User:SpaceCowboy2000/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Georg von Peuerbach

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Georg von Peuerbach seemed like an interesting charecter to evaluate an article about. I also wrote my research essay about Ptolemy's works and Peuerbach focused on Ptolemaic astronomy so it seemed fitting to pick him.

Evaluate the article
The lead section begins with a well-written sentence that describes exactly who the article is about and gives a brief description of what he was known for. However, this is not a complete article so there is not description of each of the major sections of the article, especially since all the main sections of the article havent even been completed yet. The lead is only one sentence that describes what the article is talking about so there is no information present in the lead that is not in the rest of the article. The lead is definitely concise rather than overly detailed.

The articles content is quite relevant to the topic as it gives the background biographical information as well as the work and legacy created by Georg von Peuerbach. It is missing information as the article is not very long right now. I would say the article is quite up to date since there are references from last year in the references section, and obviously there will not be much new devlopments about George von Peuerbach since he lived and died centuries ago. I would say there is probably content missing since the biography is quite short and there are only two works listed. I could be wrong however, since there may not be much other biographical information out there about him and he may have only those two works. I dont see any content that doesnt fit the topic. The article does not deal with any equity gaps or underrepresented groups.

The article is unbias and remains neutral throughout. There are no attempts to persuade the reader one way or another. The article also does a good job of backing up statements and facts with references to sources. They do reflect the available literature on the topic by linking to other Wikipedia articles that describe the people and terms being mentioned. There are a mix of current and old sources but altogether there are current sources implemented in the article, with older ones that are still highly credible. There is not an abundant amount of information from one source in particular, a decently wide spectrum of authors is observable. There perhaps could be better sources available for some of the facts cited since Encyclopedia Britannica as well as Britannica.com are listed as sources where a peer reviewed article may be available for a more reliable source of that information. The links all seem to still be working.

The article is well written and easy to read, however there are a few grammatical suggestions I have and betters ways of saying things in some sections of the article. For example, where it says his "best known works" I would change to something like "his most well known works" just because grammatically it works better. As far as I can tell there are no real grammatical or spelling errors however. The organization of the article is well done, and every section seems to be where it should be.

There are a few images in the article to help visualization for the reader, three to be exact. It probably would be possible to add more pictures with the addition of more content to the article. For a start page, the captions are ok but they could definitely be more descriptive. The images do not infringe on Wikipedias copyright restrictions. The images could be laid our better as one of them of Georg von Peuerbach's works is nearly in the notes section and is hard to see that it is referring to something being talked about in the works section.

There are multiple conversations that happened in the talk page about issues with the lead not being a good enough representation of Peuerbach's achievements, as well as talk about whether or not something called Jacob's staff should be included since Peuerbach may or may not have invented it. There is also a section in the talk page saying that the article has received multiple edits and has improved. The article is rated as a start page and is a part of 4 wiki projects. Wikipedia talks about the article as if everything is not certain whereas in class we tend to stick what is known for sure. The article goes much more in depth on the biographical information than we could have ever gone into as a class.

I would say the overall status of the article is incomplete but well done so far. The article's strengths are that it contains good information that is relevant and that it references its sources. Its weaknesses are that it needs better sources, more pictures, and just more content overall. It is underdeveloped currently but has a good foundation.