User:Bilsonian/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Brittonicisms in English

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I was looking for C-class linguistics articles, because I enjoy linguistics, and this article caught my eye. My initial reaction to the article is that it if it did not have the warning at the top of the page, I would have thought it to be a good article before I read it.

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.)

Lead Section

This section is clear and concise. A reader who knows nothing on the subject could understand what the article will be about.

Content

There is some irrelevant content in the Diglossia Model portion in the Old English section. The second half of the first paragraph could be shortened, as there are many examples of diglossia given that do not need to be mentioned. The article is about English, not Arabic. In the Middle English section, the linguistic idea of case is explained in excruciating detail, which should be changed to a linked article about case istead, or just dropped from the article altogether. This digression stears the article from it's course. There is aslo this issue later in this section in various other places. There have not been any major content edits to this page in many years, which may be necessarry to have so that new research can be included.

Tone and Balance

The tone is balanced throughout. The whole thing is neutral, with maybe an exception being in the Substantive verb – consuetudinal tense byð section. That part reads as if it is proving a claim to be false.

Sources and References

Throughout the article there are areas that use long quotations. These should be paraphrased. There are very few items in the references that are publicly available, most are print books. There appears to be a variety of authors. In the South-Western zone texts section there, an idea by "other linguists" is given, but these linguists are not directly cited.

Organization and writing quality

The overall organization is clear, however at the section about consuetudinal tense byð the writing is confusing. The whole section repeatedly references a claim that is never stated. In the Middle English section, there should be more subsections as the topic changes within the section multiple times.

Images and Media

There are no images or media and the article does not have need for any.

Talk page discussion

This article is a part of the Wikigroup on linguistics, and rated as C. There is plenty of talk here about editing the page to be clearer and explain some of the denser linguistic theory in a more accessible way.

Overall impressions

This article has lots of information already, and is pretty complete. What needs to be fixed is changing the direct quotations to paraphrases, changing the formatting to have more, smaller sections, and to have clearer writing in general.