User:CKBB008/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Dong Zhongshu

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Why you chose it: This theorist/philosopher was mentioned in this week's reading, "From Oratory to Writing" by Hui Wu.

Why it matters: Zhongshu reanimated Confucian texts with current cultural constructs 179-104 BCE

Preliminary impression: Limited, a brief biography and overview are given. A photo of a temple honoring Zhongshu is shared. From the history, it looks like some of the information was translated (human? machine?) from the Chinese Wikipedia.

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: The opening statement is clear and includes Hanzi as well as English text
 * Lead: More details could be provided in the opening paragraph. It is too concise.
 * Content: The content is relevant to the topic; however, more details are needed. Biography is the only subdivision besides References. Subheadings could added for each work discussing its importance.
 * Content: The page does represent historically underrepresented populations in English speaking pages. This may be different in Chinese pages. Considered a level 5 vital importance.
 * Tone: The article is neutral. It lists personal, historic, and cultural events relevant to Zhongshu.
 * Balanced: More needs to be said about Zhongshu's scholarly works. They are only briefly mentioned.
 * Sources and References: Both a Works Cited and References are included. They should be combined and one deleted. Formatting is also inaccurate.
 * Sources: Relatively current, late 20th C and early 21st C. I searched for other sources about Zhongshu, but couldn't find any, so it is impressive that six separate sources are mentioned. The links on the page work.
 * Organization: The organization is limited and needs further delineators such as family, scholarly works, politics, etc.
 * Writing quality: Moderate, no typos or misspellings.
 * Images: Only one image is included on the page. It is a poor quality picture of temple to Zhongshu showing the outside of the building with a side street and power lines. Not visually appealing. An inside or frontal view of the temple would be more appealing.
 * Talk page: The page is part of a WikiProjects. The latest updates on the talk page are from 2017 and 2018 asking for help and updates.
 * Overall: The status of the article is Start. The article is neither complete nor well-developed; however, sources in English about Zhongshu are difficult to find. (I tried). I predict further translation is needed. One possibility is checking sources on other similar pages such as Interactions Between Heaven and Mankind referring to the Han dynasty and Zhongshu.

Comments from Dr. Vetter
Nice evaluation here! This is directly in the scope of our project and would be a great choice for editing, but I would caution that I think you are correct in saying there may be some difficulty in finding relevant and useful sources to update this. Unfortunately, that's often the case with underdeveloped articles in Wikipedia. They are often incomplete because sources are so difficult to find. Still, I think it would a fun and challenging case for research if you have the interest/passion in it.

I agree with all of your assessments but one - on the citation style, it is incomprehensible to me, but Wikipedia has yet to agree on a single style. The "Works Cited" + "References" format they have here is actually a particular standard that emerges in history-related topics. It's basically an offshoot of Chicago's Notes+Bibliography format, which is commonly used in history and some other disciplines. It's definitely distracting, but I wouldn't recommend consolidating the two, but rather working within the convention other editors have set up.

I think you're right that translation has been applied here so there's certainly work you could do in terms of the prose's readability/style, as well as organization, adding to the lead, and adding to the main scholarly themes.

Again, this would be an excellent topic to work on and I could help you with some sources should you choose to focus on this.

Best, Dr. Vetter DarthVetter (talk) 18:42, 14 February 2022 (UTC)