaborate this more and possibly cite some sources. In addition, the author states that “email is a double blind process”, but I think this is not necessarily a benefit. The author can try to extract the benefit portion and put it here. For example, the author can add “the privacy of both sender and receiver are protected”.
The clarity of this article is generally pretty good, but with some minor problems. Firstly, the author has not written the controversy part. Also, in the “Individual Action” topic of “Drawback” section, the author mentions the categorization of email users based on their email filing behavior. I think this is unnecessary and can be deleted because it is not helpful in describing the potential solution for email overload.
The article is pretty objective and involved in a lot of citations from the reliable sources such as IEEE, BBC News, Microsoft, etc. However, I think the author disproportionally signifies the drawback of email compared to its benefit, and I think this is a personal bias. In the benefit section the author writes only 1 paragraph and listed some points without further elaboration, but in the drawback section the author writes a lot as well as provides a lot of data and examples. The author should add some statistics and examples to better illustrate the benefits of email. For instance, the author can further illustrate how fast email is by providing the email transaction time between London and New York. Also, the author can cite some sources from academic papers to describe the mechanism of “double-blind process” and how it protects users’ privacy. In addition, I think the Technical Development section need more citations. There are only 1 citation at the start of the section, while the rest of them paragraph is without the support of any sources. Moreover, the author gave some exact numbers (30 command, 1973, early 1974, …) without providing sources. Even if the author actually remember all of these dates and technical data, I think it is always good practice to find the historical documents so that unintentional mistakes will not be made.
