User:PersianaAmericana23/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
General Archive of the Indies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This is an interesting structure in the built environment of Seville. It is also an important archive for colonial documents of the americas, etc.

Evaluate the article
Although the content appears fairly balanced on the surface, there are shortcomings regarding the validity of statements made in the article. There are statements that have clearly been contested or questioned because they mark that citations or needed. In the following section, the same source is used here and there. Overall, this article is troubling because it seems to not utilize Spanish source material aside from one Spanish website. The final section lists different collections with no links to the separate articles about the collections themselves (which are present in some cases in the Spanish article about the archive).

The "Structure" section provides numerous dates and names related to the history of the building utilizing only one source in two places of the section. This section also includes some vague and fanciful language about the formal qualities of the building: "There is no sculptural decoration, only the discreetly contrasting tonalities of stone and stucco, and the light shadows cast by the slight relief of the pilasters against their piers, by the cornices, and by the cornice strips that cap each window." For lack of directing the reader to specific locations, or not specific locations the writer means to speak about, there is confusion and an indirect picture of the formal qualities of the building. More focused and specified analyses of the building, in general aspects or in specific locations and dimensions (of planes or of volumes) would contribute to a clearer picture of the formal analyses attempted. Moreover, the complete omission of "sculptural decoration" fails to acknowledge the presence of sculpted forms such as the engaged Ionic columns featured in the courtyard or even the coffered ceilings of the interior halls. It appears that the writer may constitute sculpture as pertaining only to figural forms.

Lastly, this article could use more direct sources than what appears to be only one book that the writer took and ran with throughout the whole of the writing. No other books or articles directly or indirectly related to the topic were consulted, though the writer has some awareness of 16th century Spanish architectural history citing Herrera and El Escorial. As mentioned before, other specifics go completely without citations.