User:Deep sea coral/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
J. Terry Steib - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was about someone who lived in Memphis that I thought deserved a good Wikipedia page. I thought I would be able to tell if it was good or not, because I knew a lot about J. Terry Steib. That is because I am a Roman Catholic, and he was Bishop of the Diocese of Memphis for most of my life.

Evaluate the article
The lead section is only two sentences long. It doesn't tell much to the reader about who Bishop J. Terry Steib was. It says when he was born, and that he was an ordained Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. It also includes his religious order's initials after his name.

In the article, there is one picture of his coat of arms, but no picture of him. The coat of arms looks good, and is bright and pretty. Below it are titles that you would call Bishop J. Terry Steib, with links to the pages explaining them.

The article's content is very relevant, going through the degrees the Bishop got over his lifetime, and which positions he held. However, on the work he did in Memphis and for Memphis, the article has very little to say. It only has one quote from him about what Memphis Catholics should be working for around the 2008 elections.

By putting that one quote in there, the article might be trying to lean towards a certain position and present Bishop Steib as having held certain political viewpoints off of one quote.

The article has one sentence mentioning that Bishop Steib was the first African American Bishop of Memphis, but it does not delve into how this effected Catholics and blacks, and black Catholics in Memphis.

The sources have a lot of problems. The first two paragraphs do not have any citations at all for their facts. If you Google Bishop Steib, Memphis TN, the first link that pops up on him, other than Wikipedia's page, is the Catholic Diocese of Memphis's page for him. The Catholic Dioceses' page is the same, as far as I can tell, word for word, as that of Wikipedia's, the only exception being that Wikipedia's article stops at Bishop Steib's resignation as Bishop of Memphis. I checked the three sources at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for the article. One is a Commercial Appeal Article on Bishop Stieb's resignation, that does talk about his life a little, but not nearly enough to claim that the article got all its facts from there. It is also very opinionated. The Archdiocese of Washington link says "page not found". The third source looks to be a blog post with an extensive block quote of a Bishop Steib letter to his congregation, talking about how things were going in the diocese and offering advice about the election fever in Memphis. However, since it is a blog and not the letter itself, this doesn't seem like a good source.

The writing style is polished and flows pretty well. I do not think that throwing in the lone quote about the elections without anything else in that paragraph about Bishop Steib's stance on anything, or his work for Memphis makes sense. The string of appointments seems impressive, but it is hard to read through, and to someone who is not Catholic, it wouldn't make a lot of sense.

All the information on Bishop Steib's life and work is under one heading: Biography. That could be further divided or put into different sections, such as Early Life, The Priesthood, Bishop Steib, etc. That would allow for expansion of the article, and make the information about him easier to read through.

The article is up to date, because at the end it says that the Bishop resigned from his position in 2016. It could mention that he still lives in Memphis, at Villa Vianney, the Priest's Retirement Home, but it doesn't.

The Talk page for the article said that three WikiProjects were related to the article. They were: Biography/Science and Academia, Catholicism, and Tennessee. There was a request on the Talk page for a photo of the Bishop to be put into the article, and links to find a free photo, as well. There is a picture that pops up next to the link on Google of the Bishop as a young man, but it is not in the article when you go to it. That is all that is on the talk page.

I didn't see a rating status for the article. I think the article needs a lot of work, seeing as the writing of almost all of it seems to be copied from a site that isn't even cited at the bottom of the page. The writing as it is is okay, but it is mostly copied, so this article needs to be completely re-worked.