User:Igotnooname/Evaluate an Article

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

Religious image

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 we have read about author portraits in Islamic books. Therefore, I thought that this article would be closely related to our course.

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 introduction gives a broad overview of religious images. The rest of the content mainly focuses on the use of religious images in Eastern Christianity. To illustrate the text, the author added several images that are well-captioned. The images are helpful to understanding the paragraphs. Sections on Western Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam are much shorter. Only one image of a Hindu diva was included to facilitate the understanding of the section of Hinduism. The image is not nearly as well captioned as those for the Christianity section. Even though the length of the paragraph on Judaism is relatively longer, there are no images accompanying the paragraph to showcase the animal iconography discussed in the text. There is also no section talking about religious image in Buddhism. The content gap in this article is conspicuous.

The tone of the article is not completely neutral. The author used absolute language like "always," "all," "only," and "never." Such words could be biased because not all religious images and worshippers follow the same set of rules and ideology. On the talk page, one Wikipedian also pointed out that the author had employed unsourced language such as it is "important" or it is "clear." Indeed, most of the facts in the article are not cited. The sources that were used seem to be reliable. The same Wikipedian also suggested that the author had only cited one source and that the certain POV of Orthodox Christianity seemed to be those of all Christianity. The talk posts were all posted by one person in 2010, and there is no further discussion on these issues.

In conclusion, this article is under developed. It does not provide readers with a worldwide view of the subject and needs additional citations and sources to support the article. However, the section of Eastern Christianity is relatively comprehensive although some of the absolute language needs to be improved.