User:Nagisa Ohno/Evaluate an Article

Evaluating Content

 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * Since legal history can cover a very large range of topics, it was nice to see that there was several examples of legal history according to different time, religious or geographical spheres, and you are led to other more detailed Wikipedia articles of legal history of specific countries through links.
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * I believe the multiple headings can only cover the basics of the legal histories since there are so many that developed very differently from each other. However, I think you could add more basic information on legal history of other regions, such as Africa and other countries in the Americas besides the United States.
 * What else could be improved?
 * Overall, I thought the article was pretty well-rounded in terms of formatting and the topics, such as Ancient law, law in Religion and legal history of different countries, that was put into the writing.

Evaluating Tone

 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * I paid attention to how they would phrase the historical transition between traditional law based off of religion, to modern, western law in East Asian law, as I thought there could be a tendency to phrase it a way that modern/western law is superior than traditional law, which I think can become bias rather than more factual. When explaining the transitional, it gave more historical reasons, such as the rise of Germany's power in the 19th century.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * like I've said when evaluating the content, I thought some modern countries were excluded from the list of different regions' legal history, such as other countries in the Americas and Africa.

Evaluating Sources

 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * The news article "Study reveals origin of India's caste system", the journal article "Islamic Law: Its Relation to Other Legal Systems", the encyclopedia article "Roman Law", The journal article "Law" and "Islam and Islamic Law in European Legal History" in the further readings section, was still available online. The website on "Roman and Secular Law in the Middle Ages" was available through the wayback machine, however that may lessen the credibility on it because that means it's not updated information if it needs any. Roman Law by Peter Stein is also not available online anymore.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Many of the journals are from scholarly institutions, such as JSTOR or universities.

Checking the Talk Page

 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * I see that many of the edits involve removing any vandalism, fixing citation structures and the sources themselves, and adding more information into the different regional topics in the article.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * It is rated as "started", so it is still considered developing article and may not have enough reliable articles. This makes sense because I believe it can still add information about legal history in other modern regions, put in links in some of the categories for further readings (for example, not just have links to Chinese legal history, but also legal history in Korea and Japan for the East Asia section), and update the online sources since some of them aren't available online anymore
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?