User:Xiannvzah/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article introduces one of my favorite Chinese books that I read during high school. I believe my familiarity with both the context and content of this book can be beneficial for me to evaluate. Since this book is originally written in Chinese words, some translations may cause misunderstanding about some concepts in the book and thus lead to different explanations in the wiki site in introducing this book. As a Chinese reader who speaks Mandarin, I also have access to many Chinese resources related to this book, and thus can further bring a different perspective to this article for evaluation.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The introductory sentence provides the book's title (both in English and Chinese), with the publication date and author of the book. More precisely, the book was first published in a monthly magazine named "Shou Huo" in December 1995. The lead includes a concise summary of the story and provides the novel's correct time setting and historical events. The use of language is simple and direct, not overly detailed. The lead briefly explains the most prominent literary technique that Yu Hua used in this book, which is black humor and mentions this book's peripheral Theme of this book. However, the idea of "The space of 'folk'" could not be mentioned in the lead as it is just one of the literary techniques that have been used in the book. I would suggest elaborating on this literary technique separately in another section rather than briefly mentioned here in the lead.

Content

The content is up-to-date. The content includes all the essential elements for readers to know about this book. I suggest including an "analysis" section that includes common literary techniques used in this article and the purpose of using these techniques.

Tone and Balance

There are not a lot of opinions on whether the book is interesting to read or not. I believe the article's use of language is relatively neutral as it simply gives an introduction to the content of the book and provides some related facts after the publication of the book. The summary part of the book is also quite neutral as it simply provides the book's storyline. However, I believe there should be more information related to the Theme of this book. The current article only includes one Theme of this book and emphasizes the element of "blood" as a key symbol throughout the book. But there are, in fact, much more themes presented in this book, such as "The inequality between men and women under the traditional Chinese system society" and "The influence of class in a society." These themes are also worth mentioning in the article for readers to have a complete understanding of the book.

Source and References

The "Critical response" part includes some famous authors' critical responses to this book and the writer Yu Hua of this book. All the responses have been backed up with citations. Some references are quite current such as 2019, while some references are from 2000-2005. Yet these sources are not outdated as it is relevant to the date when the book was first published. However, there are more crucial viewpoints from different authors which remain debatable today that I believe should be cited and included in the "Critical response" part. The links given are not expired.

Organization and writing quality

The article is well-written. It is concise, straightforward, and simple to read and understand. I didn't find any grammatical or spelling errors while reading. The content breaks the article into distinct sections that provide different introductory aspects to this book.

Images and Media

The image of the physical book is included in the article, which is well captioned. However, this book version was in 1998, and there is a much more new version in 2019 that I recommend including as well in the article.

Talk page discussion

The article is within the scope of "WikiProject Novels," and it has been rated as the "Stub-class" on the "quality scale" and "Low-importance" on the "importance scale." "Stub-class" promote editing and additional materials to be included in the content. However, I would argue that this book perhaps is rated "Low-importance" on the "importance scale" in the Western literature field, but it could definitely be rated as high-importance in the Chinese or Eastern literature field.

Overall impressions

Overall, I believe the article is well written but could include much more details in each section of the content. Therefore, I would assess the article's completeness as underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the article does give a superficial understanding for readers to learn about this book and perhaps generate interest in reading this book.