User:Laptopenjoyer/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Louis Sullivan

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 chose the article, mainly because of the fact that I read about Sullivan's architectural opinions and what he did to execute what he saw as fit for the medium and got interested in him because of that. He matters because of the fact he is one of the most important figures in American architecture, and also one of the most recognizable.

I'll go off what I saw in the intro paragraph and say that likely this is a well written, interesting article with a lot of impressive achievements to be documented.

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.)

Lead section

-The introductory sentence goes as follows: “Louis Henry Sullivan(September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism".” I believe this is quite a solid introductory sentence as it defines the title of the subject, that being Louis Henry Sullivan, successfully. It also includes his date of birth and death, and cited titles that have been associated with him. Additionally, there is some citation on almost all of these, even his name being discussed in a footnote in the article.

- Not really, no, it doesn’t really provide a brief description of the article’s major sections. most of the lead is just his titles and what he has achieved in the field of architecture.

- Yes, actually it does have information not really present in the article. There are a couple of points not elaborated on in the lead, some being that he was the inspiration for the Prairie School (it is not brought up again), and the fact he is in the trinity of American Architecture. However, the fact he said “form follows function” is indeed elaborated on later in the article.

- The lead of the article is rather concise. It mostly covers his titles, achievements, and what he’s known for.

Content

-Yes, it is relevant; it discusses Louis Sullivan’s life, his career, and his legacy; all of which I’d consider quite relevant to him as a person.

- Yes, the article’s information seems up-to-date; not that there is much of any new information being released about him, as he passed away over a century ago.

-In terms of content needing to be added, it looks fine. Under “Lost buildings”, there is a part that says “Washington Elementary School, Marengo, Illinois”. I’m not sure if it would count under content, but it needs a citation.

- It depends on what one would mean by “equity gap”; does it mean the achievement of success because of the fact he’s white, or who he designed buildings for? IN that case, I’d say that the fact he built structures for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (an event with a great deal of cultural appropriation and gawking from white people at marginalized people) to be some evidence of a gap… The entire event itself is a fitting example of the existence of an equity gap, after all. There aren’t really any historically underrepresented people I noticed present in the article, either, so that’s also not the case.

Tone and Balance

- Personally, I feel like the tone of the article sort of wishes to paint Sullivan as this struggling artist who was ahead of his time and is sort of flawed for that reason. I understand the article’s attempt to stay neutral, but I think the viewpoint as I mentioned before is quite evident.

The main reason why, is that while the author has a lot of neutral factoids, they have also sprinkled in their own opinions, calling Sullivan’s style both “incredible” and “unique”. Yes, I think there is some heavy bias towards Sullivan in this article, and also attempts to push the reader in the direction of believing the same thing. I was not able to observe if there was a minority/fringe viewpoint in this article.

Sources and References

- No, there is no secondary source for some of these claims; the first three paragraphs of the section regarding Sullivan and the steel high-rise lack any citation to them at all, therefore making it hard to identify if any of these are true just by looking at them. They’d have to be crosschecked.

- There’s about 38 links in the “reference sources” section, and 16 different pieces of media in the bibliography section; however, there were elements in the lead section that were not elaborated on, which leads me to believe there’s more information out there on Sullivan than is currently available in the “References” section.

- The links I clicked on worked for the most part.

Organization and writing quality

- Overall, the article is easy to read and relatively concise in its message.

- There were no noticeable grammatical errors from reading the article a couple of times over; everything was relatively easy to understand.

- I think there could be some improvement made to the way the table of contents have been arranged; perhaps making his whole philosophy surrounding architecture and how it manifested in his work (“Sullivan and the steel high-rise”) section a subsection of “Career” instead.

I wonder if, additionally, the “Career” section can be combined into one section overall; covering early, middle, and his decline, and “Early life” being its own section as well. “Death and legacy” can be its own section as it covers what happened regarding him posthumously.

Images and Media

- Yes, I’d say that the images enhance understanding of the subject. There’s a visual included of what he looks like in the profile section of the page, and the buildings he’s referenced as designing in the career section as well as the small catalog at the very bottom regarding his architecture.

- The images are all well-captioned and tell you exactly what it is.

- After clicking through the images, I saw all of them were either public domain (copyrighted before January 1926) or were free to use, uploaded by Wikipedia users.

- Yes, I think the pictures on the page look visually appealing in terms of layout.

Talk page discussion

- The talk page on Sullivan, at the beginning mostly talks about incorrect pictures, incorrect titles being attributed to Sullivan, incorrect phrasing to reference Sullivan, and incorrect information being spread about Sullivan.

- The article seems to be rated “B-class”, meaning “High-importance.”

- It feels more informal and asynchronous than how it is discussed in class, as there is no guarantee of an immediate response to the concerns of these editors if any response at all.

Overall impressions

- Over all, the article was a good read. I feel like it needs to be elaborated on, though, so I don’t believe it to be finished quite yet.

- The article’s strengths to me are that it delves quite deeply into Sullivan’s ideals surrounding architecture and how they come through in his work, as well as his many works as an architect. I feel that is why his page is there on Wikipedia to begin with, so I think it was executed nicely when it came to that.

- The article’s weaknesses to me are as follows.

For the lead, it lacks elaboration for most of its parts. It does not explain his connection to these various groups or awards he’s won later on later in the article when it should certainly be doing that (and citing it).

The tone of the article, especially when it comes to his legacy, is uneven. It becomes more of persuasive writing to make the reader see Sullivan as a truly great architect, like the opinion of an editor has leaked into the article itself. His architecture is quite partially described as “Incredible”, after all.

Lastly, some improvements to the arrangement of the table of contents; as I stated before, isolating his career information into a single section and sandwiching it between his early life and death/legacy may be beneficial for the legibility of the article itself.