User:Mollysaurus17/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Social science

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 of a personal interest and experience in the social sciences, having taken many courses in the social sciences. It is important because it is a broad term incorporating many subfields of study, and this article could be an important starting point for people to learn more about potential areas of interest. It is overall a very well-written and informative article.

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.)

Overall, I found the article really interesting and useful. The lead section was clear and concise. The article covered a very broad topic very well and subdivided it into several key components in a way that makes it easy to follow and understand. I had some concerns with the anthropology section, though, that could potentially be improved. It was particularly with the few sentences that describe the desire of researchers who are primarily from western, industrial countries to study societies with "more simple" organization. The section also states that the literature sometimes refers to these groups as "primitive," but not in a way that would imply "inferior." If that is the case, a different citation on that could be a better choice, as it seems like the citation for that right now is a work from the 1920's which uses the term "primitive," which would be unlikely to prove that the term "primitive" is not used in a derogatory way. If there is a journal article that states that the term primitive is not used in a derogatory way more overtly, that may be a better citation to incorporate. If that is not possible, this could be a good opportunity to discuss some of the colonial roots of anthropology and the mixed history of the field. Others on the talk page mentioned a concern for the lack of nonwestern representation in the article, and by discussing anthropology's complex history and the evolution of the field, as well as nonwestern anthropologists conducting research in their home country, as M.N. Srinivas in his work The Remembered Village.