User:Mmarinkovic5678/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
6th Regiment, European Brigade

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article for a few reasons. I originally stumbled upon it by sorting through C-Class Wikipedia articles pertaining to the American Civil War, since I am a history minor and am keenly interested in this particular area. This one caught my eye, firstly, because of the name of the regiment itself. My parents are immigrants themselves, so naturally, I always found the rich history of immigrants in the Civil War to be quite fascinating. However, I quickly realized that this article is direly in need of some work, which I will elaborate on in the next section. Nonetheless, it was enough to stimulate my interest and desire to see it improved. I think this topic is important because of the broader necessity within military history to document, to the best of our abilities, the stories of individual regiments, divisions, etc. This is because ultimately, the famous battles we think of as winning wars and turning the tide of history are fought by armies and navies, which are further subdivided. Knowledge of the details of these subdivisions helps paint a more complete and accurate picture of conflicts, and perhaps even helps us understand why certain things occurred the way they did. Besides, there is also a practical utility in having this information documented for the purposes of research. Say someone was interested in Italian-Americans in the Civil War, and then decided to, for whatever reason, focus on Italian-Americans in the Confederacy. If this is an article they came across, the person may think they've hit a brick wall.

Evaluate the article
This article has, as mentioned, a lot of problems. So it may actually be easier to quickly get the positive factors out of the way. First and foremost, what is written appears to be clear and concise, as well as grammatically correct. Secondly, it appears to be neutral and unbiased, though it seems hard to have a heavy bias any which way over an obscure Italian-American Civil War unit. Finally, it doesn't give much credence to historically marginalized groups, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem here, either. The point of this article is to document the facts about an Italian-American Confederate unit, and it seems difficult to even conceive of how this relates to historically marginalized groups at all, besides in the very broad way the entire Civil War naturally does. Anyway, the first and most glaringly obvious problem is the lack of content. There are 8 sentences in this entire article, with the lead including only two and the section titled "strength" including a whopping one. Furthermore, there seem to be absolutely no pictures or charts whatsoever, which definitely decreases the aesthetic appeal. I must concede, though, this is rather understandable. In my very brief research into this topic, there appears to be little documented information on them, much less photos, charts, or other detailed illustrations of them. However, this brings me to my next problem. There is a glaring lack of citations. At the bottom of the article, there is a list supposedly consisting of the commanding officers of the unit. But there is only one citation for the several listed. Many other statements are also not sourced at all, such as the last sentence of the opening paragraph. Even where there are citations, they are of dubious quality at best. They seem to be random webpages written by unnamed authors decades ago, though the authors of those pages, at least, cite their sources. But the worst part is that the cited material seems to simply not back up the claims made by the author. It is as if whoever wrote this simply made a few things up and then included a list of random sources. Finally, there seems to be absolutely no discussion going on the Talk page. This is rather disappointing, seeing is that the first and only thing that comes up when you click on that tab is that this is indeed within the scope of the Military history WikiProject.