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HIS 275 - History Of Japanese Civilization

Evaluating Wikipedia Articles: A Checklist

Remember, Wikipedia articles are not appropriate sources of information for college level work. But Wikipedia can be a good starting point to find other, more appropriate sources of information. Please use Wikipedia responsibly.

  • Assess the article's quality
    • Check the article's grade on the article's talk page.
    • Is the article's topic explained well?
    • Are the Wikipedia style conventions followed? Is there an introductory paragraph? Is the article broken up into seperate sections?
    • Does the article provide in-line citations? Are the sources appropriate for the information in the article? Are the sources authoritative?
  • Look at the article's history page and talk page
    • Check the article's creation date.
    • Look to see how many editors have contributed to the article. Has the article been created by only one or two people, or has it been a collaborative effort among many editors?
    • Has the article been subject to heavy or continued vandalism?
    • Have there been discussions about the article's validity?
    • Does the article appear to be controversial?
  • Pay attention to the template messages that appear at the top of, or within, an article.
    • Make sure to read the template messages (the boxes at the top of the page or section) if they appear in Wikipedia articles. They can inform you of any issues with the article such as lack of references and sources, the presence of unverified or unreliable information, or if the article requires clean-up, etc.

from https://libguides.lmu.edu/c.php?g=323798&p=2169061

Other Resources

Talk Pages

Talk pages are administration pages where editors can discuss improvements to articles or other Wikipedia pages. The talk page associated with an article is named "Talk:Example", where "Example" is the name of the article. For example, the talk page for discussion of improvements to the article Australia is named Talk:Australia. The talk page associated with a page in another namespace is named by adding "talk" after the namespace label; for example, the talk page for Wikipedia:About is called Wikipedia talk:About. If you are evaluating an article, you can check out the talk page to see what discussions have already been had.

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