User:Ckoerper/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Xanadu Houses

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article is relatively short but, I thought it had a great lead section and seemed like a good match for Architectural History as well.

Lead section
The lead section goes into great overview of what are/were the Xanadu Houses and their significance in history. The introductory sentence gives a great introduction to what the article will go into depth about. As well as the first and second paragraph go into enough depth to get a gradual basic understanding about how when the houses were built. There was a good brief overview of the ending history.

Content
The article was very relevant to the topic and went into great depth but it felt almost jumbled. It was hard to keep track of the three different homes and what pertains to each based on how this article was split up. The content is up to date with its facts. The amount of content about the popularity if these homes seems almost irrelevant because it is way more information than on any of the actual homes construction and usage. Also when reading through I was confused as to why popularity came before the actual information about the physical homes. I did not have any sort of connection to the homes representation when reading about how popular they were, I was questioning "why does this matter" almost the whole time.

Tone and Balance
The article is written in a neutral point of the view the whole time. No view points overrules one another. Roy Mason's view was written about in good detail but it makes sense because he was the main architect for the homes. It would have been great if more of any of the other people who worked on this project would have had their ideas more represented within this article. The article content does need work on balance because popularity overpowers the whole thing. Whereas some subtitles like the "Concerns over energy consumption" could have been morphed into another because there was very little detail on this topic or add more to the topic.

Sources and References
Majority of the content is referenced from the same source but it is written by quite a few authors according to the citation. I clicked on the book but it only shows a few pages out of the book so I was unable to check facts. The source was written a few years after the homes were built so very recent to the time. Only one thing is referenced in references so there needs to be more scholarly sources to cross fact check and add more depth to the research and content. There are a couple better or additional sources available to add to the research and content.

Organization and writing quality
The content needs to be reorganized into a more easily understood and better flow of content. The popularity can be condensed because the overarching idea should be about the actual home and not how popular it was. I want to know why not what other people did. There was one grammatical error that I found which started the sentence with 100,000 and this is just not professional writing. A bunch of long run sentences are throughout the article and need to be separated or condensed.

Images and Media
The article does include a variety of pictures but they are not always where you would need them. There should be photos of the interior space when talking about specifics of the interior to help enhance the understanding of the structure. A few photos are cited but many are not which needs to be fixed. The photo layout can absolutely be enhanced to be more visually appealing because some are too small to see what is going on.

Talk page discussion
Very similar discussions of disorganization about importance and "why" to what I have brought up. Many questions on the why factor but also clarifications of how things were written. Others have found some supposed facts to just not be true as was stated in the article this may be due to the lack of references used.

Overall impressions
Overall this article does include some very helpful understandings about what the Xanadu Houses were. The Lead section is a huge strength as well as information about the architects, constructors, and how the homes were actually constructed. The organization can be improved and with this would come much better understanding of the history of the homes as well as distinction between the three different structures. The article is underdeveloped because it needs more references, better organization, and some fact checking throughout which can be helped through more research.