User:Jennyfayfay/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Archaeology of New Zealand

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 choose it because I am interested in the place and people. It is also a place of interest for me since I have always wanted to go there. I also choose it because it was under a Class-C label under the Archeology subject list, meaning the article needed to be edited a bit more.

Evaluate the article
My evaluation:

The overall status of the article is definitely lower tier compared to a feature article. I think it gives a good summary of what is known about archeology in New Zealand, There are good images and charts, the methodology and history of archeology is discussed, and the sources are all from relevent scholarly journals or books. Yet, there are many things to improve about the article, the most important being tone, organization, and inclusivity when it comes to including information about the Maori community.

1) Tone: the first sentence of the introductory paragraph should serve the purpose of informing the reader about the articles subject. It should be subjective. Yet, the first sentence (and a few other ones further down the article) carry strong opinions from the writer/s despite using a source to support their opinion. Removing these sentences would be a good way of improving the article.

2) Outdated/need to add sections: Some information, especially the section about the history of archeology and the section about the Maori people need to be updated with more recent articles. I think the article would benefit from a more in depth view of the Maori culture by inlcuding some ehtnographic or anthropological sources from relevant journals. I think it would be awesome to also cite archeological articles writen by Maori scholars.

3) Organization: I think the first thing that should be read after the intorductory paragraph is the history of archeology sections. I also think these two sections can be combined under one general subcategory. I also think that the section named "Debated questions in New Zealand's prehistoric archaeology" should be renamed since the sentence right after says that there are "Many questions about prehistoric New Zealand have been answered by archaeology and for most it is unlikely that new information will radically change" which defeats the purpose of that section. Final thoughts are that the images of cites are okay and that there should be more detailied maps for the different archeological cites. The population map included also is not properly cited.