User:Lavenderpathss/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Flat Earth

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 this article because this misinformation is another form of social problem that's been prevalent throughout history as stated in the article. In the late 2010's a boom of flat earth-ism took major social media platforms by storm and countless articles and videos either proving this conspiracy theory or debunking it but regardless this conspiracy theory tends to be one of the gate way conspiracies to other far more sinister.

My impression of the article was that its a clearly a well researched article with plenty of information on the past historical figures that kept this theory up throughout history and what brought it back into the mainstream in the 21st century.

Evaluate the article
The first paragraph for the Flat Earth lays out exactly what this theory is, quickly providing the historical background that it belong too followed up with how this theory is not just a theory from one culture. While the lead of the article presents all of the information that needs to be known such as the words "archaic" and "scientifically disproved " it does not follow up the lead section with what specific cultures had theories on flat earthism. As primarily the article talks about the historical cultures ideas around this idea just writing down cultures does not explain enough of what the rest of the article is about.

With the rise of modern flat earth beliefs its important to fill in the gaps of pre-modern times with examples of pre-socratics and how throughout history this idea of flat earth-ism has prevailed by not just the example of a perfect flat plane but other examples such as eggs, or the disk shaped that was mentioned repeatedly. One potential addition to the content would be each of the cultures throughout history came into believing this theory and how it was disproved through history.

Most of the sources found within the article were reliable and came from academic sources but throughout the source sections repeated use of News articles that were not pertinent to the main idea were found such as a source from the guardian a news site and another article on science verses Christianity from a site named patheos.com. Both of these sources seem out of place and could be revised to a source more substance.

With pictures of the flat earth its hard to understand what decipher just exactly what your looking at more in-depth descriptions of each pictures would make for a clearer understanding of what the pictures are trying to show. With the picture of the East Asia example not providing a example of what theory its trying to portray ( either egg flat earthism or plane flat earthism)