User:GwenJ210/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Catacombs of Rome

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Tracing through the academic disciplines category, I chose to find an article that could serve as a helpful baseline as to where the course begins. Catacombs of Rome relates back to early Christianity and the Roman Empire, whose control and fragments of their control were extremely influential and prevelant during the first half of the middle ages. Their influence spread across all of their afflicted territories, and their understanding of death/the afterlife could have been passed along as well as religion.

Evaluate the article
I found the article to be well written, and conveyed the information at hand. Though, in the introduction, the article states that the catacombs housed not only Christian bodies, but Jewish and Roman pagan corpses as well, but the rest of the article only focuses on the Christian burials, even going into the history and architecture of the Christian catacombs.

For the lead section, the introductory sentence was concise and described an overview of the article's topic adequetly. It does not, however, go over the article's major sections, only giving a broad overview of what the catacombs are, not the specifics. With the introduction of both Jewish and Pagan burials, I felt like they should have been included more in conjunction with the more famous Christian burials.

Content wise, the content is relevant to the topic, but sometimes went into detail on unnecessary sections, like etymology which could have easily been included in the introduction. Some sections also felt a little out of order, I would have arranged the typology section to be earlier as it gives a visual description of the catacombes. As for equity gaps, I think this could be easily remedied with the inclusion of more instances of pagan burials in the catacombs, as well as a deeper dive into how early Christians and pagan's mortuary beliefs did not align and how they did. The Catacombs of Praetextatus section states that these catacombs were originally pagan before switching to Christian, and the historical difference in use and burial practice could have been included. I did find that the article was up to date, many sources being added in late 2021.

I did find the article to be relatively neutral in nature, though, as mentioned throughout the evaluation, the information presented does skew very heavily towards Christian history. While this serves a foundation for the current course, it ignores the religious demographic that Christianity overtook and eventually shadowed. To understand how Roman Christian society, and death, functioned, their past as a pagan community must be mentioned. That being said, the information is not presented in a Christian way, that just appears to be the only information provided.

As mentioned before, some of the sources are as recent as late 2021, though some stretch back to the 1880s. From what I could find, the sources do appear to come from reliable sources, some coming straight from Roman museums and the various catacombs themselves. Each source is either centered around Roman catacombs as a whole, a specific Roman catacomb, or mortuary studies in Rome. One of the links, Charles Maitland, does not work but the rest do. Many sources and scholarly articles have been written on the topic, though I found few not locked behind a paywall (a benefit to using Wikipedia as it is free). When the provided sources did not come from a website like National Geographic or a catacombs website itself, the majority of the information did come from historical and religious scholars who appear to be white males, resulting in a severe lack of diversity in the authors.

Part of the catacomb's appeal is how decorated they can be, which the article conveys through its use of images. There are a few images throughout that are well captioned (a useful addition because of how weathered they can be), but the majority of the images are attached to the specific catacombs, nearly every one getting a picture of the interior, a painting within, or both. The paintings are also laid out together at the end of the article. All of the images are laid out neatly, all arranged to the right side of the page, except for the Catacombs of San Callisto, which has an image on the left and right of the page, creating an odd layout for the text.

Many of the discussion posts are either about clarifying information within the text, or seeking clarification on points like "How long does tufi take to harden after exposed to air - as was the case in the catacombs?", something mentioned within the text. One of the recent posts did align with some of my critiques in the evaluation, seeking for more information of the Jews and pagan Romans mentioned briefly in the article. A group of university students proposed sections on Jewish catacombs and biological discoveries in the catacombs. This page is attached to four WikiProjects: Classical Greece and Rome; Rome; Christianity; Death. I found that the information was laid out in a more surface level way, without going into historical annecdotes like we may in class.

Overall, I found it to be a good article and it taught me more about Roman death and the catacombs. It's strengths definitlely lie with Christianity and Christian death, while it needs to be improved on the inclusion of other religions, like Judism and paganism, who are attributed to the catacombs. But, overall the article appears to be complete and well developed.