User:Abbytizo/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Latino Children's Literature

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I noticed it was rated stub-class but high importance. Additionally, I am Latina and feel that I have a personal connection to this as I grew up with certain children's stories influenced by this. I think it is especially interesting that when I looked up "English" children's literature the article for Children's Literature popped up, and it was extremely in-depth, primarily exploring European children's literature or children's literature written in english. While it does include sections concerning Children's Literature relating to Europe, Russia, China, Brazil, India, Iran and Nigeria, any mention of Latino children's literature specifically is missing from the article. The Latino Children's Literature article matters because it covers a sub genre of children's literature in the United States that is relatively new and can cover extremely heavy topics like immigration. The fact that it is so sparse and completely left out of the Children's Literature article is concerning to me. My preliminary impression of the article is that it is extremely short with only 6 citations and lacking any depth in each of the sections.

Evaluate the article
The lead section is only two sentences and while the first sentence identifies the topic it does not mention the nature of the material that makes up children's literature and it does not mention that the material is for children. While it may seem redundant to do so, the Children's Literature article writes in the first sentence that the material is made up of "stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children." The lead does not include a brief description of the article's major sections and rather than being overly detailed, it lacks any detail at all.

The article is divided into five very short sections. The sections are relevant to the topic and are History, Themes, Style, Influential Authors, and Works. I do not believe the content is entirely up to date because it is missing so much. It seems to largely cite the works of chicano authors/stories. This means that the Latino Children's Literature that falls outside the spectrum of the Mexican-American experience is missing. The largest section "Themes" has only four sentences. Each section is extremely lacking in details, only providing the most general overview of each section. It does address topics related to historically underrepresented populations in the United States, but does not provide details. If someone were to read the "style" section I believe they would come away with no new information. This article is extremely lacking in terms of content.

The tone of the article is fine and seems neutral. However it seems to be extremely off balance because it only seems to focus on or describe Mexican-American or Chicano writing. This is seen in the history section but most prominently in the works section where the person or people who wrote the article only list stories about Mexican-American experiences as notable works. It is also unclear what makes these works more notable than others or why they were chosen. In this sense I do not believe there are a diverse selection of authors being represented. One of the citations linked to a website where the page no longer existed. Other than this, the sources used were reliable secondary sources written in academic journals. However, the article could benefit from using more sources.

The article is written clearly and concisely with no grammatical errors. I am unsure if the topics of each section are the best way the article could be divided. There are no images in the article.

The last and only comment on the talk page was a user recommending that the definition be changed to a proper one as well as recommending the addition of more authors, titles, and citations. I believe the only reason someone commented on the article is because it was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment (this is stated in the talk page). It is part of the WikiProject Children's Literature, and is rated high importance but is stub-class. I think this is accurate. There is not really a discussion on the talk page so I am unable to compare it to in-class discussions.

Overall, I think that the article is on an extremely important topic but is really lacking any detail as the person or people who wrote seem to have neglected putting in heavy work on it. The articles strengths is that it does have a foundation- there is a clear structure to work with and the important topics have been laid out for someone to add more details to. The article can be improved by adding details with references to every single section and by expanding the list of notable works as well clarifying what causes something to be considered a notable work. An expansion into Latino children's literature outside the Mexican-American experience is also needed. I think that the article is extremely underdeveloped and each section would require a lot of work to be put into it in terms of research before it can be considered a high quality article, especially given the fact that it is rated as high-importance.