User:Jdawson1925/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I have evaluated a page on the Holy Thorn Reliquary, an interesting object from slightly before the time period on which we are concentrating, but with an interesting afterlife.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Searching for a page related to class but which would not contain too many, if any, spoilers for our simulation, I found the page for this artifact, which is beautiful, telling (in its demonstration of the resources contributed to the showcasing and preservation of a holy relic), and with a bit of intrigue. I was struck also by the detail given to the artifact's original patron, and wished to evaluate the distribution of space among the article's topics further.

Evaluate the article
To work from the top: the article has a well-rounded but concise lead section, which efficiently moves through the topics covered at greater length in the subsequent sections. The introductory sentence does well at providing the most general and identifying description of the artifact, though the phrasing, with “probably” as the third word the reader encounters besides the object’s name, does not inspire readerly confidence in the accuracy or certainty of the rest of the article, even though it does go on to provide definite, well-cited facts. The lead is structured less as a successively more detailed overview as laid out in the evaluation template, but nonetheless foregrounds the article well. The content, then, is relevant and up-to-date, aided clearly by the object’s inclusion in a BBC/British Museum collaboration and subsequent British Museum exhibition. The balance of the timeline in the “History” section is difficult, identifying only three moements of interest in the object’s existence, its creation, forgery and substitution, and present-day disposition. The article attributes the first of these time-leaps to a lack of information regarding the object’s whereabouts, and accounts for its resurfacing with another “perhaps.” This speculation is un-cited, so I cannot tell whether it comes from true research or pure guesswork, and again undermines the article’s credibility as a whole. The images presented are focused and well chosen, those of the “Description” section captioned with slightly less of a professional tone than that set by those in the “Goldsmith” and “Patron” sections, but sufficient. These latter two sections suffer from other setbacks, however. The information directly under the title “Goldsmith” is inconclusive and reduplicates statements made elsewhere. Under the subheading “Techniques” the text also recapitulates, to some extent, facts noted under “Description,” but their explicit boxing-off under this heading would aid a reader skimming for less about the specifics of this work on its own merit, but more as an example of larger trends, techniques, and tropes, and so improves readability and accessibility of the article as a whole. The section whose content and focus most perplexed me was the information under “Patron,” where the text meanders from discussing the patron, Jean, duc de Berry, to larger historical trends to other similar pieces, then back to Berry, then to the provenance of the relic, then to speculation on how the reliquary may have been used. The section has trouble extricating object from owner, and from focusing on the owner only as his life is pertinent to the object: the quantity of information unrelated to the article’s topic is excessive. The article is generally well-cited, though heavy reliance on John Cherry’s work and other information compiled or offered by the British Museum could draw claims of this one institution’s viewpoint being overrepresented, though any bias this brings is unnoticeable. From the talk page, it seems little has been done to this article since 2012, perhaps due to a spike and fall in interest in the object coinciding with the BBC/British Museum’s featuring of the object. Prior to that, an editor “Johnbod” seems to have kept quite strict sole control of the article, who has commented extensively on every thread bar two. Wikipedia seems to regard the quality of this article quite highly, and has been featured on the Main Page. Overall, though the article seems to have settled to a final state, I still see room for improvements, though the main effect would be to aid in authorial credibility than to substantively change the article itself.