User:Ayim93/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating Augustine of Hippo or the wikipedia page of Augustine of Hippo.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
When I was looking through our textbook for class, I noticed a section titled "Rhetoric in Christian Europe". The book mentioned St. Augustine and the influence he had on the developement of rhetoric in Christianity and during the middle ages. In the book, the author states "In the period between A.D. 450 and 100, rhetoric became important to the functioning of the church" (p. 124). This page matters because I am interested in finding an article on Christian rhetoric that I can edit for my final project. Before thoroughly looking at this page, I noticed that the page has seems to contain a wealth of information on Saint Augustine.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

When looking at the lead section of the wikipedia page, I noticed that the page lists the dates that Saint Augustine was born. In addition, this section mentions that his writing has influenced both Western philosophy and religion while mentinoning some of his most famous works like On Christian Doctrine. Overall, the lead has a lot of information; however, I will say that the lead section is overly detailed and this could be an issue for some when looking over the article.

Content

When going through the article, much of the article is relevant as different parts of the article talk about the life of St. Augustine. When going through the reference page, some of the references were from 2010-2020 so some of the content seems to be up to date. To be honest, all of the content seems very relevant to the life of St. Augustine.

Organization and writing quality

The article was very well-written and I was able to understand the article for the most part. I did not see any visible grammatical or spelling errors as I looked through the article. The article itself is divided into these sections (Life, Death and Sainthood, Views and thought, Works, Influence, See Also, References, External Links) and some these sections have subsections.

Images and Media

For the images posted on Wikipedia, many are paintings that depict what St. Augustine may have looked. Many of the images do have captions that explain what the name of the painting is and the name of the artist who painted it. From what I saw on the page, the images are laid out in a visually appealing way because there does not seem an abundance of pictures. To be honest, I had a difficult time discerning if the images did not ahdere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations.

Talk page discussion

When looking at the Talk Page, this was rated a B-class which was surprising because I thought that the article would be rated higher. So, I do wonder what an A-class article would look like. I assume that we are going to talk more about this chapter on Christian rhetoric later in the semester so I definitely look to see how the information posted on the Wikipedia page differs from class.

Overall impressions

For me, the article was strong as St. Augustine died over 2000 years so it makes sense that there is a wealth of information on his life. For anyone who is interested in St. Augustine, Wikipedia is a great starting point to collect information on him. For me, since there is a wealth of information, I am not necessarily sure what articles would needed to be added here at this time.

Comments from Dr. Vetter
hello - Thanks for your evaluation of this article. As you have noticed, this is a B-class article which means it is already fairly well developed. It also means that if you were to edit this particular article, your edits might be under more scrutiny by other Wikipedians. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it does mean that your edits will have to be a little more careful (and strictly observe writing conventions in Wikipedia such as the ones the Wiki Ed trainings have been going over) to avoid deletion. That said, you could certainly still choose to work on this article. While there is a lot of content, I could see adding a section entitled "Augustus as Rhetorician" or something similar that explained his rhetorical training and writings on rhetoric. There's a section in the main article on Rhetoric that has a section similar to this. You could start there in terms of gathering sources (as well as use our courses texts and other sources). Nice job on this!

DarthVetter (talk) 16:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)