User:Mnooj/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article

 * Name of article: Grove Art Online
 * I chose this article because it is a common reference source for art historians. I wanted to evaluate its representation on Wikipedia and possibly learn more about its history.

Lead evaluation
The lead includes an introductory sentence that effectively describes the Grove Art Online dictionary, its relationship to other publications, and its relevance to art scholarship. (It is also arguably a run-on sentence that could be separated into more readable chunks.) The Lead is essentially what we might find in the "History" section of more detailed articles. Most of the information in the lead is not repeated elsewhere in the article. Furthermore, this article is complicated by the fact that the Grove is the online version of the hardcover Grove Dictionary of Art, and outside of the Lead, which establishes this connection, the article treats these two entities interchangeably. The Lead is probably over detailed and rather than gesturing towards the rest of the article it attempts to thoroughly summarize the topic.

Content evaluation
The content is relevant, but the scope of the article is muddled by its aforementioned treatment of the Grove Dictionary and Grove Art Online as the same entity. Despite "Online" being in the title, the "Scope" section refers to "pages"; there is a separate section referring to the "online" edition, which is redundant given the title of the article. The article should be called "Grove Dictionary of Art", which seems more general and would encompass both the print and online versions. While the content is not exceedingly out of date, the references in the body of the article are to publications from the mid-2000s, and there is little information about recent activity or innovations.

Tone and balance evaluation
The article definitely has a PR tone. This might be expected from Wiki articles on commercial products. While the article does give a good overview of the Dictionary’s relevance and place, all (except one) of the sources and references come from either Grove or Oxford (which publishes the print version.) The one external source, from the NYT, is highly laudatory. I would like to see some sources which are either critical or more neutral, study-based scholarly articles.

Sources and references evaluation
Most of the sources would not qualify as “reliable secondary sources.” They are descriptions of the scope, holdings, media, and publishing history of the Grove mostly from within the organization or its publishers. Furthermore, the sources are mostly general—they link to the main Grove website rather than a more neutral source, e.g. a library website or something. Even the “reviews” come from the Grove website.

Organization evaluation
The article is short but well written—clear writing with few nominalizations or grammatical quirks, aside from the aforementioned opening sentence. The structure of the article is intelligible and informative, although, as discussed earlier, the content may defy reader’s expectations given the title of the article.

Images and media evaluation
There is only one image, of many volumes of the print edition of the Grove Dictionary. This adds to the confusion re: the “Online” part of the title. It is a simple image that might be found on an Amazon listing; it doesn’t add to our understanding. I would recommend a screenshot of the Grove’s landing page, with some images of the print and online articles as examples of the dictionary’s information organization structure.

Talk page evaluation
There are no conversations on the talk page. It has been marked as “citations needed”, and it is part of numerous WikiProjects: Visual arts Websites, Books, and Reference works. You would think this cross-reference of projects will lead to a more robust article! This article is essentially a stub that has not received much attention beyond marketing paraphrase.

Overall evaluation
As previously argued, this article is basically a stub. It provides enough information to understand the basic details, content, and context of the Dictionary, but does not meet Wikipedia’s standards on neutral and thorough analysis of the subject. Bringing in some scholarly evaluations, recent news sources, and better images would immensely improve this article.