User:Ceparris/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Trade beads

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've chosen the trade beads article because it's part of the topic I plan to research for this course. I chose this topic because I make jewelry myself, and have always been interested in beadwork as an art form. Trade beads are intrinsically tied to the history of African beadwork, and it's important to keep that history alive and available to the public. The article is classified as a stub-class, with a need for more citations and overall more information.

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.)

As the trade bead article is considered a stub-class, there is very little information written of the subject overall, with only a few sources. Because trade beads and slave beads have been utilized across the globe, and are featured in many different cultures, I feel the article would benefit from organizing each culture's histories into their own subsections (instead of cramming every culture into the generalized History section). I also feel as if some sections could be edited or re-written grammatically-wise to help the sentences flow better.

While there are several different sources listed from many different authors, some don't seem very reliable, and the information referenced can most likely be found in more dependable sources. The second source listed in the References section is a link to the Victoria and Albert Museum website, sending you an online catalog of their glass collection, though in the References section, the link is named "Trade Beads". The link's title is misleading, and I cannot find the written information in any of the five times the catalog is referenced.

In the Talk page, there was a debate on wether the article should be named "Trade Beads" or "Slave Beads". The former won, as the glass beads are more commonly referenced as such, with data such as the number of Google hits to back the claim up.