User:JujuColestock/Evaluate an Article

Article: "Gender neutrality in genderless languages"

= content =


 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? Something that really distracted me was the discrepancy between the intro and most of the individual language sections. The intro made it seem like this article would focus on genderless languages, and they specifically differentiated this from languages with gender-neutral pronouns. Yet down in the sections, most of the article talks about gender-neutral pronouns without diving into other aspects of the language that would make it truly genderless.
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? The source the author cites for the intro was published in 1999. This seems like it could be way out of date for the topic as the digital revolution has dramatically shaped discourse in several languages around non-binary identities. For example, in English, there is now an institutionally recognized third gender/gender-neutral pronoun set they/them/theirs. Other European languages are also leaning into neo-pronouns in the past decade. This source would not be able to speak to these changes that are relevant to the topic. Furthermore, many if not most of the sections on specific languages lack citations. It is unclear if the author is just pulling from other Wikipedia articles about these languages, or if they know these things personally.
 * What else could be improved? In the beginning of this article, there is a brief introduction to the topic. In this section, the distinction between the terms genderless and gender-neutral needs to be better explained. Also, the difference between having a genderless language and having just gender-neutral pronouns is not well established. Examples would be helpful. The author uses English as a language that 'may be identified' as genderless, an example that also has gendered pronouns. While this helps differentiate 'genderless languages' from 'languages with neutral pronouns,' I still find it confusing and not well defined.

= tone =


 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? This seems like a more broad, fact-gathering article rather than like a hot-button topic article. The only potentially problematic section is the intro, yet most of the issues would be resolved by expanding it and drawing from more recent sources.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented? There is a preoccupation with gender-neutral pronouns in the analysis of the individual languages. The author didn't establish this as the primary indicator of genderless-ness, so it seems corollary to the intended content.

= sources =


 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article? I checked the source used for the Armenian language subsection. The link did work and directed me to a "Fundamentals of Armenian" article on armenianlanguage.org which seems accurate but outdated. The website copyright is from 2006 and there doesn't seem to be any current mod/admin. The info presented in the source did match the article, yet it was little more than a rephrasing. Another source for this section seemed out of place. It is titled "When Gender and Looking Go Hand in Hand" published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 2013. Looking at this article, however, the study was about the acquisition of Spanish, not Armenian, so it's unclear why the author cites it for the Armenian language not Spanish.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? The intro to the article only draws on one source for several points: the separation of genderless and gender-neutral, that grammatically genderless language are not necessarily gender neutral, the difference between lack of gendered language and lack of gendered pronouns, and that genderless languages can exclude the possibility of reinforcing gender stereotypes. The only source the author cites is a chapter in a book published in 1999 entitled "Gender in a genderless language: The case of Turkish", by Friederike Braun. I was not able to access this source, yet I am concerned that this has too narrow a focus to allow for such broad claims to be made here.

= talk page =


 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic? There were several entries on this page by internet archive bot. Those by like real people were pretty spicy and disagreed with several of the points made in the article such as 'wo-man denoting an outcropping of man' when the etymology is more complicated than that. It also looks like there has been a lot of examples in the intro that people had issues with and were later removed. This is kind of frustrating as now it reads really underdeveloped, yet looking at the convos it makes sense why those specific examples were problematic.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects? I found this article in like the C-rated articles list.
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class? Many posts on the talk page were brief, angry, and unsigned. There was also such a brevity of evidence presented on such a wide topic.