User:Goomba2003/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Philosopher's stone

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 choose this article because I am very interested in the topic of alchemy and the philosophers' stone played a major role in the field. The philosophers' stone is important because alchemy was a large field of study in the medieval period. A lot of alchemy revolved around alchemists trying to create or discover a philosophers' stone. It was believed that a philosophers' stone was capable of transmuting base metals into gold or silver, healing wounds and illnesses, and even extending one's life. It's important to know how the philosophers' stone influenced the decisions of powerful people in the medieval period. Before reading the article, I didn't know much about the philosophers' stone. I had a loose concept of what it was. Basically, I thought that it was a magic rock that had supernatural powers. Also, I thought that ideas of the philosophers' stone only existed in the Arab and European world. However, Buddhism and Hinduism also had an equivalent of the philosopher's stone.

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 lead section of this article does a good job of describing the philosophers' stone in a concise way. However, the article does not do a good job leading into the major sections. The content discussed in the bulk of the article is very relevant to the topic, but I believe that it is missing some important issues. For example, the addition of famous alchemists who tried to create a philosophers' stone would be a great part of the article. This article does a good job of being neutral. It includes ideas about philosophers' stones from different areas of the world. I believe that the article does a good job explaining the ideas of European, Arab, and Indian cultures. Most of the citations used in this article come from good sources. Many of the references are hundreds of years old, but they are pertinent to the information being discussed. Not many of the sources are recent, but it might be because the topic hasn't been relevant for hundreds of years. The article is well organized and I was unable to find any spelling or grammatical errors. Not many images are used in the article, but the images are well-captioned. The images do a poor job enhancing the understanding of the topic. The last message on the discussion page was in 2013, so the last major edit was almost ten years ago. The article is apart of many WikiProjects and is rated as a c-class. Overall, the article seems to have been left behind. There is plenty of room for improvement, but the subject matter isn't very important. The article could definitely expand into more sections, but the low level of importance allows for the article to be substandard.