User:AliENGL304/sandbox

User:AliENGL304/newsandbox

Individual Implementation Plan
I will be editing the "Adaptations" section, expanding the content, particularly in the "Screen Adaptations" sub-section. I will also be adding films and radio performances.

Article Evaluation
I chose to evaluate the article for Alice Walker's 1976 novel Meridian. "Meridian (novel)" isn't the best article. It is very short, containing only truncated sections titled "plot summary" and "themes and critiques." In addition, the article is sparsely sourced. Despite these issues, the article does do a good job of presenting a neutral tone throughout. While there is an overall lack of sources for this article, every claim made in the article contains a citation. Furthermore, the sources that are included are all reliable, coming from academic journals. The talk page is, as expected, almost empty. It looks like no one is actively working on improving "Meridian (novel)."

The main way to fix this article would be to build up and expand the extant sections while adding several new sections. The plot summary is truncated to the point of being inaccurate. Meridian is, aesthetically speaking, a post-modern novel that contains a decentralized temporal and narrative structure. The novel jumps between Meridian's childhood, early adult life, adolescence, and young adulthood seemingly at random, and summarizing the plot as if it were a linear narrative gives the false impression that we follow Meridian from her college career to her work in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. I think the best way to handle this would be to mention that the novel is not linear and to more robustly summarize the events of the novel in a linear fashion. This would include characters and events that are currently excluded from the current plot summary, which leads to it's inaccuracies. I would also add a "characters" section which would include characters currently mentioned in the article, as well as others like Wild Child and Anne-Marion, who are not.

Going off of this, I think adding an aesthetics section which discusses the novel's post-modern and black feminist aesthetics would be useful in understanding and contextualizing the novel. It seems like sections on the aesthetics of novels are not common on Wikipedia, but this would be a very useful section for this particular novel. Depending on how this is done, all this material could be included in a "critical history" section, but I feel a separate section on aesthetics may be warranted.

I would split the "themes and critiques" section into two -- "themes" and "critical history." The themes section could function like many similar sections on Wikipedia articles about novels and summarize the political and black feminist themes of the novel. The critical history section could include the many ways scholars have situated and commented on the novel. For this section to be effective, it would have to situate Meridian as being a black feminist text that is simultaneously critical of, yet in the lineage of, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the Black Arts Movement. This section would also benefit from a view of the novel in regards to the Black Queer Liberation Movement and how Walker's ambiguous sexuality could denote Meridian as not just a black feminist text, but as a possible black lesbian text. Essentially, these sections should outline the major concerns of the novel, the history of social and arts movements that led to the novel, and the various ways that scholars have approached and situated the novel. A third "background" section be useful for containing information about black social movements that is key to Meridian, but may not neatly fit within the categories of "themes" or "critical history."