User:Herk0000/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I chose to evaluate Midwives in the United States.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
We recently were learning about midwifery in the United States, so I decided to pick an article about midwifes as well. This topic matters because midwives used to be the largest party responsible for the process of childbirth. However, because of physicians and stigma affecting how society sees them, they are not common anymore in the United States. My overall impression of this article was good. It contains a brief history of midwifery and how it evolved in present day. I think anyone wanting to learn about what a midwife is and how they came to be would obtain a lot of useful knowledge from this article.

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.)

Beginning with the lead, I believe that the first sentence and first paragraph follow the appropriate format for providing a brief overview of what a midwife are and the sections that will be discussed in the article. If I did not know what a midwife was, I could easily find out by reading the first sentence. It is concise, easy to follow, and provides great structure for what is to come. The content in this article fits the topic well and covers all major aspects of midwifery in the United States. It covers their history, up-to-date licensure requirements, different types of midwives, and minority populations within the field. When I was reading the article, all the paragraphs sounded unbiased and I did not pick up any sort of persuasion within the article. One aspect that did stick out to me was the amount of space dedicated to granny midwives. However, it is an important topic in midwifery and African-American midwifery was very common in the south for a long period of time, so it is understandable that there is a whole section devoted to the topic. The article is heavily cited and contains appropriate, up-to-date sourcing. In fact, the article was last revised less than a year ago. All the links that I clicked worked and directly me to a valid and reliable source. The writing style and grammar is how I would expect it to be- professional, concise, and informative. Reading each paragraph is very easy and the ideas flow very well together. Although the article is written very well, it lacks imagery and other media that would enhance the article's quality. The talk page seems to be respectful and civil, as it should be. The most recent development was the granny midwife section that I discussed earlier, and looking at the talk page, it makes sense why that section was elaborated on. I could not find the rating for this article, most likely because it was created for a class at Rice University and does not have a lot of contributors. However, I would rate this article as good with need of only minor additions. I think that adding an aspect about the stigma of midwifery in the United States would be relevant and could tie into the fact of how midwifery has lost its popularity in present day.