User:Ally RH/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, August 30). Sustainable city. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_city.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I am passionate about the climate crisis and think that sustainable cities are central to our ability to mitigate this crisis. My initial impression of the page was that it is quite long, full of hyperlinks, and quite detailed. Based on the rating and my initial read-through of the article, however, it’s apparent that the article isn’t particularly coherent or logical in its progression and would benefit from reorganization.

Evaluate the article
I am evaluating the Wikipedia article titled, “Sustainable City.” The article contains tons of information related to cities and sustainability. The primary issue is that the article is trying to cover too much, making it a clunky and taxing read. My edits for this article will focus on organizing the text in a clear, logical manner, which remains relevant and to the point.

First, the lead section attempts to touch on too many topics and throws in unnecessary facts and data. The lead - which is four paragraphs long – begins with a sentence defining sustainable cities, which is valuable, but is unnecessarily wordy and vague. Moreover, the sustainable city is also presented along the terms “urban sustainability, or eco-city (also ecocity)” (Wikimedia 2021). Based on the page’s Talk, all these terms are listed because the sustainable city and ecocity Wikipedia pages were merged back in 2008. This list of terms, however, is a bit overwhelming, especially for someone who is being introduced to the term sustainable city.

Then, the content jumps from Sustainable Development Goal 11 to Richard Register - who coined the term ecocity - to issues the UN Environment Programme says are plaguing today’s cities, back to (all) Sustainable Development Goals, then to land-use distribution, the Adelaide City Council, and then to Richard Florida. In turn, the lead kind of meanders all over the place, and references irrelevant information before mentioning key issues. For instance, the words “climate change” do not appear until the end of the third paragraph, after mentioning the €150 billion which the European Investment Bank invested in improving cities.

This haphazard structure is mirrored throughout the article. For example, the article discusses eco-industrial parks and urban farming (both listed under architecture, which I think is a misleading header), and then zooms out to the issue of new urbanism, before zooming back in to discuss LEED buildings and Sustainable Sites Initiative.

The article should be reorganized to logically progress from broader issues – like new urbanism – to more specific subtopics – like eco-industrial parks - and should place greater emphasis on the environmental side of sustainable cities. The article also fails to include the experiences of historically marginalized groups in its discussion. Social and environmental justice are key informants of sustainable cities and need to be represented.

Regarding the format, the superscripts to the footnotes are inconsistently placed in the sentences and should (I believe) be consistently placed at the end of each sentence. Regarding citations, most sources cited in the text were published in 2020, with some from 2018, and a handful from before then. While the time stamp on these references is encouraging, and all the hyperlinks that I tested worked, very few of the sources are from peer-reviewed sources and/or academic journals. Moreover, some facts listed have no citation or have a source which doesn’t support the claim they are associated with. According to the Talk page, issues of unreferenced sections and neutrality have been raised before, and certain examples of sustainable cities have been deemed inaccurate, which is probably why the article has a Start-class rating.