User:Mirnafelix/Evaluate an Article

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

Valentine's Day

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 I'm interested in learning about the history of modern holidays, and with Valentines day being around the corner i thought it was fitting. My preliminary impression of it talks a lot about its Christian religious background.

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.)

The lead section does an okay job of giving a brief overview of the topic, though I think it could be more concise. It does not provide brief descriptions of all the articles major sections. This section has a paragraph about the first martyrs that feels misplaced within the section.

The articles content is all relevant to the topic and seems to be up to date. One thing I noticed right away is that there is no mention of the one of the holidays supposed origins. The article focuses a lot on the Christian origin but does not even mention the tie that it has to the Pagan holiday called Lupercalia. Another thing I noticed is that in the section where it gives a brief summary of the holiday in each country, most of them have a short paragraph except India, which has a very lengthy section, and Columbia which only has one sentence.

The tone and balance of the article are good. There is no claims being made and it reads in a neutral tone. Although the article doesn't read as biased in any one position, it does seem like the article only gives Christian background information. Like stated before, I have read other article that state this holiday has some roots in Paganism which is not mentioned here at all so it comes off as biased towards one side of its religious history.

The resources for this article were mostly books and encyclopedias, which are good sources. I clicked a couple of links and one of them did not work so I think they could use some updating. There were a couple sources that I was not sure could count as a reliable secondary source, one being a link to the Christian Broadcasting Network and another to a Catholic forum.

The article was well-written and organized and I did not see any grammatical errors.

All the photos used were relevant to the topics they are next to and each had a little description and citation.

The talk page for this article is interesting. Due to this article being prone to spam, it's edits are semi-protected which means that most of the posts are of people asking for things to be changed and it coming back as "not changed", mostly for lack of good sources. The article is part of 3 wiki projects, Christianity, holidays, and saints, which I think explains why most of the information has to do with its background in Christianity. One person in the Talk page even brought up my initial concern about there being no mention of the Pagan origin of the holiday but the change was not made due to the person never providing a source.

Overall the article is well written, organized, and is straightforward. The strength of this article is it explaining what the holiday means to different cultures and how it came to be a commercial holiday. It could use some more information about its origins outside of Christianity and sources that don't come from Christian media outlets.