User:Helyeah27/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Meridian (novel)

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 this article because I am currently reading this novel for a class and am also learning about the social and political context of it which is fascinating. My impression of the article on wikipedia is that it was quite sparse. Much of the contextual information is lacking, and even the details on the novel itself seems superficial. My initial reaction when I scrolled down this page was, "That's it?"

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 the article does its job of introducing the text and giving an overview of the rest of the article.

The content that is provided is accurate and relevant, however there are gaps. The plot summary section takes an over 200 page novel and condenses it down to three short paragraphs. For comparison, I looked up Walker's novel The Color Purple and its plot summary was well over triple that amount. The "Themes and Critiques" section touches on some of the social context of the novel, but lacks true details describing factual events or organizations related to it. It also touches upon the novel's portrayal of women, but again lacks the development by simply stating "strong female role models" with just a brief description of the main character and little else.

Other aspects of the article are fine--the tone and balance, the sources and references, and the organization and writing quality. It's simply the lack of information that gave me pause, as can be seen also by the lack of images and media. Other than one image of the cover, there is nothing else. The Talk page is in a similar situation. There are only two edits, a decade apart, the most recent from over five years ago.

Overall, I am not unhappy with anything that is currently there. I just think there could be more content on the text itself and on the historical context.