User:CassieSmith5/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Moundville Archaeological Site

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the Moundville Archaeological Site article to evaluate because I am somewhat familiar with the Site after the readings for activity 1. Thus, I hopefully will be able to recognize if the article's tone is neutral and if it is lacking any major aspects of the Site's history. Additionally, I now have a couple sources that I can recommend. Lastly, the article has a C rating, meaning it has a lot of room to improve, so that I might be able to make meaningful suggestions.

After looking the article over, I noticed that the article does not talk a lot about Indigenous claims to the site or artifacts and remains from the site. I expected this subject to be entire section on its own, but maybe it is mention in one of the other sections.

Evaluate the article
Lead: You have to read the first two sentences of the lead section to get a good definition of what the site is. The lead section does not give a good overview of the entire article. It mainly explains the what the site was while it was inhabited, but fails to talk much about the history and at all about the ceramics or excavations. The lead also contains information that is not present anywhere else in the article (the line about historical landmark status). Furthermore, this piece of information is not important enough to be in the lead section and should probably be moved to the history section. I think the lead should be longer and formatted more thoughtfully, such that it is a better representation of the article as a whole.

Content + Tone: This article does a good job of only communicating content that is relative to the topic. However, I think the article has entirely missed certain content which could make up entire sections, specifically: Indigenous claims to artifacts and remains under NAGPRA. Additionally, it seems like there should be more content on what Moundville was while it was inhabited. That being said, I do not know many specifics on this and I would need to do more research before suggesting what specific new information is included. Both of these missing pieces of content directly reflect how this article focuses on the white history related to the site and overlooks Indigenous history and ongoing interactions with the site, which is especially unfortunate given that this is a Native American site. That being said, I do not think the article actively tries to persuade the reader that white history is more important, but by primarily providing white history over Indigenous history the reader gets the notion that only white history is present at the site.

Sources and References: The number of sources is okay for the length of the article, and all of the sources are relatively recent (within the last 15 years). However, there are several facts that are missing citations.

Organization and Grammar: I do not understand why the article is organized in the way it is. It isn't by chronology or necessarily significance, either. There are several grammatical errors.

Overall, this article is conveying a white-centric retelling of the Moundville Archaeological Site. This article would benefit from more perspectives, which could be done relatively easily by going into greater depth about NAGPRA, Indigenous history of the site, more sources that talk about non-white perspectives, and reordering the sections of the article. The article would also benefit from a good look-over for grammar mistakes.