User:BeckAnn B/sandbox

Evaluate an article: I chose Women in ancient Sparta

Overall I thought the article was well done and that it did a great job focusing on a few subjects in particular. The childhood section and marriage were both very in-depth.

However, there are a few things in this article I'd like to address. The biggest issue for me was, and there is a discussion on this on the talk page for the article: the article does not make it clear that they are in fact not talking about women in Sparta, rather they are talking about Spartan women. This difference is huge because Spartiate women were the minority, they were far outnumbered by non-Spartan women in Sparta. While the article does have a small section towards the end about other women in Sparta, the section is very small and does not show a true representation of women in ancient Sparta. I think the article should be named "Spartiate Women" because it doesn't really focus on women in ancient Sparta.

Apart from this the article was had good links and great referencing. The only issue I can find with the sources is that they are all mainly from the same five authors. Most of these scholars have multiple sources added, so while the page is supported by many different sources, there is still a uneven bias because they come from the same authors.

I think the article could be improved with more quotes and direct examples added. The page mentions (multiple times) evidence but does not actually state what the evidence is. One example that stood out to me was in the Childhood Section, when the articles talks about evidence that implies girls aren't subject to infanticide the same way boys were. This sentence is referenced so it's possible for the reader to try and find the original work to figure out how the writer knows this knowledge, but the article would be a lot clear if it simply stated from what primary sources it's gathering this information from. This is where a direct quote could come in, or possibly just a mention of what primary sources support this theory.

The article overall lacks quotes so I think more should be added, along with in-text evidence citing (this is so very important because while the writer might be getting their information from a research article, that isn't the primary source of the information) So this prevents the reader from knowing the source of this evidence from the references list. (I'm not sure if I explained this the best, but for example citing a research article that focuses on Plato doesn't actually immediately lead back to the original source [Plato] unless his name is in the title of the cited article). In my opinion this causes a lot of confusion but can be easily fixed simply by also mentioning the primary sources that the secondary sources are referring too.

Pictures would also definitely improve the page, I feel like especially the top of the page lacking a photo makes the article less attracting to a reader.

Another area I would love to see some added information is the "Homoeroticism" section. The section is only a paragraph long but I think it is a very under represented topic that readers would be interested in.

For the talk page, it has been added to rather recently (within the past few months). It seemed another student picked the article for a assignment and added to the page. Throughout their process they posted their ideas on the page before and after their edits to keep the talk page updated.

Overall I really enjoyed the article, mostly because it focuses on women (which is a huge underrepresented topic) and think simple changes would improve a readers experience of the page.

Instructor Feedback
Great job, BeckAnn B! I can tell this is a topic you care a lot, and you've done a good job evaluating the contents. You're right that the title is misleading, and I wonder if the talk page discussion prompted the creation of the "Non-Spartiate women in Sparta" section. It would be interesting to check out the edit history and see what has been done since that discussion. If this is a page you're thinking of tackling this semester, consider that although it is rated "start-class", I think that perhaps it just hasn't been evaluated recently. To me, this seems like a C-class article. You can still work on it, of course, since you've had Wikipedia experience already, but you'll have to think about the overall article and not just adding sections, etc. I think rather than making it only about Spartiate women, you could keep the addition of non-Spartiate women and just improve the explanations of our sources but also the chronology - that is, reinforcing that all the information we have about certain aspects is relevant specifically to only a few hundred years of Spartan history. For your exercises this week (copyediting and adding a sentence/citation) you can certainly do both for this article before making your final selection. Let me know if you have any questions! Gardneca (talk) 15:55, 2 February 2021 (UTC)