User:SomberIvy/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
English literature

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate because I'm an English major and much of the information included in this article is extremely relevant to me. For my first two years at Cal Poly I have had to take sequence classes that take me through various periods of English Literature (ie. 16th Century to 17th Century).

Evaluate the article
I believe that this is an extremely well written and researched article. Right from the very beginning the reader gets a clear and concise definition on what English Literature is. The initial overview briefly mentions all of the various sections which the article will be discussing. To some people, the lead section may seem too wordy, but to me it is just right. There is the perfect amount of information for a reader to get an informational summary of the article without having to read the entire thing. After reading the section the reader can either choose to continue on in order to get more detailed explanations and information about the different sections, or move on. This is an extremely important component because a reader shouldn't have to go through 75% of an article before discovering that the information which they are looking for is not there.

The content itself is great as well. The history of English Literature has been broken up into eight sections, each labeled with their time period included. This allows for easy navigation of the article. Each section includes prevalent authors of the time period as well as important works, cultural nuances, and much more. All of the content is up to date and is relevant to the article. It is very obvious that many people have worked hard on this article. The history of English Literature is extremely vast, so choosing and deciding on what was the most important to include must have been a difficult task. The only thing I would like to see changed is the inclusion of more modern English Literature authors. It seems to me that the most modern authors discussed in this article are from around the early 2010's. I feel that there have been many advancements and important works that have come about within the 2020's which should eventually be included in this article. I also believe there may be a lack of non-white authors included in this article. If anything, there should be a section dedicated to African authors, Latin authors, etc.

The tone and balance of this article is perfectly neutral. In no way is there any bias in this article; its only purpose is to inform. That being said, there may be some omission bias, but I cannot be sure. This article far exceeds my knowledge on the topic, so knowing if anything is being left out is near to impossible. I guess I am writing this from the perspective of someone who knows very little about a subject and is researching it.

Moving on to sources and references. This article references a plethora of sources, including anything from an academic journal to The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1 (2000). In total, there are 199 references included in the article. All of the sources seem to modern, with the most recent being from 2017. Some of these sources could definitely be biased, as when we person writes something their natural bias usually appears somewhat. For example, biographies can tend to read as biased depending on how the author feels about the person which they are writing about. (I find this relevant to mention because some biographies were used as sources by this article).

The talk page of this article is a beast of its own. While there may only be two topics of discussion, they are quite important topics. The first is about whether British Literature and English Literature is the same. The most recent entry to this topic was from November 2022. The second includes missing authors. The most recent entry to this topic was in May 2023. This article has been rated as C-Class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is also listed as a Level-3 Vital Article in art. It is included in the WikiProjects of Literature and English Language. In both WikiProjects it has been rated as Top-importance on the projects importance scale. It seems to me that this is an article that constantly needs to be edited. I believe what is written write now is amazing, but more definitely should be included to make it a well rounded article.