User:Alitsana

Article Evaluation

I chose the article on Public Opinion regarding the United States invasion in Iraq and the Bush's administrations decision to pursue war in the Middle East. Everything in the article is relevant to the topic. The format of the article mostly describes public support for the war in the middle East over time and examining US public opinion about Operation Iraqi Freedom starting shortly after 9/11. The article describes how public opinion about the Iraq War has shifted over time. In 2004 over 80% of Americans supported the Bush administration's actions in Iraq, but in 2007, 64% of Americans felt that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. President Obama's decision to remove troops was supported by 78% of Americans.

The article is very neutral, and statistics are mostly supported via public opinion numbers. There are no claims being made in the article, and the information is presented in a straight forward format. There are no viewpoints that appear to be heavily biased towards a particular side. There are no viewpoints that are over or underrepresented. The links in the citations do work, and the sources are somewhat varied. There are many pieces by the NYT and Washington Post. Sources are mostly polling data, with some variation with news outlets. Some of the NYT articles did have a strong anti-war sentiment and may not be appropriate to be included as sources. There is no information that is out of data, but it would be nice to include more contemporary statistics on public opinion on the Iraq war, to illustrate how opinion has changed over time.

The talk page was very interesting. This article was nominated for deletion, but the course of the debate found that the article should be kept. Users thought that the article is not notable, and is trying to push a popular opinion. Users also thought that the information should be merged into a different article, instead of be kept as a separate entity. Most of those arguing for deletion believed it had a blatant point of view (POV). One user argued for keeping it " I don't understand how this can be inherently POV. Popular opinion can be gauged from a variety of polls and open sources. Whether such opinion is pro- or anti-war doesn't have any bearing on the POV-ness of this article. If anyone feels the article is POV then they should be editing, not AFD'ing, surely?"

The consensus of the debate was to keep but clean up. Many people have edited this article, including a student at GW in the US Foreign Policy and Public Opinion Class. (Fall 2017) This article is not ranked favorbly on wikipedia. Wikipedia provides a disclaimer, "

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page."

This article is a part of the Wikipedia Military History Project.

This article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2011)

This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (December 2007)

This article may have too many section headers dividing up its content. (September 2011)

This article needs to be updated. In particular: The article needs data from 2008-2017. (November 2017)