User:Ed8795/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The Wikipedia article on Dura-Europos.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have been instructed to choose this article to evaluate by my course professor. It is the main page for the city and excavation site which my object of research for this course is from, and therefore contains most of the background and contextual information on Wikipedia about Dura-Europos and for my object. My first impression is the article's thoroughness in terms of subtitles. The article includes a timeline of events and details about the site as a historical city, excavation site, and relationship with contemporary Syria, which are all crucial.

Lead Section
The article's lead is concise and clear. It does lay out the article's three main sections: history, archaeology, and modern times, but more information could be included, particularly in the archaeology section in the lead, on who has excavated the site and when (specifically the Yale-French excavations). I would also suggest emphasizing that temples for multiple religions were present at Dura-Europos, as this is major interest for scholars.

Content
The information on the foundation and early history of Dura-Europos is detailed and interesting, containing more marginalized pieces of information such as the piece of cuneiform writing, which is central to its history, but easily overlooked in favor of Roman or Hellenistic material. More information could be provided on the "Palmyrene gods" and "local deities," who have temples, wall paintings, reliefs, and inscriptions like the Christian church and synagogue do, but are mentioned within one sentence rather than being named with a separate sentence of context, which the Christian and Jewish temples have.

In comparison with the coverage of the Christian and Jewish temples, as well as the long section on the city's siege and destruction by the Sasanids, the Palmyran and local religious influence on Dura-Europos could be expanded upon. Overall, the influence and presence of non-Roman polytheistic gods at the site is underrrepresented on the Dura-Europos page.

It would be helpful to include lists of alternate names for many sites within Dura-Europos. For example, the Temple of Bel is also referred to as the Temple of the Palmyric Gods, the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods, the Temple of Jupiter, etc., and these should all be listed and redirect to the same article, for clarity and accessibility.

(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.)

There is no mention of the Arab laborers who worked on excavating the site, which should be added. Additionally, the discussion of objects is biased toward religious and war artifacts, with little discussion of remnants of daily life/domestic objects.

Tone and Balance
The tone is objective and considers the input of multiple scholars. Correcting the slight issues of underrepresentation of cultures at Dura-Europos would help with the balance of information and viewpoints.

Biases are well avoided, and yet nuance is still discussed. For example, "The find is important for religious history, as the Jewish communities there were generally judged to be hostile to images." discusses what many thinkers believed, and how the synagogue paintings at Dura-Europos dispute this belief, without favoring one side of the debate, or losing a neutral tone. Likewise for the article's discussion of Cumont's theories of Mithraism as a Roman form of Mazdaism (called "now-obsolete") versus what other scholars read from the Mithraeum's imagery. However, there is no evidence given for why Cumont's theory is now-obsolete (or whether it factually is obsolete), which is perhaps an issue.

Sources and References
The links that I checked worked, and redirected to current, reliable, and scholarly secondary sources. It seems like these sources back up most of the facts in the article, although there are not as many citations as I was expecting (not sure if this is an issue or just a style of citation used in Wikipedia - citations occur about once a paragraph, rather than there being a citation to each sentence of factual information from (a) source(s)).

There are sources from the late 2000s, 2010s, and as recent as 2021, which proves the currency of material.

Organization and Writing Quality
The article is well-organized, moving through the site's history and significant buildings, followed by more information about the archaeology and concluding with modernity. Perhaps the timeline should be placed earlier in the article?

Images and Media
Perhaps more images of archaeological finds could be used, particularly in the "Archaeological finds" section, which shows only war artifacts, and not other objects such as those from everyday life. This reflects a bias toward an interest in war and religion throughout the article, which ignores most evidence of daily life and habits including worn and domestic objects. Additionally, more photographs from the archaeological digs themselves could be used, to show proof of the Arab laborers who did the actual excavation, under European/American supervision.

That being said, the images throughout the article have concise and strong captions.

Talk page discussion
The talk page has evidence of copyediting (which is duly noted, since the article is free of errors and reads well), as well as formatting of images and external links. In terms of content, someone has added recently to the illegal excavations/looting subsection, which is great because the site is still developing and its history continues. Perhaps reviews of other content/adding some more recent sources will be needed soon, although the sources from 2021 assure me that someone has recently updated this article's content.

The article is rated as C-class, and belongs to important national WikiProjects such as Syria, classical Greece and Rome, and Iran, all of which Dura-Europos belongs to, culturally-historically.

Overall impressions
I think this article is strong, with specific room for improvement in adding sentences and/or sections on archaeological objects from everyday life, acknowledgement of the native Syrians who worked on excavating the site in the 1920s and 30s, and slight reorganization (why is the site's archaeological digs not included in the timeline? should this timeline be earlier in the article, to provide context?)

This article is well-developed, with, of course, some room for slight improvement!

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