User:21RowRowRoYourBoat89/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Snakes in mythology is the article I will be evaluating for this piece.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have a close relationship with snakes in my personal life and is part of the reason I chose this article to start on. My impression of it was that it contained a well-developed enough page that had some promising leads to work from and toward. However, I think that it contains considerable room for improvement as it is still on a C-class article. This is surprising, to say the least, because snakes seem to be a common thread in many cultures across time and the world.

Evaluate the article
The Lead section is very disjointed and begins from a place of ambiguity, to which I mean, "The behavior of snakes and their facial features (e.g. the unblinking, lidless eyes) seemed to imply that they were intelligent, that they lived by reason and not instinct, and yet their thought-processes were as alien to humans as their ways of movement." I'm not sure how this provides a brief overview of snakes in mythology, but I envision something rather different. The Lead section does not go over the sections include in the entirety of the article, but seems to dive right into a few cultural practices of different people and rituals that have the word "snake" in them. in this sense, however, it does begin to give examples of where within the world and time you might find snakes in mythology, and for that I see some promising features. For the Content aspect, in this article many areas are touched upon, but I think that there can be much more depth involved in the cohesion of different topics as it relates to all cultures of the world and throughout most of time. I think there can be a few, if not many subheadings attributed to this subject that aren't currently present. Under the subheadings Water, Wisdom, and Healing, there is very little attributed here. This article does not hold relevance in terms of equity gaps, unless you are referring to snakes being overrepresented in mythology compared to other animals, or more specifically, reptiles. The article appears neutral in its representation of the known material available. It touches on many different cultures of the world and does not appear to be biased towards one in particular, in this sense. I don't think there are fringe topics related to this article because it is based on mythologies, which are inherently fringe in and of themselves.

There are many sources cited at the bottom of the article, as well as throughout the article next to their corresponding information. The links to the sources seemed a little troublesome to access, insofar as that it required chasing down many different sites to get to the original one cited. The timelines of the sources spanned from the earliest I could see being from 1901 all the way to the most recent I found, in January of this year (2022). The links were shown to be a diverse group of information and spanning many institutional realms. However, many were in foreign languages and lose some meaning in their translation to English, where I could understand what I was reading. I anticipate many more sources, and notably, more reliable sources being available as they pertain to a more specified search of information regarding this topic. Aside from a few grammatical errors, it was fairly smooth to read and transition from section to section. It became a little daunting having to go back and forth between the different culture's belief systems and how they incorporated snakes into their own mythologies. It was rather disjointed in this way. The major sections or subheadings were, again, sparse insofar as each of the cultures mentioned could be expanded on broadly just in regard to snakes in their myths. This jumbled mess of information that bounces back and forth makes it particularly difficult to stay invested in if trying to garner any substantial knowledge from it.

The article had only two images, and while the first one at the top was slightly captioned, it really just left me with more questions then answers. There could be a multitude more images attributed to this page, indeed. The two images available appeared to be adhering to copyright laws and Wikipedia standards, as far as I could tell. There were only three total remarks on the Talk page for this article, however, it did state that it was part of the Mythology WikiProjects in accordance with other Mythology-related topic's projects. I would assess this article as only really just underdeveloped. My opinion is that has the makings of a great article, but there just isn't a lot of "heft" to it in its current form. The article is rated as a C-class of High Importance. I think it can be improved upon by providing more in-depth discussion of each of the culture's representation of the snake in their respective mythologies, as well as potentially more historical insight throughout a broader swath of time not inherently included in the article thus far. I look forward to improving this article substantially.