User talk:Pumpkinpie21/sandbox

Article Evaluation Article: Marina Carr

First sign that this article is rated with start-class would be the warning banner written at the top of the page stating that the article has multiple issues and there is a need for improvements throughout the whole page to become a better rated article.

Content: Improvement Introductory sentence was very simple sentence, being that it was only one sentence long while simultaneously it does not give much information about Marina Carr except her birth date and a play she was famous for (Marina Carr, 2018). The very minimal introduction at the beginning could be improved with either more information about who Marina Carr such as who she is rather than just the simple statement of her being an Irish playwright and one of the major plays she is famous for writing (Marina Carr, 2018). The second half of this tiny introduction is that " She is well known for her play, By the Bog of Cats which premiered in 1998, and her other published works" (Marina Carr, 2018). The last few words of this sentence is lacking so much substance to it. It is lacking information about other plays she has written and just kind of brushes off that she is famous for pieces of theatre she has written while whoever wrote it could have possibly been too lazy to fill in information about what other playwrights she is actually famous for creating (besides By the Bog of Cats that she wrote in the 1990s) (Marina Carr, 2018). This information should be edited to either include titles of the other work that was created or the sentence should be shortened to only "She is well known for her play, By the Bog of Cats which premiered in 1998" (Marina Carr, 2018), so it only states one famous piece of work or just not state any pieces of work right away and include a brand new section of her successful work. Only later on in the play there is a section about another successful piece of hers, Woman and Scarecrow, however it was probably not as important to be mentioned before in the article (Marina Carr, 2018). This information could have been included in the short introductory sentence. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? No, not all the information in the article is relevant to the topic. The topic of the article is about Marina Carr, however, going lower into the article there are two sections that are about plays that were written, By the Bog of Cats and Woman and Scarecrow, which do not mention anything about Marina Carr in the paragraphs. These sections only mention some points about the production (directors and actors/actresses), premiere of the plays (such as playtime) (Marina Carr, 2018). More details about her personal life and her career leading up to her writings. Possibly some more insight about her ideas for coming up with these plays or process for how she wrote them. Under the publications section, there could just be a small introductory sentence stating these are pieces she has published. For the "Early Life and Career" section, the title could possibly have education included because this whole portion of the article has her academic career written into it. An alternative would be to separate "Early Life and Career" (besides education being included in this section), career should be its own section to describe her career as a whole.

Tone The tone of the article is neutral. The Marina Carr article has to be neutral since it is under the "biography of a living persons" policy which states that all information written must have a neutral tone and not be biased towards or against her (Wikipedia: Biography of Living Persons, 2018). There seems to be no biased information about Marina Carr's life. There are almost no viewpoints within the article, except for the phrase "Marina Carr is considered one of Ireland's most prominent playwrights" (Marina Carr, 2018), which is actually challenged by an editor who wants a source to be written of who claims this phrase. This phrase can be seen as a way to persuade people to believe she is the best oh as the phrase says "most prominent playwrights" in Ireland (Marina Carr, 2018). This is the only sentence where persuasion is attempted to convince the reader.

Sources

One vague sentence read in the article is "Marina Carr is considered one of Ireland's most prominent playwrights[by whom?] and is a member of Aosdána[according to whom?]" (Marina Carr, 2018). This sentence is clearly lacking reliable sources for both statements since someone who has edited the article in the past want to know who has stated these sentences. The few links tried from the list of sources in the reference page worked and the information in the article or webpage opened corresponded with what was written in the article. The citations working for the article is a positive note because under the "biographies of living person" policy, the sources must be verified and legitimate when used to reference the information about Marina Carr (Wikipedia: Biography of Living Persons, 2018). Under the "biography of living persons" policy, the sources being provided must be unbiased and neutral (Wikipedia: Biography of Living Persons, 2018). Of the some citations opened, most of them came out neutral. Some of the sources just mentioned awards and recognition that Marina Carr has received from different organizations (Marina Carr, 2018).

Talk page Now take a look at how others are talking about this article on the talk page. One major thing written in the talk part of the article is the part in 2017, one editor realized that the word "exemplify" was used too frequently in the article, it a step was taken to just reduce the amount of repeats it was used (Marina Carr, 2018).

A strict rule that the article must adhere too is the "biographies of a living persons" policy which affects the way the article is written (Marina Carr, 2018). Another conversation is just this active bot following the URLs to make sure they are still valid and correct with the information in the Marina Carr article (Marina Carr, 2018).

The article is a part of several Wikiprojects such as: Wikiproject Ireland; Wikiproject Biography/ Arts and Entertainment; Wikiproject Theatre; Wikiproject Women writers (Carr, 2018). When it comes to ratings for the page, all projects listed above gave the page a 'start-class' rating, which means there is much room for improvement about the content of the page (Marina Carr, 2018).

Sources: Marina Carr. (6th Sept. 2018). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Carr

Wikipedia: Biographies of Living Persons. (29th Aug. 2018). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons

Pumpkinpie21 (talk) 23:08, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Some nice work here Kat, particularly when engaging with the talk page and recognizing the elements of the article that need references in order to align with Wikipedia’s biography guidelines.

You need to take a little more care with your written expression. Write in complete grammatical sentences. Simplify your syntax (i.e. – privilege shorter, simpler sentences over long complicated ones). Watch your tenses. And watch agreement issues (e.g. – “is” agrees with a singular subject; “are” agrees with a plural subject.) Start by looking at the introductory sentence to your evaluation of content, and thinking about how it might be improved.

I agree that the intro of the article needs some work to bring it into line with Wikipedia’s stipulations for an introductory section. Nicely observed.

