User:Themeali/Evaluate an Article

User:Themeali/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Jurisprudence

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I have chosen this article to evaluate due to my growing interest in the law and philosophy. To have a society is to have some general basis of norm and what those associated with the society would deem deviant. The study of legal theory aids in the question of, "why have laws in the first place?" by expanding upon that initial question with in depth analysis of "law" from every angle. The beginning paragraph piqued my interest however I was unaware this article would lean more so towards a philosophical course of thought.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Content
Based on the introduction paragraph alone, a reader would imagine the Jurisprudence Wikipedia article to be full of small misdemeanor thoughts and ideas. However upon further reading, the reader is met with almost an overflow of subheadings and different sections. The article has an abundance of citations, ranging from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas to John Finnis, with plenty of sources being the book they published based on their school of thought.There are plenty of cited wiki links within each subsection for additional reading. I wish that the sections were more so defined, but appreciate in sections where a philosopher published their methodology, the terms and laws are broken down and defined.

In the subsection, "Critical rationalism" a majority of the one paragraph is a quote. There are two names mentioned, Karl Popper and Reinhold Zippelius. However the following sentence begins, "He writes" followed by a quote in an unspecified language and then the quote in English. While a majority of the information found within this article, this subsection is underwhelming, as there is no follow up or explanation for the quote chosen, how it relates or explains critical rationalism, who the two mentioned men are, or even how they came up with the theory to begin with.

Tone
The tone throughout is neutral. There are sections that are heavier in content matter than others, but overall the article is equipped to deliver information on this broad topic to those who are casually interested. The article seems to be organized by the three branches of jurisprudence, with the main contributing people as well as the main theories or schools of thought associated within a particular branch. The only subsection I found unclear and had to read multiple times was "School of Salamanca". I do not think this section was clearly written as there is mention of one name not previously mentioned wherein the reader is expected to know who or what Suarez is, only to be mentioned later in the section. When he IS mentioned, there is a few different latin phrases thrown around and I personally had trouble distinguishing one from the other as they are all italicized and literally look the same to me. I can't tell you how many phrases there are as it hurts my brain even trying to distinguish them.

Talk page
So. The first entry on the Talk page titled "Embarrassing." There is no date under when the first entry was posted but the following comments are from 2003 to 2004 so one can only assume it's before then. There was talk about merging the page Jurisprudence with Philosophy of Law however there was philosophical debate as the two subjects share major similarities but one user points out that books concerning jurisprudence were not written by proclaimed philosophers, but just law people, (Metamagician3000 14:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)). There was a different comment under the heading titled "Humour" where Jimmi Hugh wrote, "Is this article meant to be a joke?" (Jimmi Hugh 14:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)). Overall, there seems to be an agreement from most people posting on the talk page, that this wiki article could use an entire redoing. There is also a lot of disagreement concerning the "true" definition of jurisprudence. The last post on the page was made in May 2019 regarding the article quality, with each post after being an evaluation. It appears that those who did care about this topic gave up on the article or transitioned to a topic they had more care for. As someone who knew nothing of this subject, it was informative, but after reading people tear it to shreds I am starting to wonder if I should have read it at all. In my ignorant opinion, it was a good read.