User:Akiramorgenstern/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I evaluated the article titled The Birchbark House. The Birchbark House

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it provided information pertaining to an indigenous narrative we discussed in a previous class that I found particularly interesting. However, it is rated a start class wikipedia article, evinced by its length and lack of substantial and sufficient information pertaining to the narrative.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The article titled The Birchbark House contains a lead section that is concise and straight to the point; it describes when the story was written, its setting, the community involved and the collection in which this book is a part of. It is also successful in not including information not present in other parts of the article. Yet the lead section does not contain information pertaining to the other sections in the article, diminishing the effectiveness of the structure of the article altogether.

The article's content is somewhat related to the topic, but will often lead to tangents about issues outside of the story and the book's accolades. The article speaks to underrepresentation of indigenous peoples, and is up-to-date. However, a significant portion (almost the majority) of the article is dedicated to describing each character. While the characters are obviously important to the story, their descriptions do not carry much weight given the lack of emphasis in the article's explanation of the trajectory of the story. The article only contains its lead, a background section, and the character list, which results in the article being somewhat dry and sparse.

Given the article primarily explains the narrative and describes characters, it is neutral in the information presented. There is not much persuasion included in the article, and the content does not contain any controversial or minority viewpoints that are arguable in one way or another. The article makes points about Erdrich's involvement in the indigenous and Ojibwe communities, and argues that these involvements led to her writing The Birchbark House. Besides the background section, there are not many argumentative statements in the article.

The facts and statements are not completely backed up with sufficient secondary or primary sources. In fact, there are several instances of the article lacking a citation, with a "citation needed" symbol popping up after many sentences. This diminishes the trustworthiness of many of the article's claims. The sources that are provided, however, are mostly reliable and reflect available scholarship on the topic. Many of the sources are also written by indigenous authors, adding to the diversity of the references provided on the topic. I checked several links which all worked and led me to the correct page where the claim was backed up by a secondary source.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings in the article, the writing style was its best feature. The writing was concise, and grammatically correct with proper punctuation and no run-on sentences. While it is broken down into proper sections containing the broader ideas of what the article will talk about, the sections could be improved by simply containing more information on the book outside of its background and characters.

The article has only one image which is the cover page of the book, with a description of its author and year of publication. It adheres to copyright regulations and is formatted properly. The article could definitely benefit from more photos.

There is surprisingly just one comment on the talk page, where someone describes how much of a "mess" the article was. It was part of a school project where people edited without guidance.

The article's overall status is "start" class, and in my opinion, requires a lot of improving and substantially more information to become a better article. The article does a fantastic job of listing and describing the most important characters and provides a concise and interesting background page. This article could see significant improvement with an influx of additional information pertaining to the narrative's trajectory and importance to indigenous culture in today's society.