User:Aidelprin/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Kenneth Kaunda - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I have chosen this article because I wanted to pick an article about an African author since African literature will be the focus of our class. This article is about Kenneth Kaunda who was the first president of Zambia and wrote his autobiography about how he freed his country from British rule. My impression just from reading the lead was that this article is interesting, well-organized, and completely neutral, it only provided facts that could be proven and no opinions or feelings.

Evaluate the article
The lead is very good, it is straight to the point, there isn't information there that isn't also in other parts of the article, and it sums up the article well. The only issue I have with the lead is that the only things that are sourced is Kaunda's birthdate and nickname. The content is balanced it doesn't put too much emphasis on a particular topic and all of the information is up to date with references from 1980 all the way to May of 2020. The article is completely neutral I could not find any bias or anything that seemed to be there to persuade the reader of anything. There is a long list of reliable and working sources. some of the sources are old but there are also very recent sources as well. The only problem is they don't source a lot of the material in the article but there are sources for where they got the information. The article is well written and organized I could not find any grammatical or spelling errors. There aren't many images but the ones that are there are relevant to the section of the article that they are in and they are well captions so you know exactly what you are looking at. The talk page is a bit difficult. The first few posts I saw were about different names that Kaunda had, what they mean, looking for sources to prove that he really went by those names but I also found a post saying that the article was clearly biased. Another says that there is a lot of important information that was left out like how Kaunda was a vegan/ vegetarian, he was a vegan head of state, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is a member of International Rotarian organization. Other talks mentioned that there needs to be more sourcing like I said earlier in this evaluation. The article is rated as a level-4 vital article and C-class and it is apart of the WikiProjects, WikiProject Biography/ Politics and Government, WikiProject Cold War, WikiProject Africa/ Zambia, and WikiProject Zimbabwe/ Rhodesia. Over all while I think that this is a good article I think that it needs to be sourced better. It is well written and organized, and I believe that it is neutral. I would say that this article definitely needs the information that one of the posts said was left out because being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is a huge and important piece of information. I would say this article is good but it could use improvements to the citations and there is more information that needs to be added.


 * OK, a few things. First of all, this paragraph is too long: I am having a very hard time reading it (I talked about this in class). Second, it's really a long article to evaluate for this exercise, and that length is also relevant for the sourcing--you said it has enough sources, but I'm not so convinced. Yes, it is absolutely true that it needs more footnotes (which related specific claims to specific sources--there is a tag for that and I'll add that to the article). But the lack of sourcing in places coupled with the length means that, I think you missed at least one thing: there is an entirely unreferenced section in there, and it starts with the statement that some of his measures "effectively made Kaunda's presidency a legal dictatorship". There is no way that's a neutral statement if unsourced: it is a very serious indictment, one that I personally agree with, but it cannot be stated in Wikipedia's voice. I also can't see the content of Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa, so the claim that he was so active in the struggle against AIDS, I have to accept that it's there in the book--but without more sourcing it's really a value judgment, and so at the very least it should have been ascribed to that particular writer. Does that make sense? Neutrality is sometimes a complex matter. Dr Aaij (talk) 16:49, 29 January 2021 (UTC)