User:Phoeb.mh/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Howiesons Poort

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Howiesons Poort is a Middle Stone Age technological complex. It is significant because it contains some of the oldest material evidence for symbolic culture. Many of the artifacts, including bone tool technology, adhesives for hafting, ochre and engraved ostrich eggshells did not develop in other parts of the world until much later. This complex, therefore, has significant implications for early complex cognitive behaviors.

Lead section
The lead sentence could be better; it includes information on the interesting history behind the complex's name, but does not touch at all on the significance of the complex itself. While the history behind the name is certainly interesting, it is not the most relevant aspect. The lead introduces details on the dating of the complex, inferred cognitive behaviors of the inhabitants, and brief descriptions of the tools that are found there. The actual story behind the dating of the complex is controversial, however, but the debates are not mentioned. It includes a detail about the culture being both "modern" and "not modern", but this is not expanded upon during the rest of the article. The lead is overall concise, but I find that the information that is present in the lead is not the right information to summarize the main takeaways of this topic.

Content
The content is relevant to the topic. It is missing some important aspects however, and this may be because it is not up to date ( the talk page has only been modified in 2009 and 2017). The main content that I can see right now that is missing is information surrounding the debates over the OSL dating of the site. The topic does not touch on one of Wikipedia's equity gaps.

Tone and Balance
The article is overall neutral. The authors never try to sway the readers in a certain direction, unless we want to consider the absence of mention of the controversy over dates. If anything, the viewpoints that are "biased toward a particular position" would be towards one opinion on the dates of the complex, based on OSL. I intend to add much more detail about all sides of this argument.

Sources and References
From a skim through the citations, they all appear to come from scholarly and relevant archaeology and science journals. There are currently 20 citations in the article. Assuming that I expand thoroughly on the topic, I will be increasing this number and increasing the quantity of different academic sources that give information to this topic. The oldest source is from 1928 and the newest is from 2009. I consider this out of date, and I will be adding in more recent publications.

Organization and writing quality
The article s certainly concise, but I would not say that it is exactly "well-written". Some points that are made clearly come from arguments in papers, but these points are not explained or expanded upon (for example, the lead says: "Howiesons Poort culture has been described as "both 'modern' and 'non-modern'". The authors never elaborates on this or explains what it means). I do not see obvious grammatical errors. I am considering explaining what concepts like "BP" and "ka" mean in the article. While it's obvious for us, a reader with a non-archaeology background may not understand. The breakdown of the article is decent, but there are many gaps. I will be adding different sections and subsections to increase the richness of the article.

Images and Media
There is one image in the article, and it is of a map of Southern Africa with different points marked at geographic locations where the culture of Howiesons Poort has been found. This is definitely an important image to show the geographic spread of the culture across the continent, but there should be multiple images in a topic about an entire culture complex. The caption also raises alarms- " Selected  Howiesons Poort sites from the ROAD database". If this map is not all-encompassing of the culture complex, do we gain much from it? I aim to add images of sites and artifacts, given that they adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations.

Talk page discussion
The talk page has two moments of activity- one in 2009, and one in 2017. Obviously, there is not much activity here. The conversations mostly discuss adding in direct quotes so that readers can see "original words" instead of summaries, and talks of modifying links. With so little conversation, and no activity in six years, it is clear that this article needs attention. It is a part of the following WikiProjects: Anthropology, Archaeology, South Africa.

Overall impressions
This article needs a lot of work. Strength-wise, nothing in the article appears falsified. The previous authors seem to have been using academic sources from reputable journals. The writing is a bit weak and needs expansions, elaborations, and reworks. Nothing however, would be considered "inaccurate" or false. However, the article is poorly organized and out of date. No one has edited it in six years, so no recent publications are considered. The authors include details without context and fail to elaborate on them (it should be assumed that the reader will probably not go to the cited source to interpret what was written on Wikipedia). There is one image, and it is a map showing "selected" sites, so the relevance is questionable. Certain points of view are written as facts. To be improved, the article needs a reorganization, expansion on ideas, deep discussion on the debates surrounding the topic, more images, and more up to date sources.