User:Tun97369/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Iconoclasm

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I simply chose the most relevant article, the title of the class. Immediately as I opened the article I could see that it was a very well edited and written article, including lots of information, sources, and images.

Evaluate the article
As I stated earlier, from the moment you open this article it is easy to see that it is loaded with information. The first sentence successfully explains the term of Iconoclasm in a simple matter. It is a complicated term, with lots of other complicated terms and concepts connected to it, so within the introduction of the article they explain the most immediate concept and most related terms well. They don't include every section, which I believe is wise in this case because there are so many, and the introduction already feels pretty heavy itself, and to add more new information would be way too overwhelming.

The content of this article is loaded with information. It is sorted mostly from earliest history on, but is also sorted by different cultures and religions as it is used differently. Looking at the editing history of this article, it seems to be very up to date and is consistently updated and edited with new information, or fixes.

The information in this article is all very straight-forward and factual, rather than biased. I don't see any spot where I feel a certain perspective being pushed on the reader. There is an absence of many different cultures such as any South American or African history. As I do not know a ton about this subject in itself, it is possible that the many cultures included are the ones with histories of Iconoclasm, but I could imagine that many other cultures had some form of it, which is not included. This could be because there isn't much history or evidence, but I would assume it has to do with our discussion on content gaps, and that we don't have enough 'legitimate' information from certain cultures.

There are over 150 sources cited in this paper, which is pretty exceptional. I see sources cited from most recently 2021, which I would consider to be pretty up to date. Many of the more recent sources come from News articles and sites, which I wouldn't say is the most reliable and unbiased, but as they're written about in this article, they are stated very neutrally. But then the majority of other articles are academic journals coming from institutions or sites such as JSTOR, which is probably some of the best and most trust worthy sources one could find. I notice just a couple paragraphs of information without a citation at the end of it, but mostly everything stated seems to be cited.

This article is very well and specially organized into sections, and subsections. There is such an excess of information, but it is broken down in a very organized way which would help a reader easily find what specifically they are looking for. Within the article itself, many words are linked to other articles more specific to that word or concept, which is extremely helpful. Personally, some of the language seems a bit dense and hard to understand to me. I obviously do not know much about this topic, but I feel like many people who would be looking at Wikipedia for information also are not very familiar with it. But again, it is helpful to have the linked words to other sources which help with that.

There are a good amount of images, captioned and cited in this article. The image captions all seem to be precise and straight forward as to describe what we are looking at. But as this is a topic about the destruction of images, I would hope and expect there to be more images here. If I were writing this article, I would include maybe image comparisons to help make the concept more clear. Like an image of a statue originally, and then after it was destroyed. The most dense section of images is "During the Muslim conquest of Sindh" which has a great amount of images and examples provided, I think that there should be this many for every section. This topic is all about visuals and I don't think that is shown enough.

There is a rich Talk Page discussion for this article with many ideas and revisions. There are clearly lots of experts working with each-other on individual sections of this broad subject, to try and make it whole with as much information as possible. As the article itself, the talk page also seems to be currently used and updated with ideas and materials. I am very surprised to see that this article is rated C-Class, as from what I see, it is filled with information. It is part of the WikiProjects: Christianity (importance), Religion (top importance), Visual arts, and History. This information differs from how we talk about it in class, purely because of the excess of information that we haven't gotten to, and I don't think we will even ever get to every single section written about here.

Overall I think this is an extremely well informed and detailed article. I would be curious to know why it is rated C, because it seems very thorough. It could have to do with the few things missing I noted earlier, such as some other cultures histories with Iconoclasm. But I believe it is organized and sectioned very well, the citations are more than adequate, and there is clearly a lot of collaboration and perspectives going into it. My biggest issue with this article is the use of images, I just think if this topic is so big in Visual Arts, and literally about the destruction of images, it would really boost this article by showing more visual examples and comparisons.