User:Vixwint/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Athenian democracy

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.)

In one of our first readings, Manin talks about how lot was an element of selection in early Athenian Government. In considering creating a better democracy from what we have today in which government positions are fulfilled through election, I am interested in learning more about the proponents and merits of a lottery system. Ultimately, I hope to come to a conclusion on whether it is better to have a lottery system or an elected system and if one system is inherently more democratic than the other, if it is, do we then follow the democratic choice, or the overall more efficient choice?

This article in particular seems pretty thoroughly researched, but it pertains to Athenian Democracy as a whole, but the portion on selection by lot vs elections is markedly smaller than other sections in the article.

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.)

The introduction to the article is concise but does not mention key proponents that marked Athenian democracy such as that it was a direct democracy and officials were largely selected by lot.

Content-wise there is a mix of older and newer citations, however seeing as the topic is something historical, I think it is fine to have some older citations as the information shouldn't have changed. The article does a good job at staying neutral and mentions when different consensuses are debatable, such as how close revived Athenian institutions were to a real democracy.

Most of the images are simply locational or of a person so as to give an idea of what things looked like visually, but there is one diagram that helps to simplify the explanation on the bodies of government that existed and their responsibilities.

On the talk page, one suggested edit felt that the article was opinionated and dealt too much with opinions of the authors of the citations used, but reading it I did not think it was particularly opinionated. Moreso, it seems the suggested edit hoped to see more analysis on the influence Athenian democracy held on modern democracy which would be an expansion to the legacy section.

According to the talk page, this page as a whole which serves for many different subjects (Greece and Rome, Politics, Greece, History, European history, Philosophy) is only a C rank, most likely because there is still a lot that can be added. As it stands that information that is included in the article is neutral and backed by citation, but overall in comparison to other pages, there is not too much information on the topic as a whole. I do wonder if this is a result of lack of work on the article or an overall lack of primary sources on the topic however, considering how old Athenian democracy is. Likewise, I suspect many modern articles and works on Athenian democracy focus on analysis on the system rather than just primary source information, and such it is probably difficult to find raw unopinionated information on the topic.

Overall, I agree with the C-rank the article has, but I am dubious on how possible it would be to reach say an A-rank. It would be worth looking into how much primary sources there are on Athenian democracy, and to determine if there really is anymore information to add to the article.