User:Mcolletti 2/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Epicureanism

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I thought it was a pretty interesting theory, and we didn't get the chance to talk about it in class. As a rival to Aristotle's school of thought, it's worth looking into to understand more about what the Grecian schools of thought looked like. Especially comparing to Aristotle's model allows us to understand more about why Aristotle's model became so prevalent.

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 article has a good leading sentence that describes briefly what it is
 * Lead section provides a summary of the sections that are to follow
 * The lead section is a little more detailed than probably necessary, specifically with points about where Epicurus' works can be found today
 * The lead section adequately compares Epicureanism to other modern schools of thought allowing the reader to have some basic idea of it

Content

Overall the content is fairly comprehensive. There seem to be some gaps in dates involved, and a general lack of some information. I would like to know more about other thought process' about these topics at the time and how they related to epicureanism as well. The content is dated, but I don't know if the information is out of date or if there's not much information to be had about epicureanism.
 * History section
 * The history section has some grammatical errors and seems to be disorganized
 * The history section does do a good job in describing how Epicureanism evolved, but doesn't go past the 17th century, despite mention of its modern acceptance in the lead section

Tone and Balance

The article is written fairly unbiased. The Wikipedia editors provide empirical accounts on the beliefs of Epicurus and his followers. That being said, it's difficult to write about a belief system without some bias being involved in it.

Sources and References

This article is very well sourced, and the sources themselves are reliable as well. Although there are many sources good quality secondary sources, this article also uses some primary sources, such as Dante's inferno, which can establish some bias into the article. The wikipedia links within the article also work well.

Organization and Writing quality

Overall this article is written well. It is concise and well worded to prevent confusion. There are some places however, where the grammar and organization are lacking in comparison with the rest of the article. The "history" section is worded and organized poorly, and the "modern usage and misconceptions" section seems to repeat what has already been said in other sections, such as the "ethics" section.

Media and Images

A philosophical idea is hard to illustrate with pictures, but this article is still missing images that could help a reader understand. In the physics section, for example, additional images could be added.

Talk and Discussion

It seems like much of what I've brought up in evaluation has been discussed in the talk page of this article, although most of it was from a while back and it hasn't been worked on since then.

Overall impressions

Overall this article seems very well put together and thought through, but there's still a lot of work to be done to make it better. Most prevalent is filling in information and seeing what kind of additional information is there, especially about epicureanism in the modern world. Also prevalent is fixing the grammatical errors and organization problems within the current article.