User:RobbyGreg/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating the article on Wilton culture.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen to evaluate the Wilton culture article because this topic is currently listed as a Stud and so, there is a lot of work to do on this topic. First and foremost, Wilton is not a culture but a generalized term that refers to specific set of technological attributes first recorded at the Wilton site in South Africa with age an age range of 4-8 thousand years ago. This article also has few citations and not all are from scholarly sources. These need to be updated and modified. Also, there is no image of what culture in this context is defined as or where the Wilton site is located.

Wilton culture as it is referred to here is one of the last generalized stone tool industries in South Africa before the introduction of herding and eventual colonialism. So, it is important to concisely and accurately describe what the Wilton culture is and its significance in the broader scope of human evolution.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The Wilton culture article includes a topic sentence that does summarize the perceived notion of what a Wilton culture is and how it is related to the broader Stone Age of Africa. However, I would modify this sentence to state that the Wilton is not a culture but a stone industry that doesn’t start 6 ka, but instead starts 8 ka. The major sections of this article are described in the lead section but not in great detail, since there are only three major sections, locations, characteristics, Gwisho. Because of the brevity of this lead section, there are no details listed that are not in the subsections below, and thus, the lead section is too minimal.

Content

The content of this article is relevant to the topic but is not up to date and is missing important content. The first edit on this page was made in 2004 and there are major articles that have come out since then that contradict some of the statements in the current Wilton Culture page. There is a topic on Gwisho that addresses a topic with peoples from this group, but this discussion is larger than other topics. Regardless, the information in this article is so sparse that future contributors will need to add major discussions to each topic.

Tone and Balance

The Wilton Culture article does not appear to persuade the reader in any way, but the only discussion on culture deals with Gwisho. Gwisho is located just north of Zimbabwe and does not seem to be relevant for the origin or terminus of the Wilton culture, yet this is the only assemblage described in the text. Since the introduction states that Wilton is found in South and East Africa, the article should cover a broader region for this topic.

Sources and References

Most of the sources in the Wilton Culture article are from scholarly, peer-reviewed, journals but there is so few of these sources. Sparse sources mean that not all of the current list of references do not adequately support the data or extend to a broad range of journals, authors, or information. Furthermore, these sources are not current and need to be updated with current knowledge and understanding.

Organization and Writing Quality

Though the Wilton Culture article is broke into topics that are introduced in the lead, there are many grammatical errors that make this a difficult article to read.

Images and Media

As mentioned above, the Wilton Culture page does not include any images or media. This is especially important for locating the site in space and when describing a term that is dependent on the form and shape of stone tools. Future work on this article need to include geographical and images of artifacts that archaeologists have used to define the Wilton Culture.

Talk Page Discussion

The talk page on the Wilton culture article contains two discussions that are not current nor substantial. One discussion points out the precise location of Wilton farm in South Africa, but the author of this post has not fixed this issue in the text. Overall, there does not seem to be a substantial contribution to the talk page on this topic. Wikipedia has flagged this article as a candidate for the broader Wikiproject of Archaeology and narrower Wikiproject for Africa. However, the current Wilton culture article is labeled as a stud, which implies that this article needs revisions and additions.

Overall Impressions

Overall, the Wilton culture article is underdeveloped and requires substantial corrections, edits, and additions to be considered complete and reliable. The article has very few strengths. The article defines Wilton as a physical culture. Historically, archaeologists have used stone tools to define physical culture, but this is not considered acceptable today. Therefore, one of the greatest weakness of this article is that the literature is not up to date. In a discipline like archaeology, theories and ideas get disproven constantly. These changes lead to altered concepts and notions that, if not kept up to date, risk leading people in the wrong direction. Therefore, the main improvement that this article needs is a more extensive review of the history for the term Wilton, how archaeologists describe it from past to present. However, this article is ultimately incomplete in all topics including content, balance, updated and relevant sources, organization, images and media, and active discussion.