Alfredofee

Article Evaluation

Subject: Lucretius' On the Nature of Things

An evaluation of a Wikipedia article concerning the second week reading on Lucretius.

Questions to be Considered:

• Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
• Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
• Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
• Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
• Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
• Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
• Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
• How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
• How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Notes

• The article is well organized and seems neutral and non-biased (although the talk page claims a certain reference for a Darwin claim was biases and consequently removed), mostly giving a synopsis of Lucretius' content and the work's philosophy while showing competing interpretations in scholarship are represented in equal fashion fairly consistently.
• Many of the earlier citations are for books, so to that extent it seems accurate and the few online sources I checked seemed to work.

• The article is part of several WikiProjects (i.e. WikiProject Philosophy, WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome) and while differing in importance to these multiple projects, it has unanimously been labeled as a start class by them.
• Viewpoints presented here are more comfortably situated before modernity within antiquity and the middle ages. Not much coverage is given to modern reception as well as scholaship of the work.
• The Talk page is a comfortably informal and respectful workspace and radically sporadic on the breadth of its topics, including more aesthetic concerns regarding the page's picture versus a more indepth discussion debating the merits of pronouncing Lucretius a "scientist".
• The "Response" section commences with the description of Cicero's response to Lucretius' poem but then delves into the scholarly as well as interpretative history of Cicero's possibility of having amended and edited Lucretius' poem as asserted by Jerome. This placement fits better elsewhere than the response section, perhaps under the Manuscript History subheading.
• Perhaps simply a minor bother,but the response section has sub-headings corresponding to temporal designations (i.e. classical antiquity, Late antiquity and the middle ages) but the final label seems inconsistent with this format, merely labeled "Later Works" rather than being ascribed a temporal subheading such as "_____ to Present" as precedent might dictate.