User:Acl370/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cultural anthropology

Why have you chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I have always had a special interest in cultural anthropology, and I thought it would be better to evaluate an article on a subject I have some understanding of. On first glance, I thought the article was overall well-researched and well-written, but it is apparent that many authors with many different writing styles have worked on this article.

Evaluate the article
Overall, the article is well on its way to becoming a comprehensive overview of Cultural Anthropology. It just seems a bit underdeveloped in areas.

All the information included in the article is relevant to the topic of cultural anthropology. The majority of the sections seem well-balanced and informative. The sections are fairly well laid out. There are few to no spelling or grammatical errors. However, a few sections stood out to me as incomplete or a bit biased:


 * The "History" section is quite short and only focuses on the 19th century evolutionist theories; it might be helpful to have an overview that includes more of the major cultural anthropological theories through time (which are already well explained in further detail throughout the rest of the article).
 * The "Cross-cultural comparison" section does not thoroughly define cross-cultural comparison, and mostly gives an overview of the comparative studies at Yale's Human Relations Area Files.  More of a formal definition and an explanation of methodology would be helpful in this section.
 * Under "Topics in Anthropology", only "Kinship and Family" and "Institutional Anthropology" are described in detail. This represents only an extremely small portion of the vast areas of study included in Cultural Anthropology.  Perhaps it would be better to instead have a short overview on the wide range of topics in Cultural Anthropology, and insert many Wikilinks to articles on topics in Cultural Anthropology (including those already mentioned in the "See Also" section).
 * Although it provides a great explanation and is well cited, the section "Participant observation" reads a bit like an argument in support of utilizing the method of participant observation. A shift to just explaining the methods of participant observation would sound less biased.
 * As noted in the Talk pages, the article focuses heavily on American Cultural Anthropology. An overview of European Cultural Anthropology would improve this gap in representation.

Wikilinks are found throughout the article. However, there is inconsistency in the level of citation among the sections. Some sections, such as "Participant observation" and "Topics in Cultural Anthropology", are thoroughly cited with reliable, appropriate, and relatively unbiased sources. Other sections have few to no references, and need further citation to demonstrate credibility.