User:Momo 318/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sympathy (poem)

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.)

"Sympathy" is a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar. This poem is one of his well-known poems, so it deserves attention and a good introduction. This article seems detailed, but some problems remain.

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.)

This article provides readers much information, but it still needs to be improved. The lead section of this article contains almost all of the sections mentioned below, except the "structure." On the one hand, since the structure is often discussed in poem introductions, it could be regarded as too ordinary to mention in the lead section; on the other hand, if one poem's structure is extraordinary, it is worth mentioning. In "Sympathy," its structure is unique: it contains unusual repetition, rhyme, and meters.

There are a few more aspects this article needs to improve. As for the content, although the author discusses the poem's background and reception, the author overlooks the text's analysis. The "structure" part is relatively short. As mentioned above, this poem's structure needs more focus. If the writer can cite a source about the structure, it will be better; the author can also make some brief comments on the meters or rhymes, as long as citing the terminology when defining the features of the poem. Moreover, the background section is more like a reception: the author utilizes the poet's wife's interpretation as the background. Yet this interpretation could only be her assumption or reception. Furthermore, this article does contain an image. However, the image cannot enhance understanding of the topic. It is only a photo of the poem page, the same as the "text" content. Thus, if the article contains the poet's image or his picture in the Library of Congress, it will be more beneficial for readers and be visually appealing.

On the Talk Page, this article is within the scope of WikiProject Poetry and rated as C-Class on the project's quality scales and Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Some conversations about missing citations and the copyright of the text are going on behind the scenes. When we talk about the poem, we are more focused on its structure, word choice, and content meanings in class. However, reviewers pay more attention to the poem's citations, eligibility criteria, and copyright on the Talk page. Therefore, the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differs from how we've talked about it in class.

Overall, this article is detailed and informative, and the length is not fairly long. As for the tone and balance, this article is written from a neutral point of view. In the reception section, the author listed many opinions without concluding: letting the readers think and judge. This article also uses many reliable sources and references; it is well-written, with few grammatical or spelling errors. However, the article can still improve in many aspects, such as content expansion, completeness further development, and image source improvement.

comments on your evaluation
As you note, it might make sense to include a reference to the structure of the poem in the lead section. This would be better justified if the Structure section included more information about the verse structure, which, as you note, is distinctive. In fact that section is primarily devoted to a summary of content, which you also correctly describe as insufficient. The article could include a more detailed neutral paraphrase of the content even if no source is available. Attention to analysis is warranted in this section, as long as it is given in the context of scholarly discussion.

You’re right also about the questionable position of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s otherwise very interesting comment. It certainly dominates the Background section, and its use verges on reception or interpretation.

As for the image of the first publication:  In some cases such images can be useful. For example, they may show differences between early and later versions of the text (even if that is not their purpose). In this case that possibility is limited, since the image gives only the first two stanzas of the poem.

I think you’re right about the neutral tone and the presentation of a variety of perspectives reflected in reliable scholarly sources. However, it’s not entirely clear to me how the material in the first two paragraphs of Reception is organized. This is a problem in many Wikipedia articles about poetry: it’s not easy to balance neutral perspective and purposeful organization.

You note differences between the Talk page discussion and class discussion in the approach to the poem. Our discussion is supplementary to the encyclopedia discussion, designed to give us a better idea of what we’re writing about, and also to show the basic differences between analytical and descriptive writing.