User:Nmnbldbyr/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Thomas Harriot

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because it was one of the authors we covered for the class. When I checked out the Talk section of this article, overall rating was B-class, but University of Oxford rated it C-class-High Importance. I wanted to look into what kind of article is considered overall B-class but C-class to University of Oxford. I am going to try to work on Christopher Marlowe for my class project, so I wanted a good example for writing about authors of the past and see the type of language used to summarize their lives and works.

Evaluate the article
Lead section: Overall, the lead section is clear. However, multiple information is from single source, meaning it's not backed up by multiple accounts of his life. There is one sentence that has nothing to do with Harriot but explaining one book he wrote. I think the book should be explained separately from the lead section because lead section should be overall information about the person, not their specific work. Besides that all the links work, both to wiki pages and external links.

Content: Though there are many topics further explained and expanded, I just feel that there isn't enough. If anything, as I was reading it, I found multiple sentences too redundant. A lot of same ideas were repeated in different words, which added to the length of it, but as a reader, I didn't enjoy reading the same thing over and over. Content wise, it did cover most information about Harriot, but overall writing is not as clear as the lead section. There were parts I thought that had nothing to do with Harriot's life, but it was still there anyway. Maybe a different section for it would be better (about his friends and coworkers), but as a person who's trying to know more about Harriot, I do not need to know about his coworkers and friends.

Tone and Balance: I found too many statements without any citations, and they all seemed to be more like an opinion than actual fact. There were multiple direct quotes from the sources, which I found redundant as well. I don't think the article was trying to persuade me in certain direction, but I got the general sense that there isn't much documented material about Harriot. Mostly, the article had a neutral tone, but sometimes it switched to biased statements in some parts.

Sources and References: The links that I tried out all worked fine. Most of the resources were pretty recent source of information about Harriot, which were written someone other than Harriot. The links and sources that I peeked into were all available for me to read and check.

Organization and writing quality: I think the article is pretty organized, but the writing has too much redundant information and phrases. I found it bit too hard to read because of the flow of the writing. I believe the wordings should be more clear and precise with more citations overall.

Images and Media: They were all good. They were linked and appropriately tagged below the media. They gave me better understanding of the content of the article.

Talk page: this part didn't have that much in here. There were lot of questions from who I assume are students (because this article was course assignment project in 2018). There weren't too many edits on this article, too. The most recent one was an auto bot that links articles and dates. I didn't find anything significant discussion section or Talk to read through and get ideas.

Overall impression: I feel this article needs more work to refine and polish from how it is right now. Though there isn't much information about Harriot himself, it doesn't mean he should have a redundant wiki page. I think the overall article needs so much more citation and clearing out the biased statements.