User:Ella011001/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Tituba

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 Tituba's article because in class we discussed how not much is known about her, and after the Salem Witch Trials concluded, any record of her stopped. From this, I was curious to see what appeared on her Wikipedia page. Tituba was instrumental in setting off the start of the trials, as well as being a notable figure associated with the trials. Because Tituba is so noteworthy, I was expecting her page to be written to a fairly good standard. However, what I found was just ok.

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 does have useful information, but it needs quite a bit of work. Some sections are poorly written and clunky, i.e. "Tituba was allowed to speak against her accusers despite their race because it was not illegal for slaves to give testimony in court." The article could definitely be much improved with some simple grammatical edits and sentence restructuring. I haven't read every single source that's cited (partly because not all of them are accessible), but the article seems to read like it was paraphrased from its source material. Particularly in the "In Popular Culture" section, there is an argument being made about how history and fiction have shaped each other in relation to Tituba and the Salem Witch Trials. While it is compelling, this isn't suitable for a Wikipedia article that is supposed to take a neutral stance. There are also a plethora of uncited claims throughout the article. Once again, some of the links in the citation section lead to nowhere and need to be updated. All of these issues are addressed in the Talk page, dating back to 2019. Ultimately, this article is written pretty poorly and needs a lot of work before it's up to par.