User:Spookysmoothie/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Land art

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because the practice and forms of land art intrigues me, as well as the way land art has influenced the conservation movement.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of the article was concise and informative, and a good length to introduce the topic. The lead sentence and paragraph summarize well what land art is, when it emerged, and some of the ideas that the land art movement is centered around. The article gives a history of the rise of land art mainly by highlighting influential land artists.

I was disappointed to see not a single woman land artist's work highlighted, mentioned, or expanded on. Towards the end of the article, a list of "other prominent artists in this field" included three women. A list of contemporary land artists includes eight women's names, but is simply a list with links to their individual wiki pages. Out of the over fifty artist's names mentioned on the page, I hoped for more representation of women artists. Additionally, the article focuses on American and European artists, giving little attention to artists from other areas of the world. In addition, most of the American and European artists mentioned are white males. The article asserts that land artists have "tended to be American" citing Jeffrey Kastner's book Land and Environmental Art, further research on the topic reveals a great amount of diversity within land artists. Furthermore, under the talk page one wikipedian mentioned they checked the reference articles behind this claim and could not find anything to validate it. The content needs to be updated as well to reflect modern contributions to land art.

The article maintained a neutral point of view. The information was factual, and the writers did not place any judgements on the artworks, movement, or artists. The sources used in the article appear to be reliable and the links that I checked worked. Diversity from source authors could increase, similarly to my criticisms of the content. The article was divided into two main sections: form and contemporary land artists. All the information fell under form. I would make the article more organized by dividing the information into smaller subsections and use clearer topic sentences. Given that this article discusses a form of visual art, I would expect many more images. The article has 8 images; compared to Graffiti with over 50 images, there is room for additional images and examples of the form.

The talk page shows the article as a level-4 vital article in Art, and rated as C-Class. It is part of the WikiProject Public Art and the WikiProject Visual arts, rating as C-Class in both. There is a lot of discussion happening on the talk page, which mostly comes down to the definition of land art and whether to include pre 1960s art. Overall, the article has its strong points and is a decent start, but there is a lot of room for additions and expansion on the subject.