User:RafaëllaMES/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Damascus affair - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Because I would like to work on the 1860 Damascus massacre, which is only a relatively brief subentry on the Wikipedia page of the 1860 Mount Lebanon Conflict, I decided to pick this entry for some historical background of my understanding of Damascus and its inhabitants. Just like in Mount Lebanon Damascus housed multiple religions and gives us a good case study for a multireligious society under the Ottoman Empire (and its millet system) in which the Christians and Jews had to pay jizya. I picked this article for its similarity to the multireligious society in Mount Lebanon.

My preliminary impression of this article is that it looked well-structured. It contains some background information, information on the incident and the aftermath. The article starts with a good summarising sentence. However, the part on the Damascus affair itself is relativey short and therefore - on a brief glimpse - you do not immediately notice that that is the most important part of the article.

Additionally the article looks visually attractive too.

Evaluate the article
This article discussed the Damascus affair of 1840. It is of interests to multiple Wikipedia projects.

The lead section

The first sentence of the lead section summarises the incident concisely. The lead section consists of only one paragraph but this does contain the most important things. However, the lead section does not include a brief description of the article's main sections: the lead section does not provide some background information (on the relationship between different religious communities) but it does provide a brief summarising sentence on the aftermath. Lastly, the lead section does not include any information that can not be found in the rest of the article.

My suggestions:

However, what I missed in the first sentence is that it doesn't say by whom these persons were arrested. This is explained later in the lead section. But perhaps putting this information earlier, would be better.


 * Add a brief explanation why it drew international attention. Just a small interjection in third sentence would suffice.
 * A second paragraph in the lead section explaining the tensions between the Christians and Jews and Muslims would have been good, because these interreligious struggles were at play too, as is shown in the Background section.

Content

The article's content is relevant to the topic and does not discuss events that are outside the scope of this subject. However, the main section about the Damascus affair could have been longer because this is the main topic of this article and yet in length it does not differ much from the Background section or the Aftermath section. Additionaly it is notable that in this section (Incidident and arrests) a reference is missing (as already noted on the article page). Lastly, this article could benefit from more sources. For example, in the second section there is only one reference. (Perhaps, if possible, article could also focus more on the non-Christian and non-Jewish experience of this incident. For now, the article's main focus are the Christians and Jews (and the Ottoman Empire)).

My suggestions:


 * Expand incident and arrests sections
 * As already noted, the second paragraph misses a footnote.
 * Add more internal references.
 * Change the third section title to 'Aftermath' or something similar to clearly indicate that this section is about the consequences resulting from the Damascus affair.
 * Under influence of the incident and reactions to it: the first sentence could use a year (to indicate the time).
 * In the same section, first paragraph there is a citation, but without a reference following.
 * Use more sources.

Tone and Balance

This article is written from a neutral point of view. I did not come across any claim that seemed biased or intended to persuade its readers towards a certain point of view.

Sources and References

As already said above, this article could benefit from a bigger bibliography. It is extremely remarkable that the main section about the incident contains only one reference. Additionally, only 3 (of the 6) sources under 'Further Reading' are from 2004 or later. Some more recent publications should be added in this article. Moreover, not all references in the 'references' section contain the date of publication. This should be added.

The sources as listed at the end of the article are reliable, since they come from academic publishers or academic journals.

I checked a few links, and these seemed to work properly.

My suggestions:


 * Try to add (more) newspaper articles from that time.
 * Make sure all the reference are correctly annotated
 * Use more recent literature
 * It seems as if most of the authors are Western. A more diverse array of publications and authors might benefit this article.
 * For example, some additional literature migt be:
 * Tsur, Y. (2020). Who Introduced Liberalism into the Damascus Affair (1840)? Center, Periphery and Networks in the Jewish Response to the Blood Libel. In Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism (pp. 263-287). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
 * Calabrese, J. (2005). Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840. The Middle East Journal, 59(3), 518.
 * Gerber, N. S. (2020). Can Damascus 1840 be Re-oriented? From Shami historical memory to Sephardi and Mizrahi agency. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 1-22.

Organization and writing quality

The writing is clear and the content is sensibly divided into different subsections. It is easy to read and not too long which makes the article accessible for people who want to have a short introduction to the topic. However, this is perhaps also the weakness of this article. It could have benefitted from a more elaborate discussion of the incident and the relations between the Jewish community and other religious groups.

Talk page discussion

There are multiple conversations going on. For example, about the mistaken nationality of the servant (Syrian instead of Greek), but no one seems to have responded to this comment, nor is it changed on the article's page. There are also some comments that argue that there is more to add to this article (but this is not reflected in the article's page, since it does not contain the information as suggested in the talk page).

It is especially interesting to see that someone posted a detailed summary of the Damscus affair (which is far more detailed than in the article's page) and that he mentioned some references in his comment on the Talk page, but that this is not on the article's page. In fact, no one seems to have responded to this post. Additionally, there is not much conversation going on. Usually only one or two usesrs respond to a comment posted on the talk page. The article could benefit from a more engaged discussion (with more paticipants).

The article is of interest to five Wikipedia projects but it is rated as 'start' for all these projects. This means that it provides a concise introductory description of the events, but that readers will need more information for a good understanding of the event.

Overall impression

I think the strength of this article is it brevity: for those unfamiliar with the Damascus affair this Wikipedia page is a good introduction to the affair. However, its brevity is also its weakness. After reading the article, readers will need more additional information. Moreover, readers have to find these sources themselves since this article does not contain a big bibliography. Adding sources and expanding the text should therefore be the main concern for the future editors of this article.

But the article aslo needs some minor edits. For example, many more internal references (to other Wikipedia pages) could be added. (I missed an internal reference to the Wikipedia page on jizya. I added thiss).

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