You could certainly separate early life from career here, in order to expand on both. I urge you to read the Wikipedia entry on Career before undertaking a task like this, as Career on Wikipedia has a broader sense than it tends to in general usage.

In terms of what else was missing, I thought a section on her awards and prizes might have been useful.

I take your point that the material on her plays is not strictly biographical. I’m going to ask Shalor to weigh in here. Shalor – on the one hand this article might be improved through adding synopses and information about more of Carr’s major works, but would this detract from its function as a biography? Should Carr’s works have their own individual pages?

I agree that the tone here is generally neutral, and feel that the statements for which a source is required should be quite easy to support.

You have published this material in the talk page of your sandbox, instead of the regular page as required. There has been no penalty for this, or for any technical errors during this assignment.

EmerOToole (talk) 16:50, 3 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Peer Evaluation
 * Content
 * Your version of the section is much, much better organized than the original section, actually separating the analyses of the plays rather than them being spread out somewhat randomly. I'm not sure your contribution is entirely at home under "References to Themes and History." I feel like your writing would fit under a different section you could add to the article, maybe titled "Women in Carr's Plays" or "The Role of Women in Carr's Plays." You somewhat lost the references to history, which might be important to add. Other than that, what you wrote makes the information much easier to find instead of it consisting of wandering thoughts.
 * Tone
 * I really appreciated the way you made the article more nuanced, as the original was very critical of the women in Carr's plays with no hint of neutrality. I did find your sentences are a bit long, though, making the paragraphs a little difficult to follow, so shortening some of your sentences could help make your contributions clearer. Maybe watch out for vague sentences like "Marina Carr's plays play big roles in representing different parts of motherhood." It's true in an essay you would need a concluding statement to sum up your work, but I don't believe it's necessary here. However your neutral language has much improved the original author's biased thoughts!
 * Sources
 * Your version uses actual references so much better than the original article, where the majority of the information has no references at all and seems to be the author's own analysis. I had trouble accessing your Maresh source, but otherwise all your sources seem to be peer-reviewed academic papers, which makes them all the more valid. Also there's a super easy way to cite things without having to use parenthetical citing. You just click at the end of the statement that needs a reference and press "cite" at the top of the page. You can then paste the link and it creates the citation all by itself, or you can insert the source manually. This would be super helpful when you move your contribution to the actual article in order to make it conform to Wikipedia citations.
 * Daneyer (talk) 22:16, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

Hi

In addition to 's excellent feedback, I'd like to urge you to think about balance of content and neutrality, and how the theme of Motherhood will now be weighted in comparison to all the other themes in Carr's work should you so significantly augment this section. Very much looking forward to seeing this develop. EmerOToole (talk) 17:52, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Hi

Some nice work here.

I'm going to reiterate my feedback above, as maybe I didn't make my meaning as clear as I intended. If you augment the section on motherhood to this degree without also augmenting other themes, it means that the theme of motherhood is over-emphasized in relation to other themes in Carr's work. That it is to say, if you have three long and detailed analytical paragraphs about motherhood, and only short paragraphs about other themes, this creates the impression that motherhood is the most important or noteworthy theme in Carr's plays, which is, of course, not the case. Motherhood is one theme among many. At the moment your reworked section is a more like an academic essay on motherhood in Carr than like something written to introduce readers to the main themes in her plays. Therefore, I'd like to encourage you to streamline (chop down) this section considerably and to also develop other themes, based on a greater variety of academic sources. You might consider creating subheadings for various themes. I am going to ask to weigh in here with any further advice about balance of material before you consider moving this to the Wikipedia page.

A little more care still needs to be taken with the written expression. For example, let's look at your opening sentences.

"Carr has written a different view when it comes to the appearance of mothers in plays."

A difference view to what? Can you use a more instructive word that "different" here?

"Rather than always being a loving, sweet mother, she has taken this behavior and twisted it to represent dark sides of motherhood, such as in The Mai, the mothers in the play do not give the attention their children need, but rather to their male partners who do not treat them properly (Randolf, 2012, 48)."

The word "being" implies that you are talking about Carr herself as opposed to the characters in her plays. There is a grammar issue called "an agreement issue" where you write "rather to their male partners," as you have not previously said that they give attention TO their children.

These are just the first two sentences, but all of the writing needs a careful edit.

You need to use wikipedia citations, not in-text citations as you would use in an academic essay. could you please point Kat to the correct tutorial for how to do this?

Very much looking forward to seeing how this develops as you incorporate more research and find more balance in your material!EmerOToole (talk) 15:12, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi Kat,

It's not entirely clear to me from the material on your talk page if you are intending to move the short paragraph currently labelled "Tweaks with attribution" or the longer section, "Revised mother section 1" below it. The former is about the right length for your addition, while the latter is too long. The tone and level of detail in the former are also more suitable for moving to the wikipedia page.

As well as adding your paragraph on motherhood, something you might like to do in order to improve the article is to work through the tone and structure of the themes and history section. I feel like some subheadings would help to make it less journalistic and more like an encyclopedia entry. There are also some strange colloquial constructions in this section, as well as allusions to particular actors (e.g. Holly Hunter as Hester Swane) that don't fit. EmerOToole (talk) 03:26, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi

I'm going to recommend that you do not move this work to the Wikipedia page, as 1) in your redrafted section on motherhood there are still significant problems with grammar and written expression, and 2) - while the themes you've chosen look promising, I was hoping to see an indication in your sandbox of how you might have edited the section in order to apply them.

I will still be able to give you a grade based on the considerable research and work that has gone into this project thus far. EmerOToole (talk) 23:31, 6 December 2018 (UTC)