User:Andyqn29/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Ainu people

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I selected this article to evaluate because the Ainu are a historically marginalized minority group in Japan, and a group we will be studying in FWIS 286 relatively soon. Since they have usually been overlooked by others, I decided to bring light to their situation in this article evaluation.

As the article is rather long, I mostly skimmed each section for a clear writing style and relevant information. Overall, the article appears to be fully comprehensive, incorporating all aspects of the Ainu experience, from their history to language to governance systems, and more.

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.)

For the most part, Wikipedia's article on the Ainu people appears to wholly encapsulate all important details on this ethnic group. First, the lead section succinctly encompasses the basic topics of the article, from the Ainu's location, present status, and population. It remains fully objective in its style, which can be seen throughout the rest of the article.

In regards to the general content of the article, the editors have successfully addressed one of Wikipedia's equity gaps in writing about a marginalized group and documenting much of their story. Most of the headlining sections of the article are of similar length to one another, or of appropriate length given how much information there is about them. The two sections I found to be somewhat out of place are the "Military Services" section and the "In Popular Culture" section, the latter of which is indeed highlighted by Wikipedia to be irrelevant. Because the "Military Services" section is so short, it could plausibly be incorporated into the "Situation with Russia" section. While I find the "In Popular Culture" section's material to be interesting, it is often very difficult to find reliable sources for these references, so I think it would be better to either scrap the entire section or include it in the "History" section by prefacing the examples with a cited statement such as, "In recent years, several publishers have made efforts to represent marginalized groups like the Ainu in their media. Some examples include [insert examples here]."

Other than this minor shortcoming, I believe this article to be a solid neutral encyclopedia of the Ainu people that allows readers to draw their own conclusions to the Ainu's situation. The images are relevant with informative captions, and there is a diverse variety of links, from academic journals to Russian news articles. While a lot of the sources aren't recent (e.g. 2001, 2011 for the links I checked), the nature of this article (with a heavy emphasis on history) doesn't necessitate all of the sources to be current.