User:Acadia72/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Balfour Declaration

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to look at the article on the Balfour Declaration as this was a policy I looked at while writing my essay last semester, and it was an important foreign policy document in the early 20th century. This Declaration matters because it validated and gave British support for Zionist claims to the land in Palestine which has had ramifications that are still felt in the region today. I was initially very impressed with the article; it looks very extensive, with historical context, the main issues associated with the topic, reactions, the long term impacts and much more. There were extensive notes and sources which also seemed like a good sign to me.

Evaluate the article
Evaluating content:

- Overall, everything in the article seemed relevant. It is an intensively comprehensive covering of the Declaration and history around it and so I was impressed with the scope and depth of detail. As the article was quite long and I am no expert on the topic, most information looked up-to-date and accurate to my knowledge. There is a mix of time ranges for the sources, suggesting that it has been updated and adapted. In terms of equity, the post seemed to cover both sides of the topic (Zionists) and Arabs fairly equally, although the notes appeared to have a slight bias towards Zionists with extensive citations from Weizmann (a high level British diplomat) and no mention of prominent opposition member Edwin Montagu (also a high level British diplomat). I would also change the wording in the article from "conflict" as I do not agree with the use of that term to describe the situation, but beyond that I think the article was very comprehensive and well-written.

Evaluating tone:

- As I mentioned previously, I do think there lies a slight Zionist bias in framing the situation as a "conflict" which misrepresents Arabs as equal opponents however beyond that slight distinction in wording, the tone overall appears neutral, with no obvious language to take one side versus another or suggesting agreement/dissonance with a viewpoint.

Evaluating sources:

- The sources were extremely comprehensive. I tried 5 different links that all worked, and brought me to sources that were peer-reviewed and scholarly. There are over 350 citations, and looking through the bibliography, the sources represent a wide time frame (some from the 1970s to much more recent works in the past couple years). Additionally, as I wrote my essay on this topic, I actually recognized a lot of the books and articles from my own research and was able to corroborate how they were used.

Checking the talk page:

- This article is a Featured Article, which it means it is considered one of the best quality articles on Wikipedia. Additionally, it has a warning for Active Arbitration Remedies as it is classified as a "contentious topics". Further, this article is involved with many wikiprojects. There have been discussions contesting some of the wording, as well as the lack of representation of Montagu (like I mentioned earlier) and some other smaller, contested details. We have not talked extensively about this topic in class, although I can imagine it would be somewhat similar as the article is quite well-balanced and in-depth.