Which article are you evaluating?

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Here is a link to the Wikipedia page I am reviewing about plosives.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

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I chose this article by looking through the list of C-pages that are categorized as Linguistics articles. Since we have already discussed phonetics, I decided to find an article about a phonetic category I felt comfortable evaluating. By scrolling through the Talk page, it appears that there has been some contention regarding what to actually categorize as a plosive. After glancing at the article itself, there seems to be a relatively detailed breakdown of the different types of plosives and how they are categorized.

Evaluate the article

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The lead section appears to be satisfactory, as the first sentence does provide a good overview of what a plosive is, although this could be a bit misleading since aspirated plosives do involve some air. All of the content in the lead section is covered in the article, although some of the sections, such as aspirated plosives, are not even mentioned. The lead section could likely be expanded a bit to at least mention the different types of plosives that exist, as this is not alluded to in the opening.

As far as I am aware, all of the content in the article is up to date, although several of the sources are from the 1980s or 1990s. It could be worthwhile for recent sources to be investigated to determine if the information from the earlier sources is upheld or not. The content is relevant to the topic, as further breakdowns about the types of plosives are provided along with examples in various languages. There does not appear to be any content unrelated to plosives. There is some attempt to categorize plosives in languages that are not as widely studied, such as Hawaiian and various Native American languages, but these are small points mentioned in the article and not the main topic.

The Terminology section of the article does a good job of illustrating differences that arise in the use of the word "plosive" and its development over time. However, it is much easier to pick out the majority viewpoints as set by the IPA, and the minority viewpoints are not directly called out in the same way. Additionally, in the Transcription section, there is a special section for English plosives, but not for any other language, indicating that more importance is being placed on Western phonetics than that of other regions. This section could either be removed or listed clearly as an example of plosives used in a language alongside one or two other plosive inventories from underrepresented languages.

Unfortunately, not all of the facts listed in the article seem to have secondary sources, especially for the languages that are not as widely studied. For example, the Common Plosives section references many other Wikipedia articles when discussing the plosive inventories of other languages, but it would be helpful to provide further reading or sources for this information outside of Wikipedia. There is one source from Estonian authors, which does help provide some diversity in the information provided, but searching for sources from other, non-European or English scholars would certainly boost this. Other sources do exist for the facts that are missing citations that also provide diverse perspectives, such as this breakdown of the Samoan language. A few of the citations do not work or are not complete, mainly citations 3, 8, and 12.

The article is mostly well-written, with a few minor errors, particularly in the Terminology section when the Latin term surdus is introduced. The structure of the article is organized, providing a history of the term first and then delving into how plosives are used or what factors characterize them.

There are no true images in this document, only the IPA representations of each plosive using text placed into tables. This is likely acceptable because this involves a written representation of speech, although adding an image or short animation of how or where plosives are formed could help provide more context.

The Talk page, as alluded to previously, does appear to have debates on how to properly categorize plosives, and it seems like the changes discussed about describing multiple perspectives did make it into the current article. Additionally, there are still some lingering questions or concerns about how phonetic releases and plosives are related on Wikipedia currently and if there should be more information provided in a separate article. The article overall is listed as C-Class and is part of the Linguistics WikiProject. Overall, this article is much more in-depth than the plosives we have covered in class, as shown by the many debates about the variety of ways that plosives could be defined.

All in all, this article seems to have a solid foundation, although it still has issues that prevent it from reaching its full potential. More sources and article space should be devoted to highlighting a variety of plosives from different cultures, and less emphasis should be placed on the English plosives alone. Additionally, images could be added to help users better understand how a plosive is formed, which is especially useful for beginners in linguistics. Despite this, the article is extremely detailed in its evaluation of different plosives, providing several subcategories and descriptions of them. In general, this article seems to be slightly underdeveloped due to its lack of in-depth evaluation or citation of non-English or European sources.