User:Redrhoad/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cultural depictions of dogs

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I love dogs and the depiction of them throughout history can lead to a greater understanding of our changing relationship with them. The article started off fairly strong, but it could be improved or even included in another article related to dogs and their relationship with humans.

Evaluate the article
The lead of the article seems to focus on more on the middle ages the most, I think the lead should focus on the changing role of dogs and how they were portrayed in culture from early history to present. The way it is written seems to be a little awkward. The first sentence was informative and gave a good overview of the article.

The content of the article provides a fairly well rounded overview of the cultural depiction of dogs, although it does tend to focus on Europe more than other areas of the world. It seems disjointed occasionally, and I think each section of the article that is arranged chronologically should be divided by geographic area. The tone is even and is neutral.

They have sources that are recent as well as older sources, and they appear to be diverse and from many different authors, but I think more current sources and content needs to be added to the article. The links work, and

The author provided many examples of the artwork portraying dogs as described in the article. It is well organized, and it is coherent. It gives a good overview of the topic, while being concise. The images that are included in the article are well placed, but the images at the end of the article could be better organized or used within the article itself.

The conversations on the talk page address some of the issues I had with the article itself. They took out all non western related content because they were working on articles for the other regions of the world, I think they should put links to those articles within the body of the article itself. It is rated C-class of low importance, and is a part of the Wikiprojects of History, Culture, Europe, Visual Arts, European History, and Popular Culture.

Overall, I think this article is informative and balanced, I do think it needs some work done to streamline it with the other dog related articles. It's strengths were it's focus on the way dogs were depicted and valued in art changed throughout the centuries. The weaknesses are the article was not clear that it was only referring to European dog art. I think it needs some work done to address the issues I mentioned earlier, but overall it's a good article.