User:Jacktuj21794/Evaluate an Article

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

Auslan

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.)

This is the topic I will be looking into for the final project.

Auslan is a primary sign language in Australia. My immediate impression is that there was a lot of information there including history, relation to spoken languages, and other sign languages, dialects, and information on Deaf people and children's acquisition of language. There is also some information on Aborigines but not a lot, although it is noted that there are other sign languages spoken among those communities that are separate from Auslan. There are also many references, enough that I think it is proportionate to the amount of information in the 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.)

The lead section is concise and taps into several topics present in the article, but not overly detailed. It flows nicely and the starting sentence(s) give a lot of information one may be looking for when doing a quick search on Auslan.

Content seems fine, although most of the information cited comes from sources somewhat out of date (before 2000 or around 2007-ish, with just a couple sources from 2015 and 2019, no later. The section about Aborigines is sparse, and there is much focus on European origins (for good reason, as much of Auslan comes from European sign languages, but there is still a gap, in my opinion).

The article for the most part seems neutral. I would say the use of the capital "D" for Deaf people is good as it highlights the deaf community's perspective when appropriate.

-- have not checked sources -- (although some are old)

Organization makes sense and flows, and there are several sections appropriately titled.

There are some images but they are dark and hard to see. They are otherwise laid out in an appealing way.

There has been no update to the page since November of 2018, so it may need to have things added/changed. There is a lot of talk in Auslan as a native language and "deaf vs. Deaf" and relation to other languages. Perhaps there could be more info on just Auslan, as opposed to its relationship with others.

I would not go so far as to say it is poor, but it needs some updating and more information about Auslan added. I would say voices of Aborigines should be present, although I'm unsure what this would look like (is there any kind of "gentrification" with languages happening, for lack of better terms?). There should be more current citations. There is a good amount of information on Auslan's relationship to other languages. I think it is structured adequately.