User:Stardust456/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Roman citizenship

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article as the topic of citizenship in Rome is something we explore a lot in my class on Roman Women.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section


 * The opening sentence of the article clearly defines the basic framework for citizenship in Rome and also provides the Latin word for citizenship.
 * It does include information that is not present in the rest of the article.
 * Instead of an introductory paragraph, after the opening sentence the article utilizes bullet points to discuss the different forms of citizenship that applied to different classes of citizens. It provides an overview of the types of citizenships available to freedmen, women, and allied states of Rome, but this information is not present in the rest of the article.
 * The lead is concise.

Content


 * Most of the content is relevant to the article but it is lacking citations/sources to many claims and several paragraphs are not based in any factual evidence.
 * I feel that the article would benefit from a section going into more detail of the citizenship of women and certain legal rights they did possess and/or legal restrictions placed upon them.
 * Off to the side, the article includes a section detailing different offices Roman citizens could hold, but I do not feel as if the inclusion of this is beneficial to the average reader without explaining why these offices are listed. The article mentions briefly that citizenship effected your ability to run for office but barely goes into more detail than that.

Tone and Balance


 * The article is mostly neutral but its tone in some places could suggest that Rome was a benevolent conqueror compared to those in the past. Specifically, it is seen in the article comparing Roman treatment of conquered peoples to that of Sparta and its treatment of helots.
 * The article does not contain any mention of potential debates within scholarship about the extent of Roman citizenship, which can be a heavily debated topic.

Sources and References


 * The biggest problem with this article is that it is lacking sources in several sections. There is an entire section that is flagged as not having a single references, and many claims within the article itself are not backed by any factual evidence.
 * The links to the various sources do work.
 * Only one of the sources provided for secondary sources is from the last ten years. As such, it is probably necessary to find more recent scholarship on Roman citizenship.
 * I found this source that discusses Roman integration and may prove useful for the section on Romanization. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40751853
 * As this article did corroborate several parts of that section, I added it as a citation to the wiki page.

Organization and Writing Quality


 * The article is generally well-written and easy to understand, but I believe the opening paragraph desperately needs to be restructured into the body of the article itself. There needs to be a separate section detailing the types of citizenship available for different classes of people (women, men, non-Romans, slaves, etc.), the opening paragraph could instead provide a slight background on the beginnings of Roman citizenship and how it might have been modified over time.
 * The article is free of grammatical and spelling errors.

Talk Page Discussion


 * A lot of the discussion points in the talk page suggest expanding upon the article by discussing the evolution of Roman citizenship over time.
 * The article is part of WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome.
 * The article differs from how we discuss citizenship in class as rather a list of rights a citizen of Rome possessed. In class we discussed citizenship as a tool of a class ruling structure and within the context of court cases brought to the Roman forum by various citizens - men and women included.

Overall Impressions


 * According to the quality scale of the WikiProject, the article has a B rating despite being of top importance to the WikiProject. I agree with this rating as the article is missing a substantial amount of information on how citizenship in Rome worked on a practical and technical level, in addition to lacking substantial citations to verify its claims.
 * The article does a good job of presenting the individual rights afforded to citizens and has a good foundation for a much larger article on Roman citizenship.
 * The article needs more citations and sections expanding upon the practicality of citizenship.
 * I would say that this article is under-developed.