User:JamieB1719/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Adi Shankara

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 am interested in Advaita philosophy and its origins, and it is important to the Hindu faith. I was initially overwhelmed (in a good way) by the sheer quantity of information on the page.

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 very clear about who this article is about, and their significance to various concepts. It does a pretty good job of touching on most of what the article is going to talk about. This might be just a me thing, but it seems a little overly detailed - the lead is basically its own paper.

The content is plentiful. Considering this is a historical figure being spoken of, who lived over 2000 years ago, it's a little difficult to say whether or not any of the information is outdated. I see no missing content (though I don't know a whole lot about Adi Shankara.) Everything is presented very factually, and there aren't any apparent equity gaps. It provides historical context for some of Adi Shankara's commentary.

The tone of the article is very neutral. Everything that is said is stated factually, without any attempt to sway the reader. Both positive and negative viewpoints of Adi Shankara are shared.

All of the source links I tested worked, and all of the links to other wikipedia articles that I tested also worked. The sources are fairly current, with articles generally dating from the 2000's to today, though there were one or two places where the sources were from the early 1900's. The sources I checked appeared neutral, and came from many different places and authors.

There are some areas where the writing is a little difficult to understand, simply because of the sheer amount of religious terms used to describe things. In some places, there are small parenthetical definitions given of what a term means, other places you are kind of on your own. Generally, the article links to other definitions, but there are a few places where you are sort of having to hope you can guestimate what a term means, or look it up yourself. I'm going to be honest - this article was massive. I may have missed some typos, but as I skimmed through, there weren't any glaring errors. The organization is excellent, though I might put the historical contexts section earlier in the article so that the reader has background for the ideas being shared by this man.

This is a very word-heavy article - not a lot of pictures are given to at the very least break up the wall of text. The images that do exist add value to the article, though. The images have captions that state what they depict and where they are from. There was only one image that wasn't public domain, but it seemed to have permission to be used on wikipedia.

The talk page was mostly just people making clarifications and asking for terminology change. Discussions about length and states of completion for various sections seems to be the norm. There are some blurbs that weren't terribly clear to me what they did, probably just made an edit, but nothing super out of the ordinary. I don't think it's part of a WikiProject. Everyone in the talk section seems to cut to the chase with what needs to be changed and why, but no one is harsh about it.

Overall, this is a very good article. I think that some more images could help with flow, and the Hindu terms that many readers may find unfamiliar ought to be defined. The article is very well-developed, and I can't see a need to add more information anywhere. Overall, 9.5 out of 10.