User:Zstillman/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
History of bankruptcy law

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 chose this article because it is relevant to the course due to being on the history of an area of law. The historical basis of bankruptcy law is important to understanding any of the current principles underlying the subject. My impression of this article initially was that it was severely lacking in content for what should be a detailed topic.

Lead section
The lead section in this article is lacking. it merely explains what bankruptcy is in 2 sentences and does not talkk about any of the intro to the information in regards to the "historical basis" of the topic. If anything, the lead is too concise here.

Content
The articles content is relevant to the topic up to a point. it only really talks briefly about ancient, medieval, and post medieval England periods. The content is up to date essentially because its not like this information has changed, but then it merely links to history of bkz law in the US and bkz in the US as "modern development". the article doesnt talk about any other jurisdictional developments in bankruptcy law and is lacking in discussion of the modern era. There would definitely be a "content gap" here in regards to modern development outside the US.

Tone and Balance
This article is definitely written from a neutral point of view and talks about the developing attitudes towards bankruptcy and how treatment of debtors developed and thee remedies available to them.

Wikipedia articles should be written from a neutral point of view; if there are substantial differences of interpretation or controversies among published, reliable sources, those views should be described as fairly as possible.


 * Is the article from a neutral point of view?
 * Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * Are minority or fringe viewpoints accurately described as such?
 * Does the article attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another?

Sources and References
The article has some fairly good sources but definitely depends a little too much on a few of the sources used for the early history of bankruptcy. It also uses the bible as a source and some more philosophical/ideological authors like Adam Smith. For the amount of info in the article, it probably seems like there is a reasonable amount of sources but they could definitely cite to some more scholarly historical records or writings about bankruptcy and the development of the doctrine.

The articles used are scholarly articles though.

Organization and writing quality
The writing is clear and professional for the most part and is broken up sensibly into sections that make sense. They could probably break it up even more like by cultures and the impact each had on bankruptcy doctrine development over time, however for the size of the article how they have it broken up is probably fine. There are a few sentences that could be written slightly more professionally, such as where they refer to corporations "going broke".

Images and Media
No images really in this article or any media of any kind other than words.

Talk page discussion
The talk page on this article is empty. It seems like not much work has been put into it.

Overall impression
Overall, this article is alright but not great. It is rated as a start class by wikipedia so I assume this is really not much more than the start of what this article should be. The periods of time it looks at are broken up quite generally and not much info is given about each. The page could definitely benefit from being broken up by cultures and time periods more and really making it into a sort of timeline of the history of bankruptcy law as the name of the page would suggest. As it is now, the page mostly just describes a few developments and things they were doing in the aforementioned 3 time periods.