User:Anomalocrisis/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Canyonlands National Park

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose it because when looking at national park Wikipedia sites the other day it seemed more lacking than some of the other parks' sites and I really like the national park. On first glance it seems to be pretty good, with a number of sections each with a significant amount of information and a lot of citations.

Evaluate the article
The lead has a good topic sentence, but does not contain any information on the different sections of the article. Additionally, it includes a quote from Edward Abbey but does not mention him again in the article. The lead is concise.

The article's content is relevant, but it is not always up to date. The information on climate is from 2011. Additionally the article only discusses the park's indigenous history briefly in its geography section, and there should be a section about the people who lived there before settlers came in the history section.

The article definitely has a neutral tone, although it is certainly written from the perspective of settlers with no indigenous perspective.

A number of sources are outdated, and there are some sections (geology) that have few to no sources. Additionally, most of the sources are from the National Par Service, and so may have bias. There is a sentence in the geology section that goes "Some scientists believe... but more modern studies show" and does not cite either study. There could be much more diversity in the sources (as none of them are from historically underrepresented perspectives) and just in general more reliable sources. Many of the Parks Service citations are based on scientific research, so one would only have to find the original studies to have more reliable sources.

The article is mostly well written, but the Climate section could be much more concise and easy to understand. It does not appear to have any spelling or grammatical errors and it has overall a good organization.

There are a number of images, although most are in the gallery at the bottom and could be spread out in a more visually appealing way.

The article is rated as Start class in WikiProject United States and C class in WikiProject Protected Areas. On the talk page people are discussing the need for an addition of indigenous history and better sources. People don't seem as concerned with adding topics like climate change to the article as we are in class.

The article is okay, but could use some work on it to clean it up. It has good organization and most sections are strong, but it needs more reliable sources for some sections and more information on indigenous history in the area.