User:Dkim3029/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Alexander the Great

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 chose this article because I was interested in the history of Alexander the Great. My first impression of the article was that there was a lot of writing for a historical figure who may have lost or have fictitious, surviving accounts of their life.

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.)

Lead Section

The lead section starts off with a concise introductory sentence that states the most important information about Alexander the Great. The lead section contains a brief overview of his life, achievements and his legacy and mostly has information that appears in the other sections; however I did find a reference to Hellenistic Judaism that only appeared in the lead section and never in another section. The whole lead section is a bit long I believe as it does go into detail about certain topics could have been explored in the sections that are about those topics.

Content

The article's content is all relevant to Alexander the Great and from what I can see by briefly looking at the sources, the information appears to be up to date with many recent sources. Looking throughout the article, the information all pertains to Alexander the Great and all of the aspects of his life appear to be listed as sections, including his personal life, kingship, military conquest, etc. The article does not represent an underrepresented topic as Alexander the Great is very well known.

Tone and Balance

The tone of the article is very neutral and does not try to put forth a certain image, only stating alleged facts about Alexander the Great's life. Whenever I searched for words such as better, greater, best or superior, the appeared only as quotes, within a different context or from the title of cited sources. The history of Alexander the Great is all that is ever talked about with no moral judgement or any kind of framing that would attempt to show his actions and life in any kind of biased light. I believe that the article represented many different views and would try to give voice to multiple sides as a way for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Sources and References

The sources for this article seem to be reliable, coming from various databases and published journals. The sources are also current and updated as the dates on many of the sources come from current year or from last year. There are many different authors writing about Alexander the Great from many different perspectives such as history, military and art. I cannot say if there are better sources that can be used as I am not an expert. All of the links that I clicked on, which I admit are only a few of the total, work which tells me that the article is well researched enough.

Organization and Writing Quality

The article is written very well with short sentences that are filled with lots of information. It appears to all be grammatically correct and no words appeared to be spelled wrong. It is also organized well with all of the sections in the article serving a purpose. I find it helpful that one section is dedicated to the "character" of Alexander the Great which consists of multiple subsections pertaining to all of Alexander the Great's varied personal traits.

Images and Media

The images in the article helps to give an image of what the writing is talking about. The visuals are incredibly helpful and interesting and are all related to the topic that it is helping to visualize. The captions also properly explain what the image is supposed to show and are never off topic. All images are set into the article in an appealing way, always to one of the sides, never too large. Not all of the images are cited however.

Talk Page Discussion

All discussion is focused on giving proper information about Alexander the Great such as if he was considered a king or an emperor. This article has been rated GA and is a part of multiple WikiProjects. In class, we have a discussion that is mostly focused on what the teacher said about the topic. In the talk pages of Wikipedia, people discuss any subtopic within the topic.

Overall Impressions

Based on how famous Alexander the Great is and with the interest of multiple WikiProjects and the rating of GA of good article, I can say this has the status of a well done article. The article contains many strengths such as its writing, information and balanced tone. The article has few problems, such as the few times I didn't see a cited image and the fact it doesn't show many underrepresented topics about the man or at least they are not given much attention. Overall, the article is very well developed.