User:Pzudyk000/sandbox

Article Evaluation

In the beginning of the article, not only do I feel the topic of Pope Gregory is underrepresented, but I feel it is also under the scrutiny of biased. In section one paragraph one, he author(s) of this article make statements that "popular legends credit" Pope Gregory with founding Gregorian Chant, and that "scholars believe" otherwise. Statements like this not only create doubt in my mind, but also show that the author(s) are unsure as well. In the section "development of earlier plainchant", the authors discusses the development of Gregorian Chant, but mentions Pope Gregory once, showing me that they are leaning towards what scholars believe, leaving Pope Gregory to be an underrepresented topic. The authors continue to make statements of uncertainty such as "The 3rd-century Greek "Oxyrhynchus hymn" survived with musical notation, but the connection between this hymn and the plainchant tradition is uncertain." which is very distracting because it shows the reader that the authors don't know the reliability of their own information. I clicked the link that was supposed to lead to the cited information and it did not work. Which leads to my next note, if the connection between the hymn and plainchant is uncertain, how relevant is it to this article?

In the section "Origins of mature plainchant", the authors state "Willi Apel and Robert Snow assert a scholarly consensus that Gregorian chant developed around 750 from a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chants, and was commissioned by the Carolingian rulers in France." Which, again, shows his biased towards believing the scholars. However, this source is not cited, and only one of the scholar's names has a Wikipedia link to their name. The authors are talking about the year ~750, and are bringing up scholars from the late 1800's in the midst of all that. It is not relevant. That author then, the authors' bias begins again, talking about Pope Gregory, stating that there is no way he created Gregorian Chant because it couldn't have existed in his time. "In addition, it is known definitively that the familiar neumatic system for notating plainchant had not been established in his time". I downloaded a digital copy of the book called The Oxford History of Western Music-Volume I that the authors cited for this information, and it talks about Pope Gregory just as biased as the rest of this article!

While looking at the citations, some links work, others do not. Most links for references are books, so most of those are just ISBN numbers. But links to Grove Music do not work. And I'm curious if contributors actually did utilize the books referenced, because when clicking an ISBN, it linked me to a book in Latin, and since this was an article in the English section of Wikipedia, I'm curious whether or not this was actually a true contribution.

Gregorian Chant is a part of several WikiProjects, including WikiProject Songs, WikiProject Middle Ages, and WikiProject Christian music. Gregorian Chant has been listed as a level-4 vital article in Art. According to Wikipedia, vital articles should be high quality. This article is listed as B-class, according to Wikipedia means "The article is mostly complete and without major problems, but requires some further work to reach good article standards". This article features a gold star with an "X" through it, meaning it was a former featured article. In the talk section, another member also discuses issues of dead links and under referencing, so it was good to know I wasn't alone on that.