User:KatlynnT/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Art history

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article as it pertains to the course in which I am enrolled, Art History Methodologies 1103. This is a very general article, yet lists Methodologies first under the table of contents, so I felt that it still related to my course. My first impression is that the article seems to be very lengthy and detailed, with many theories, methods, and ideologies listed under the Timeline of Prominent Methods. There also seems to be a considerable amount of references and suggestions for further reading and research on the topic.

Evaluate the article
The lead section does a great job providing both a clear and concise introductory sentence as well as a further description of the subject. The lead section does not, however, include a description of the major sections to follow, but instead talks more about what art history is not, comparing it to art criticism and the philosophy of art. It includes seemingly unrelated information about other disciplines instead of giving a more detailed definition of what art history truly is. This makes the lead overly detailed and in the wrong way- meaning that it seems to be a lot of information that has little to do with art history itself.

The contents of the art history article do seem more relevant to the topic than some of the lead did, yet still has a feeling of incompleteness. The Methodologies section gives an adequate generalization and is a great length, yet the Timeline of Prominent Methods section is much much longer but still feels incomplete. The Divisions by Period and Professional Organizations sections seem to have no purpose at all and could use much more work, as they are severely lacking in information compared to the rest of the article. So, while the content is relevant, it does not seem complete. There have been many edits within the past few months, but the content does not feel up-to-date. I feel as though there could be much more content added to each section of this article to greatly improve it and bring it up-to-date. There are not many references to more current art periods, however I did like that it mentioned feminist art history and Non-Western art becoming a more important topic of conversation in recent years, meaning that it is becoming more inclusive of the global community of artists including minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ artists. This topic could even be made into a section of its own to discuss underrepresented topics.

Most of the article appears to be written from a neutral point of view, however one claim that "the most important art history organization is the College Art Association" does seem incredibly biased, especially once discovering that the citation is from the College Art Association itself. I feel as though the "prominent methods" are a bit selective and subjective and could be more inclusive of other methods, yet there are already a large amount listed so it might be too much information. Minority viewpoints such as feminism, race, sexuality, and non-western art are explained as being underrepresented or built from a struggle, however these topics are only briefly mentioned. The article does not seem to be biased or trying to persuade readers, but does have limited information on many minority topics and organizations.

The sources and references in this article are a mixed bag, there are many sources from books or textbooks, however most citations are from open web sources that are not necessarily reliable or up to date. There were also some links that brought up pages that were no longer available (such as reference 12) and should be updated with new links. There may be better sources available on this topic such as scholarly journals/articles to replace the references that currently seem to be mostly websites.

The article seems well-organized and easy to read despite the holes in the actual information. The sections and sub-sections break down the article into more digestible pieces, and the Timeline section is well organized and in a general order by date. However, I feel that the Methodologies section could have been broken down into subsections as well to further explain the various methods used to examine a work of art. I did not come across any spelling errors, however there were some grammatical issues I found odd, for example with the sentence, "It is, however, questionable whether many questions of this kind can be answered satisfactorily without also considering basic questions about the nature of art" which is not incorrect, but could be worded much better and use the word "question" more sparingly.

The article does include images that pertain to the topics and various subtopics, and the images do include brief captions and seem to be under public domain. I do not believe that many of the images enhance understanding of the topic, however they do relate to what is being discussed and help break up the article to make it more engaging. There is definitely an opportunity for more images to be added to this article to give further examples throughout the timeline and methodologies sections.

There is only one comment in the talk page by the main contributor, so there are no conversations about the topic to look in to. This article is a part of two wiki projects; History, where it received a C-Class rating, and Visual Arts, where it received a B-Class rating.

There is a banner at the top of this article indicating that additional citations are needed for verification, which leads me to believe that the references are not reliable. The article has a strong layout and a good base but needs to be built upon with more in-depth information and reliable sources. Some areas are well-developed, such as the timeline, while others such as the divisions and organizations are lacking and need improvement.