User:Mp3frog/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Link to Article: Maritime Archeology of East Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maritime_archaeology_of_East_Africa

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article from the list provided of articles written by students from an African Archeology course that did a similar project to hours, and I chose this one because Maritime Archeology sounds interesting to me. This article matters because it provides information about the use of marine resources, the use of seafaring technology, and the involvement with the global marketplace by means of the ocean in East Arica. My preliminary impression of the article is that it seems well organized, and has plenty of links and references.

Evaluate the article
The Lead section of the article seems well made, with a brief introduction of the topic and overview of the major sections of the article while keeping it concise. The Lead section does include an overview of geographic information about the range of East Africa and their maritime technology that isn’t further explained in the rest of the article.

The content of the article is relevant to the topic, and doesn’t seem to focus too much on any one thing. The content of the article addresses that while it is known that the use of marine resources is known to have occurred in the area, there is less record and knowledge of the use of nautical technologies in East Africa which may mean the article addresses topics related to historically underrepresented regions and topics of study.

I think that there could be more sources added to this article, as there are only 6 References along with 1 further reading listed, and a few of them seem to be written by all the same people so perhaps not a very diverse source of knowledge. However, I’m not sure if more sources are available on the topic. The newest references look to be from 2016, so its possible there are new materials that could be sourced now. All the links that I checked worked.

The organization and writing quality seems fine, I didn’t have any trouble reading or understanding it. The images all adhere to Wikipedia’s copyright guidelines, two are pictures that show what the nautical technology (dhow) they are talking about look like. One is a low quality map that is sort of hard to read, but it’s fine.

The article’s talk page is pretty much blank, thought it says that the article is part of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. It says the article is rated as Start-Class in the scope of both WikiProject Archeology and WikiProject Africa, although of unknown importance.

Overall I think the article was okay, and had strengths in providing a good general overview of the topic. It could perhaps be improved by including more sources/references and a more diverse set of sources. However, that might not be possible if they couldn’t find more credible sources on an understudied topic.