User:MoMajeed4113/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_quattro_libri_dell%27architettura

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.)

The article describes the treatise on architecture written by Andrea Palladio, a Venetian architect, titled “I Quattro Libri dell’architettura”, italian for “The Four Books of Architecture. The article’s contents are of utmost relevance to me, as someone who is studying interior design, and matters immensely to the average population due to the impact that Palladio’s work has had on the built environment around us. This fact is immediately impressed upon the reader given the substantial amount of information that is provided. Reading the article, I instantly got a deep impression that Palladio’s work has deeply impacted the way we build today, what principles govern our designing process, and how he reintroduced classical Greco-Roman design values into our modern conceptual processes.

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:

The lead is very concise in introducing the article’s topic in a precise manner. Indeed, the first sentence immediately informs us about the topic, the treatise, whereas the rest of the lead gives us sufficient information concerning the context surrounding the publishing of said treatise, as well as briefly touching upon other key information, which is to be later elaborated in the article.

CONTENT:

The article does a tremendous job in keeping an appropriate amount of content without overloading the reader with unnecessary or irrelevant information. The article itself is divided into three succinct sections. The first one is Organization, which explains the treatise’s layout and contents, briefly describing the main thematic of each book as well as enumerating the various temples mentioned by name. The second is Author, which gives us a view into the impact of Palladio’s works, the influence they had as well as the influences that inspired him. It also begins to describe the general rules that Palladio developed, which are then further expanded upon in the section titled Rule-sets. For the most part, the two main sections are equally weighted, since they inform the most about the topic. Consequently, the last section, a more precise notion, is not as thoroughly explored as the previous two, for obvious reasons.

TONE AND BALANCE:

Throughout the entirety of the article, there isn’t much to indicate any form of biais for a particular point of view, making the article come across as fairly neutral. One may argue that the author might be attributing much importance to Palladio’s works, but there are many sources and facts provided to affirm his influence across centuries of building design.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES:

The main source that the author refers to is the treatise itself, in its English translation, which is definitely an essential source for an article such as this one. The author also refers to a post on a now-defunct web page called “The Center for Palladian Studies in America” which itself bolsters many thorough references, mostly academic in nature, concerning Palladian architecture. In this sense I do believe the author could have perhaps exhausted more effort into seeking out newer, more relevant references, to enrich the reading experience and add more facts about how we may see the influence of Palladian architecture in the built world around us, for example.

ORGANIZATION AND WRITING QUALITY:

The author makes use of appropriate diction throughout the entirety of the article, which is absolutely to be expected of a text such as this, which ventures into a topic which is academic in nature. As aforementioned, the author has appropriately divided his work into sections which correspond respectively to the nature of the information therein, e.g “Organization” versus “Author”. However, for the latter I do believe that the author might’ve made a more sensible decision by naming it “Influence(s)” or “Impact”, seeing as the contents of that section talk less about the author from a biographical point of view but rather from a point of view that studies the influence and impact behind his work. As such, one may note that as an organizational flaw.

IMAGES AND MEDIA:

The article includes three images: one of the front page of the treatise and two excerpts which display different temples. To this end I feel the image selection is rather lacklustre and could’ve included many more illustrations or even images of contemporary buildings whose design was inspired by Palladian principles, so as to really make the impact of the treatise more widely felt. This criterion is thus definitely something that is lacking.

TALK PAGE DISCUSSION

There is not much to be found in the talk page for this article, the only notable entry is one notifying the reader that this article was “the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 September 2020 and 10 December 2020”. This definitely lends to improve the credibility of this article, since it was considered credible enough to be used for a course assignment.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

The article overall is very well written, and concise enough to convey the information in a clear and efficient way. There are nevertheless areas where the text could be improved, notably a better organization, to rename the section “Author” to “Influence/Impact” as well as the inclusion of more illustrations to help the reader visualize the subject matter more efficiently. If a revision of this article was to be made, it should definitely include more research material, ergo more reference sources, and perhaps go into more detail vis-a-vis the impact that the treatise had on subsequent construction and design projects. (Note: there is already a section titled “Palladian Style” under the Wikipedia page for Palladio, but a similar section exploring the impact of the book itself would definitely be a possibility to consider.)