User:TheWatTyler/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Medieval female sexuality

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because Medieval "Lesbianism" is the topic I wrote about for my final research paper in my Medieval England class, and I found the research process very interesting. I chose to write that paper-- and to choose this article to evaluate-- because we don't see very many references to female homosexuality during the Middle Ages at all, so the idea that sapphic women existed and had homosexual relationships during this period is usually not brought up or considered often. I think it's important, especially for historians of Medieval and LGBTQ+ history, to write about how these women did in fact exist, and how female homosexuality was even formally acknowledged in secular and canon law.

My first impression of this article (now that I'm revisiting it, but looking at it in its entirety this time instead of just the "lesbianism" section), is that it's very short, but still covers different aspects of female sexuality. This is fine since there really aren't that many primary sources available on this topic, so the length of it makes sense.

Lead Section
The lead section of this article does a good job of introducing the topic by defining what is meant by "Female Sexuality," and listing the various aspects of sexuality that will be covered in the next sections of the article. This section is very concise and does not go into detail about the content in the rest of the article.

Content
All of the content in the article is relevant to the topic of Medieval Female Sexuality. The information seems to be up-to-date with the knowledge on the topic that is available to historians. The topic of the article is about a marginalized group (women), but also includes a section about sapphic/homosexual women.

One thing that could be added to this article is more detail about gender-nonconforming women. The article briefly mentions in the lead section that there is evidence for gender-nonconforming women during the Middle Ages, but details are not included in the article. It could be because the article is focused on female sexuality, not gender; however, I think there is often some overlap between queer people and gender-nonconforming or trans people. If there is information in any primary sources about, for example, homosexual women expressing themselves differently, perhaps to signal to others that they are queer, they should be added to this article. But I'm not sure if such information exists, so that's not necessarily a "flaw" of the article, just a suggestion.

Tone & Balance
The article is very neutral; it does not suggest or imply any moral judgements about women's sexuality (by the editors). I did not recognize any obvious signs of bias throughout the article. One might interpret some claims, such as that men often got acquitted for violence against women, or that men were not held to the same standards as women (i.e. in regards to prostitution and non-marital sex, or virginity and sacredness) as being biased against men or in favor of women. However, I think these claims, and all the other claims in the article, are supported through evidence and written about in a very objective manner, so I do not think it shows an unreasonable amount of bias.

I do not think any viewpoints were over represented or underrepresented. The article is very specifically about women, so the lack of focus on men is not unwarranted. In fact, the laws and other sources that the information is taken from were written by men, so their viewpoints are still being represented in that way.

Sources & References
The links used for the citations work, and the ones that I have read do support the claims in the article. The citations are all from academic sources written by historians of Medieval history and Medieval LGBTQ+ history. These sources are as neutral as you can possibly get, since they are writing these sources from the standpoint of a historian, some of whom are men, and some who are probably not LGBTQ+ themselves. These sources come from a variety of different authors; they are mostly from publications based in the U.S. and U.K. The sources are pretty modern, ranging from publication dates in the 1980's to the 2010's. Ideally, there would be more sources written within the last ten years, but it's a very specific topic and there may not be new information found within the last decade to include in a new publication.

Organization & Writing Quality
The article is organized well, divided up into sections targeting different aspects of female sexuality. The article is well-written, easy to understand, and has no spelling or grammatical errors (at least none that I noticed).

Images & Media
The article contains no images or media to accompany the text. This is one thing that could be changed to improve the article, as I'm sure there are images that could be included that would help demonstrate Medieval conceptions of female sexuality.

Talk Page Discussion
There are two users who provided feedback on how to improve the article. The first user suggested that the title be changed to "European Medieval Female Sexuality" to specify that the information provided is specific to European society. The second user provided suggestions to expand the scope of the article; it appears as though users have followed those suggestions, because that information is now included in the article.

This article appears to be included in WikiProjects about Women's History, History of Sex & Sexuality, Gender Studies, and European History.

I do not see a rating for this article, although it does give a warning at the top that the article has "multiple issues" regarding the focus on Medieval Europe and the short length of the lead section.

Overall Impression
Overall, I think this article is written very well. I wish it was longer and more detailed, but the reality is that there aren't a lot of primary sources about this topic to go off of, so the information provided is most of what is known by contemporary historians.

The strengths in the article are: it is well-written, easy for the layman to understand, and concise; it approaches the topic of "female sexuality" from different angles, not just the angle of sex and sexual orientation; and that every subsection has a decent amount of cited evidence from historians to support the claims.

Areas of improvement are: the lack of images and media to help accompany the text and provide visual evidence for the claims; no information on how gender-nonconforming women were perceived, how they behaved/expressed themselves, or the role that they played in the Medieval world and conceptions of women during the Middle Ages; the narrow focus on Medieval Europe (and lack of information of other parts of the world during the same time period); and the lack of new sources (the most current was published in 2017, everything else was 2014 and older).

Despite these opportunities for improvement, I think the article is mostly "complete" and of high-quality.

Personal Notes for Wikipedia Project
- Look for more information on gender-nonconforming women that may be relevant to the article.

- Look for information about Medieval Female Sexuality that is not based solely in Europe.

- Look for sources within the last decade (2013-2024) to include to make the article more "current."

- Add images (and other media, if possible) to the article.