Talk:Paywall

Length

The length of this article is roughly 1000 words, including the content section. The editorial feedback template asks for about 3000 words, so we’re a bit short in this case. I can see where the content will go: there are headings in place where content will appear, so the structure indicates what we’ll see.

One easy spot to expand would be in the introduction, there may be some opportunity to summarize the body section more in the intro.

Structure

An introduction is present and could be expanded some more but it does the job. It might be nice to add an image off to the right of the intro to jazz it up.

The body area looks like it will be substantial, including five top-level sections (excluding references). “History” is there, which is the standard format of a wiki article. I really like “Classifications” as a section. I’m going to use that in my article! (Thank you!) The order of sections seems very logical: History > Classifications > Perception > Practice > Ethics. This is well thought out in my opinion.

Even if the content is a bit short at this stage, it does seem to be well-planned. Once the content is there I think it’ll really come together. Seems “history” and “perception” and “paywalls in practice” will hopefully see more content. I think those sections can be as small or expansive as needed to meet word counts while not wasting words.

References are present, though there might be some unsupported statements that might also need citation, such as “Globalization has accelerated information production in an interconnected world in which research is done by scholars who are more diverse,” in the last section of the article. This is making a claim that should be supported. The following sentence, which relates to the one written above, is cited, but that citation doesn’t really support the preceding claim. However, I could be mistaken; I don’t have the time to fully read the cited sources and I could have missed something.

Clarity

The writing is clear in my opinion, but that’s partially due to the fact that new content is still being written. The current text does give me a pretty clear summary of what paywalls are and some types (three types). Are there other, lesser known types? It might be helpful to add a quick intro paragraph to each section that might say “there are many types of paywalls, but most experts recognize three general categories” or “industry practitioners generally refer to three types of paywalls.” That way the reader can understand some of the subtleties of classifications, if there are any.

The “Ethical Considerations” section could also be expanded by exploring the topic from other perspectives, such as how some industries think of ethics of paywalls. What do social media companies think? What do registered voters think? Academics? Lots of stuff to potentially explore.

Point of View

The writing seems very objective. I don’t detect personal opinion or overt bias in the writing. Claims are reasonable and not extraordinary.

Most claims are backed up by sources. Some claims are more murky, such as “Globalization has accelerated information production in an interconnected world in which research is done by scholars who are more diverse,” which I mentioned above. I agree with the statement itself, it should seem obvious but it’s a sweeping statement that needs more backing. (Such as, what is meant by “diverse?” Racial, ethnic, ideological?) Source quality is relatively decent, although it would be nice to see more research/studies among the media citations.

Additional points of view could be added, as mentioned above. Especially under the ethics section.

Overall

An interesting topic, and will be especially so when it gets into more detail using the current article/outline that has been structured.