User:History2112/Evaluate an Article


 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? Everything in the article appears to be relevant to the article topic.
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? Since I have not begun any significant research I cannot think of much that is missing besides more relevant information on the Crypteia.
 * What else could be improved? The citations and sentence structure could be approved. The article lacks inline citations, with the current article only utilizing four that correspond to one of three references. In the reference section there are four more works included along with the references that correspond to citations. These works, however, are very dated (three of them being published in the mid-1800s and the other in 1968) and irrecoverable from online research. The inclusion of these works would suggest that some of the information throughout the article may have been taken from them but there are no citations to verify this. While the article is informative, relative to the amount of information that it presents, it could read better than it currently does. The article is largely split into paragraphs only containing a few sentences which makes for a fairly choppy read.
 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? There does not appear to be any bias towards a particular position within the structure of the article itself so I would say that article is indeed neutral. Where the author(s) of the article use source material that includes the personal bias/opinions of the author, these claims are contextualized and cited to avoid them being seen as a bias coming from the author(s) of the article.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented? The viewpoints of the helots themselves is not represented at all within the article. The reason for this may be that we do not actually know what the helot population would have thought of the Crypteia and their tactics of repression. If I am able to uncover any relevant information to this then I will be sure to reference it throughout my updates to the article.
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article? Only one of the citations listed has a link but it does work. The source comes from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal, and appears to support the claims made within the article. This source is actually quite detailed and would be beneficial to employ throughout the process of updating the article.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? There is only one source from a peer reviewed journal with the remaining two coming from scholarly books. The information appears to be reliable as one comes from a peer-reviewed journal and one of the scholarly books was written by Paul Cartledge who is a classics professor at Cambridge University and has many publications on related subjects to his name.
 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic? There are actually no recent entries on the articles talk page, with the last comment being posted in 2011. The majority of the discussion in the talk page is anecdotal but the last two, posted in 2007 and 2011 respectively, make note of the outdated and uncited sources that I referenced earlier on in this evaluation. There was no response from anyone about the use and ambiguity of these sources.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects? The article is rated as a start-class, mid-importance article and is a part of WikiProject Greece and WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome.

Instructor Feedback
Good work, History2112! You've accurately evaluated this article, especially noting its weaknesses in sources (which inevitably leads to issues with content). This is a great choice for your project this semester, since it's a popular topic and there's no shortage of bibliography that can be added to really improve the quality of the information here. For the exercises that are due this week (adding a sentence/citation and copyediting) you can certainly add a sentence to this article, especially if the chapter you're reviewing is related to this topic. Copyediting might be more difficult because this article is pretty short, but if you find enough issues with grammar/sentence structure/presentation to merit copyediting, then go for it! Gardneca (talk) 15:14, 2 February 2021 (UTC)