User:Itchen628/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sable Starr

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it's the page for Sable Starr, the so-called "queen of the baby groupies."

Evaluate the article
This article about rock and roll's "queen of the baby groupies" is definitely fascinating, but perhaps lacking in the realm of reliable citation. Much of the information about Starr -- and I understand that in large part this is simply due to the nature of celebrity gossip -- either lacks a citation or the citation is not terribly reliable. One key example of this is the part about her relationship with Randy California, which allegedly occurred when she was twelve. There is a citation that links to a piece by Interview Magazine, which, while a fairly reputable source, doesn't really provide anything to substantiate the claim despite the fact that it was written around four decades after it would have occurred. Much of the information on Starr in this page relies, directly or indirectly, on lore recast as fact by wide word-of-mouth circulation. There is really no way to substantiate these claims; like the Randy California story, they rather reflect a commonly-repeated belief -- more than gossip but less than provable fact -- about Starr's life. It would be helpful to note this, and perhaps to note the difficulty of demonstrating the veracity of celebrity gossip.

Interestingly, there seems to be a debate going on behind the scenes about the proper spelling of Starr's name. According to one contributor, websites run by people who had met Starr claimed that the spelling was actually "Sabel"; contributors appear to have reached a consensus with the introductory sentence "Sabel Hay Shields (August 15, 1957 – April 18, 2009), better known as Sable Starr..."

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