User:NETronnes/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Measure word

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Because I had to do something for this assignment, and it's a concept that's of vague interest to me.

Lead section
This article has an extremely short lede—only a single sentenece. While that sentence is accurate, it alone doesn't give a particularly clear understanding of what a measure word actually is; the reader has to continue down to Measure word#Description for that.

Content
I'm no expert on linguistics, so I can't speak to the article's accuracy, but it seems to provide a decent explanation of the concept, with no glaring omissions or cruft.

Seeing as linguistic change is relatively slow (i.e. the English spoken today is similar enough to the English spoken in 2002, when this article was created, that it is unlikely someone would be able to consistently distinguish them), the content all seems to be up to date—it's unlikely that Chinese has entirely lost its measure words in the last 20 years.

You could, if you were particularly contrary, argue that the article suffers from an ethno-linguistic bias seeing as much of its discussion of measure words concerns English and Chinese, with only a passing reference to their use in other East Asian languages, and no mention of them in the languages of various smaller marginalized communities. However, seeing as this is English Wikipedia, it's reasonable to assume the reader is familiar with the English language, and therefor any linguistic concept that appears in English is best explained through that lens. Unless they are a particularly rare feature which only happens to simultaneously exist in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (languages from four distinct families), an exhaustive list of their occurrence in smaller languages likely wouldn't do much to alleviate the equity gap.

Tone and Balance
There do not appear to be any serious NPOV violations, or indeed, anything that could be considered particularly controversial to anyone but a professional linguist. The discussion is mostly constrained to English and Chinese, which are used to provide examples of the concept, but that's not really much of an NPOV violation, since they're used purely illustratively.

There's only one viewpoint represented, but outside of syntactician esoterica, I doubt that there even exist multiple viewpoints on the topic. If I'm wrong and there are, then, you know, someone should fix that.

Sources and References
Sourcing on this article is abysmal. There are only two citations (it reads as four, but it's actually two, each of which is repeated twice), to a total of two different teams of authors, all concerning Chinese measure words in particular. No citations appear for, for example, what measure words are.

There are many claims of fact that are uncited, and potentially need to be rephrased to even be verifiable (for example, )

Also I don't know where else to put this, but it appears there's some weirdness created by different names being used by language teachers and linguists. It seems "many" linguists distinguish between measure words and numeral classifiers, but allegedly material for teaching East Asian languages which use numeral classifiers for count nouns calls them "measure words", and this article is sort of trying to be both. I suspect that this article should be trimmed down to only discussion of what linguists call "measure words," and discussion of classifiers should instead link to Classifier (linguistics), regardless of whether teaching materials use a different name.

Organization and writing quality
The writing should be clear and professional, the the content should be organized sensibly into sections.

The writing is... OK. I read it and didn't see any glaring spelling or grammar errors. There are only two sections: one explains what measure words are, and the other talks about how different fields use the term differently (see above rant—it seems that this mismatch has lead to an article trying to explain two different concepts at once). However, unless more content is going to be added, the lonely Description section seems to be enough; further subdivision would just be silly.

Images and Media
There are no images in the article, and none are needed to explain this linguistic concept.

Talk page discussion
This article does not appear to be part of any WikiProjects, but it should probably be under WikiProject Linguisics, where I imagine it'd get a C-rating at best.

The last entry on the talk page was in 2016, and is someone saying that a factual claim (uncited, I'll add) about Japanese grammar in the article is incorrect. They received no responses. Before then, in 2010 there was a discussion about the same thing I've pointed out (the article seems to be about multiple distinct concepts), and in 2013 someone announced their intention to add information about English based on their own experiences as a speaker (which I'm sure they were right about, but they were just adding more uncited information to an already-uncited claim.)

Overall impressions
This article did a very good job illustrating a concept to me, followed by doing the opposite of that by informing me that there are two completely different uses of the term and that this article had made little effort to properly distinguish them. So now I know about a concept, yet I don't know what it's called.

And nearly nothing about it is verifiable.

It could be improved by doing literally almost anything.