User:Malunk/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Adena culture

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article by navigating through the academic discipline categories to anthropology and then to Pre-Columbian cultures. I ended up selecting the Adena culture specifically because I'm aware of mound-building as a cultural practice after reading the play "The Mound Builders" by Lanford Wilson several years ago, and thought this might give me an opportunity to learn more about the Adena culture than what Wilson actually conveys in that piece. I thought this article may provide some context for the importance of our class assignment in addition to showcasing how cultural anthropology is depicted on a platform like Wikipedia.

My preliminary impression was that the article seemed quite concise, though outlined into various segments in a way that made sense to me. I appreciated the variety of visual aids and the table structure for presenting cultural sites. I was struck by how one of the first pieces of information conveyed by the article is that the Adena culture is so named because that's what a landowner with a mound site on his property well after the Adena's existence there decided to call the mound.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of this article is brief and contains some vague information. The first sentence is strong and clear, but location information could be added to convey more basic information at-a-glance to the casual reader. The time frame outlined in teh first sentence contradicts what is displayed in the article's overview/knowledge panel (100 CE vs. 1 CE as the ending period of the culture's prevalence). The second sentence is vague an uncited, including the phrase "what were probably a number of related Native American societies..." I would adjust this phrasing to "a number of likely related Native American societies" to sound less uncertain without misrepresenting known facts. The final sentence of the lead section includes location information about where this culture was based, but the lead section concludes without giving any information about the numerous sections that make up the article.

The body of the article conveys clear and well-organized information from a range of sources. 23 cited sources range in date from the 1980s to 2021, which seems acceptable, but there are some areas of the article that seem like they could use more citations. Most notably, some descriptive entries in the 'Prominent mounds' table lack citations, and the 'Mounds' section detailing the existence, history, formation, and purpose of the Adena's mound constructions contains information exclusively from one single source, a Cabrillo College faculty member's archived personal website that was last updated in 2000. I'd seek additional sources for this section for more up-to-date information. A cursory search of UMD library databases returns multiple scholarly articles about the Adena culture and their mounds published in the last 5 years and uncited by this Wikipedia article. It's possible these articles could supplement or replace some less reputable/non peer-reviewed sources. Many original links to sources no longer work, but links to archived versions of the originals and the date each was archived are available.

This article makes good use of table formatting and images to illustrate prominent mounds and other creations of the Adena culture. Each image is described within the table itself, and working links to relevant mound-specific Wikipedia articles are available for each one.

The tone of the article is neutral, though some information is speculative due to the culture in question existing in the distant past. No Adena testimony is cited. Information that is speculative appears clearly marked as such with phrases like "probably" "likely" "possibly," etc. The text is well-written with no grammatical errors, and the sections of the article are organized in a logical way, moving from large-scale cultural importance and creations to specific domestic-scale knowledge and artifacts.

The Talk Page for this article mostly contains comments indicating slight discrepancies and inaccuracies in details like the geographical locations and extents of the Adena culture, the years bookending the culture's prominence, and an interesting back-and-forth about a now-removed section of the article dealing with how tall Adena people were. The Talk Page also reveals that this article is of interest to three WikiProjects: Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples of North America, and Archaeology. Talk Page entries range back to 2005 and up to 2022, showing a long-term interest in collectively improving the article.

Overall, the article seems strong and effective in terms of writing and organization. Sources could be added and citations improved.