User:Rmkooist/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Ealhswith

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I have chosen this article because I think that women from the middle ages are not reported on enough. While there is limited information, Ealhswith was still a prominent figure at the time, yet little is written about her in the article. The article only mentions her life and children she bore, not really going into the specifics about her life. Most of the article mentions what her husband did for her both before and after death, yet little is mentioned about her ethics or what she did for her people.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

When initially evaluating the article, the first paragraph describes why she has the power and influence that she does and it is simply stated that it is through her male lineage that she has the title that she does. The next paragraph describes her descent into this title and gives reasoning as to why she was able to be a match for King Alfred. It discusses her potential lineage, but it also has an uncertainty in its tone. When reading the paragraph, the original author is vague and not able to be completely certain of what they are saying. This is no good as people reading this article should not leave it with more questions. The next section discusses her life and she manages to feel like a background character on her own wiki page. It says that she was married to Alfred as a means of union for Wessex and Mercia, but provides no context as to why this would be important. There is not much context given in the article and the reader is left to wonder why any of this matters and if all she did was sit around. She allegedly never witnessed any of her husbands charters (no context is given about those either or their significance) and only after his death did she witness one. This article leaves me with questions about these charters and why her not witnessing them was such a big deal that it is one of the primary focuses in an article about her. Towards the end of this section, the article mentions how she founded the convent of St. Mary's Abbey Winchester, but that's it. No reasoning as to why she would or the impact that it has had. Finally, the last section lists all of her children that survived into adulthood. What about the children that did not? Did she have more children that died at a younger age? After reading this article, I am left wanting more and feel as though she was not even the main subject of her article. The author of the article feels unsure of themselves using words like "probably" several times throughout the article. There is one image of her and while I personally have not done much research upon Ealhswith yet, I am sure there are more out there. Looking through the talk section of the article, it is described as a C-class article, meaning that it could use some improvement. It also appears that there was some discussion about including an actor who portrayed her, but this section was taken out as it did not seem relevant to the article. Once doing research, I think having a section titled "Entertainment Depictions" would be good to have as it would help bring Ealhswith to life. Looking through the six source listed, the newest source is from 2004, the rest of the information was pulled from publications from the 1970s-1990s. These are very old sources and I find it unlikely that no one has reported on her since 2004. These sources, while still providing information, do not provide enough and I think newer sources could help to unlock so much more about Ealhswith.