User:Applesandbanana/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Fire and Ice (poem)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

Throughout my high school career, there was multiple occasion where I ran into Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice. One of these moments were during our Poetry Out Loud unit during class. Fire and Ice was always a fan favorite. From it’s short stature and easy to memorize build, there would always be multiple people in the class reciting the poem. Yet, listening to it multiple times, year after year, I failed to take the time to actually sit down and analyze this poem. This assignments presents an opportunity to read a bit more into a poem that I’ve familiar with.

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.)

Fire and Ice’s wikipedia page consists of 6 sections: inspiration, stay and structure, analysis, musical adaptations, in popular culture, references, and external links. The overview, located at the very top, provides a good description and insight into the poem and the rest of the wikipedia page. The overall content of the page can be improved on. In the style and structure section of the page, rhyme scheme is mentioned. In the analysis section located right under contains a Compression of Dante’s Inferno subsection where the rhyme scheme is brought up once again. The analysis section can be expanded and worked on as most of the analysis section is made up of the subsection that is focused on drawing parallels between the poem and Dante’s Inferno. The image presented on this wikipedia article is a picture of the poem. At first glance, I don’t think that it enhances my understanding of the poem. I believe that the caption is well written and provides a clear insight to the image. The image as a whole does entice my interest into the poem.

When looking at the talk page of the wikipedia page, there has been dispute on the content of the wikipedia page. One comment that really stands out to me was “did the person who wrote the article even read the poem?” The comment emphasizes the lack of understanding from a reader of the page. This brings emphasis that the wording of the article itself can be worked on and improved on.

The poem is rated C-Class by wikipedia in terms of quality. The page has moments of strength and moments of weaknesses. In my opinion, I thought that the first sentence of the page was a strong opening to the page. In retrospect to the beginning, the analysis and structure section can be improved on. Additionally, the sentence structure can be worked on to show understanding of the content.

comments on your evaluation
1. You note that the rhyme scheme is mentioned twice. This is a good point. There is some justification for the two references, which are given for different purposes. But since the rhyme scheme itself is specified in the structural description, it does not need to be repeated in the analysis section.

2. In another excellent observation, you note that the analysis section includes a substantial discussion of one interpretation of the poem, Serio’s comparison between “Fire and Ice” and Dante’s Inferno. Even the brief paragraph preceding that discussion turns out to reflect comments in Serio’s article. This is a significant imbalance; surely Frost’s poem, which is among his best known (as the lead indicates), has been discussed elsewhere in the scholarly literature.

3. You mention the image, which shows Frost’s poem in its first appearance. Sometimes such images can provide further information about the poem. In this case, if you compare the text of the poem in the 1920 publication with the text given in the infobox, you may notice a couple of discrepancies. Apparently Frost revised (or corrected) the poem after it appeared in Harper’s.

4. You refer to a comment on the Talk page questioning whether an author of the article understood the poem. This section of Talk is somewhat cryptic, but it seems to me that the question refers to the quoted passage: "while desire certainly has the power to end the world, his experiences have led him to believe that it is in the chill might (sic) of hate that the end times will be found." The questioner juxtaposes that comment to a passage from the poem: "From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire,” suggesting that the comment is inconsistent with what Frost wrote. Probably that comment can be found in an earlier version of the article, and was cut out at some point – perhaps as a result of the discussion on the Talk page (the note on the Talk page is dated 2007).

5. I wonder about the sourcing of the Musical adaptations section. Does every item need two footnotes?