User:GeologyDUde/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
365 Crete earthquake

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
The 365 Crete earthquake is not only a historically significant event, its place within the roman empires downfall remains the subject of debate. The aspects and details are contentious, down to whether or not it actually happened. Its implications extend to politics and economics, and fits within my major, political science, whilst remaining related to the class.

Evaluate the article
The article remains relatively neutral and detailed throughout, though occasionally assigning absolutes in wording, such as when they say it was virulent antagonisms between Christianity and Paganism that distorted literary evidence, though the writing does follow up with a precise example. The article dives into different types of evidence, archeological, geological, and historical, with archeological being only supported by one sentence, and historical being the most obviously contentious, with different interpretations. The ultimate failing of the article however, appears in the reference list: Nearly every reference is being made to one of two places, Stiros 2001 and Kelly 2004, two historical papers which (according to the talk page) regularly contradict each other, and whose information (revealed by the user Mikenorton in the talk page regarding a different Kelly paper from 2008) and new information has since come out, but yet this paper is still heavily relied on, just having replaced small chunks that have become outdated. Another issue of debate in the talk page is whether or not this earthquake, or series of earthquakes, was one of the key factors in the fall of the roman empire, which was concluded with a 2010 Stiros article. And lastly, the end of the talk page has an unsigned paragraph of text which seems to have been ripped straight from a reference paper. Overall it seems to have been well written, and the page has received an appropriate amount of refinement, but does not have a breadth of resources preferable for a historical event such as this.