User:Collector786/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sarah E. Goode

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This is an article I will be expanding on as I do more research. I chose Sarah E. Goode since she was the second African American woman to get a patent, and not much is known on her. Growing up south of Chicago, it is rewarding to focus on a woman from that area.

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.)

The article is very brief overall and could definitely use more information. The lead is concise, but probably too concise. It is missing the summary of details that will come later in the article. That would be something worth adding as I edit the article more.

As far as content, the article seems to be up to date, with no obviously irrelevant information. It also deals with an equity gap, an African American woman in STEM. However, the article is definitely lacking in content. I was able to find more information about Sarah's family life and upbringing that I hope to include. I also found a journal article about challenges to women and people of color getting patents in the 19th century, which might add some perspective to her accomplishment. I want to include more about her furniture business, too, which I found the address for, and for a local cabinet bed competitor. I also found some information that I'm not sure is relevant to include or not. But there is plenty of content out there to expand upon. I did notice a contradiction between the lead (which mentions her as being the second African American woman in the US to receive a patent) and the folding bed paragraph (which mentions her as the first African American patent holder in the US) - obviously one is incorrect, and this needs addressed!

The tone of the article seems to be neutral, with nothing that really stands out as being fringe or biased.

The sources for the article need improvement. Clicking the link for reference 1, for instance, takes me to an Amsterdam News article that shows a white woman commonly mislabeled as inventor Sarah E Goode. (This woman is actually Sarah Good Marshall.) It also misspells Sarah's maiden name and says she was born into slavery, which is not true. Slavery existed at that time, but she was not a slave. She lived in the free state of Ohio. Unfortunately this misinformation is echoed in the other sources, and these sources keep being reused despite the incorrect information. I haven't discovered yet if her parents experienced slavery or not. But both her father and her husband Archie's father were carpenters, as well as her husband, which probably acted as a catalyst for her invention. I am excited to bring better information to this page as most of the sources are just random websites.

The article has some grammatical and spelling errors, as well as the contradiction I mentioned above. But the article does seem well-written despite these issues, and it seems well organized.

The images are useful for the topic. I'm not sure if they adhere to Wikipedia's rules or not, but it looks like they are images in the public domain. One photo's caption is fine, but the other needs a lot of work. It reads, "Patent issuded a canbinetbed for peoples homes and needs."

The talk space in this article doesn't seem to have much discussion going on, more just some information posted to be included in the article. The article is rated "start-class" and is of interest to many WikiProjects.

Overall, the article is just starting out and needs more information. It also needs more scholarly sources if possible.