User:Ryanscott06/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Romanian language

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am very interested in the Romanian language as well as its history. Romanian culture and identity has always fascinated because of how unique their language and nation is. I see this as beneficial to the wider world because Romanian is a language spoken by over 24 million people and I am sure many people would need to use this information to learn more about this interesting part of Romanian culture.

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.)

The opening part of this article seems to be very concise and makes sure to distinguish which language is being talked about, as not to confuse readers. There are citations and links to other articles as to distinguish the article from others, and this makes for a very easy-to-understand concept.

As I move through the article however, there seems to be less and less citations, as well as a more "mixed-bag" of information that doesn't seem to all work together. What is mentioned is cited from works of the 16th and 17th century, which merely mention the language, and all seem to somehow be giving the same information, which in my personal opinion, could be done away with and replaced with something more precise. The information does seem to be up to date however, so there is hope there. The information presented is neutral, with no obvious attachment to any national or political entities, and the points made about theories that aren't the most widely accepted are acknowledged as such. Editors made sure to balance all viewpoints equally as not to give precedence to one over any of the others, and not to persuade readers towards one specific point.

The references made here are accurate, and of the links I checked to review information, all worked. Some of the sources are archives, mostly from the early 2000s, so the information is a little outdated and could use a revision. There does seem to be a wider amount of information available about the language now, definitely more than what available in the early 2000s, so in that regard, I would definitely seek to update the information being cited on this article. The article is organized in an order that is sensible and provides links to more in-depth topics for further consideration, and there doesn't seem to be any clear grammatical or spelling errors that would be a problem for readers. There are a couple of images provided for the article, mostly graphs or maps showing where Romanian is spoken, with a video showing a conversation of a native Romanian speaker. The graphs are clear and understood clearly, all images fall within Wikipedia's copyright policy, and laid out in a manner that makes sense, with an image or graph typically appearing next to the information giving an explanation of the image.

The talk page of this article is small and focuses on distancing the article from fringe viewpoints, with a discussion from 2018 focused on defining that any theory stating that Romanian isn't descended from Latin is fringe and should be removed from the article. There is also a discussion on the history section of the article, however this doesn't do anything besides providing commentary and not solving any problems or adding new sources for new information to be added. This article is a C-Class article, and is part of several WikiProjects: WikiProject Romania, WikiProject Moldova, and WikiProject Languages. This article, I feel like, accurately represents a topic that would useful to anyone researching it and it appears to be precisely and concisely organized, and I would say that this article is not only full of useful information, but also does a very good job at presenting infographics to highlight and build on information that was presented in the article. Where I think this article lacks is on its sources, being a bit out of date, and therefore I would recommend making updates to that in particular.