User:Soniakilcoyne/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Iconoclasm

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I've chosen to evaluate this article because it provides general information about iconoclasm within different counties, eras, and religions. Since I'm taking a class on this phenomena, this article can help me briefly see which sectors are underdeveloped and which are more so.

Evaluate the article
The lead includes the definition of iconoclasm (as written by a user- in the talk page, the phrasing of this definition was disputed for clarity. I also believe that the definition could be cleaned up). It also mentions a few hyperlinked articles for further reading but doesn’t have descriptions major sections. The lead doesn't include information that isn't in the article, but it's neither concise or overly detailed. It provides some definitions of terms, like iconoclasm, iconoclast, and the subtle difference between iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae (which has its own section later on in the article). The last paragraph has some broad information about the variety in iconoclasms between religious rules, but doesn’t get super specific about anything.

The article's content is relevant, with the most recent additions being a bulleted list of the US's instances of iconoclasm in 2020. There’s a small section titled “other instances” that could use some love. There’s a very small sentence attributed to Maui peoples and Easter Island, but nowhere else in the article is iconoclasm and this culture mentioned. Also, there’s very little discussion regarding iconoclasm and Judaism.

Regarding tone, it seems to favor certain subtopics more than others just based on the amount of writing under some subtitles in comparison to others.

I think there could be revision on the layout of information. When you start to read the article, you’re under the impression that there won’t be much spoken on Hinduism or Buddhism, which is not the case once you finish reading the article. I think that the information is a little bit all over the place, and could be better grouped together. Why put three sentences about buddhism in the very beginning, when paragraphs of content is attributed to this topic at the end? If information regarding specific countries/religions are going to be grouped together, then group them together. It seems a bit messy the way it is now. However, the images embedded in the article are laid out well and seem to adhere to wikipedia's copyright regulations.

There are many sources within this article, and all information is linked to a source. However, some of these sources are blog posts, others are tweets, and others are from peer-reviewed sources.

In the talk page, there is lots of discussion surrounds muslim interaction with iconoclasm, including cultural and military, as well as the tones insinuated by certain phrases and sentences within the article. The discussion aimed to rework these parts to be more straightforward. There’s also a subsection of the talk page regarding the hindu section, and how one user claims it to be “largely a catalog of persecution”, where rants about the persecution of Hindus was crafted tangentially to iconoclasm. A lot of the discussion within this talk page is about staying on track without bringing in bias. The article is rated as a level 4 C-class.

The article talks about iconoclasm more in a historical sense with historical examples instead of through art and artifacts like we do. The art is at the forefront in our studies, meanwhile the photos that exist in the article seem to be there just for reference.