User:Beaver14/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Maya civilization

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.)

I chose an article on the Mayan civilization as I currently am doing a lesson plan and unit plan about the Americas for my examples in a class. I find this article is very important to anyone that is learning about early American civilizations and especially for 7th graders who might be using Wikipedia to start a research project. My preliminary impression was this is a really good article, it is spaced out good with info and has a good introductory paragraph and table of contents.

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 lead section is strong however I found some issues to it for my own preference. Before this to say, I checked the article's talk page and it is rated as a featured article. First the first sentence doesn't tell me to much information rather it is very brief saying "its a people know for their temples and glyps" while the rest of the section provides more info. I think a longer sentence could give more of a representation of the article. The rest of the section provides important information tp summarize the Mayan civilization achievements and aspects of culture without going into the extra detail found later in the article.

For content, this is an overview page for the Mayan civilization so I do find the article to have the sections that are most important and all the content focused on the civilization. For all the sections, for more information there are links to the actual pages such as history, art, language that would provide more information than it previously had. One issue I may have with the article is that due to its neutrality it may feel it as it doesn't provide a "voice" for the Mayan people but I would say it does show how unique the Mayan civilization was which would counter the typical Eurocentric view taught in classrooms. The article is mainly focused on facts so it doesn't pick a side and remains neutral.

For Sources, this article is plentiful. In a references section it is referencing pages of books and the bibliography has plenty of books with links to pdf in order to use. There are plenty of voices included in their list and all seem to come from peer reviewed journals. There are Spanish sources included but also other voices that you would not think of such as a British author article about the Mayan people.

For images and Media, the added images help give each section a what to expect for the article such as for Mayan astronomy - calendar, or for mathematics it shows the glyphs and the representation of the numbers. All have captions of what the image is representing and are placed in the correct section.

In the talk page there a discussions about the English used meaning how the article is written and heavy discussions over the validity of soruces and what should be included. There is even one discussion that states a section is the commonly used higher level of education information in their arguement for using one source over another. Like I said previously, the article is a featured article so it should reflect that, but it does give you a better representation of why it is good compared to others. This is a great starting point for any student in their research of the Mayan civilization.