User:Weewass/sandbox

Article Evaluation
Link to Article

The article on the black death is very well written with a constant flow of supported information. I enjoyed evaluating the page and came up with some thoughts of my own that I think can improve it even further. To start off, the entire page was written with supported sources and virtually without biases. This greatly contributed to my reading experience because I was not being skewed in one direction. The only thing that I found distracting were the images, due to their nature.

The page doesn't make any heavy claims that cannot be supported by established, factual information found elsewhere. Each paragraph flows smoothly into the next, but I did find that the "causes" section, in my opinion, should be moved up toward the top of the page rather than the middle, which brings me to my next point. Overall, the article seemed to have an equal amount of facts covered, but I found the "Alternative explanations" section to be substantially larger than the "Origins" section which is the first paragraph that the reader will see. The problem is that because the origin is at the top, and is supposed to be the main cause and setup for the entire page, it makes the rather large paragraph about alternative explanations at the bottom quite confusing by the time the reader gets to it. I would consider changing this section to be underrepresented in order to strengthen the introduction.

Taking a sample of citations, I noticed that many link to google books written by established authors. As a reader, this assures me that the facts I am reading are valid as opposed to being sourced from a webpage with a skewed view. I also enjoyed that many of the words throughout the article were linked to other Wikipedia articles to give even more information in case the reader doesn't understand what is being discussed. We find this on most wikipedia pages, but it's certainly noteworthy.

The talk page for this article was very interesting. Many people are challenging facts both large and small, but no one seems to have commented on the over flow of the page. The main talking points are about how the plague was spread, whether humans or rats. Additionally, some are talking about the environment's affect. The article has been rated as a B-Class, which surprises me due its seemingly thorough and well-written pieces.

Overall, the article matches up to what we learned in class. I didn't see any large differences and even thought that much of the information could have come from this article without students noticing.