User:Arushilahiri/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
China–India relations from Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate since it captures my proposed topic of the trade and economic relationship between China and India. Initially, I felt that this article was a large volume of facts about the two nations over the years but I found that the historic interplay between the two nations seemed more fleshed out than knowledge about current affairs. Overall, the article felt messy and overwhelming since the information did not feel well-compartmentalized besides the years. It would have been nice to have it broken up into discrete topic and subject areas as well.

Evaluate the article
Though this article provides a lot of information about historical China-India relations, I feel like it does a poor job at communicating new developments in international policy. For example, it does not cite UNCLOS violations in the SCS as being a key trigger for India's reactionary agenda. Further, there is little information about public opinion beyond just one example of how the Chinese people viewed India in 2008 and one in 2014 which does not necessarily reflect current opinion after significant expansionary moves China has taken through the Belt and Road Initiative. I think such details would be important to properly represent current foreign policy and relations between the two nations.

In answering the above areas, I noted the following areas needed a bit of work:

Lead Section: I think the introduction of the article was a pretty effective summation of the historical and present-day relevance of the relationship between India and China. I do feel like the article is overall lacking an explanation of leadership's approaches to foreign policy which does play a huge role in determining political and economic decisions. I think it would be pertinent to discuss the roles of, for example, Modi and Jinping and their relative stances on foreign relations. Ultimately, I think there should be a bit more information about present-day relations since the point of Wikipedia is to also be one step ahead in terms of recent content which also happens to be the most pertinent in the context of evolving bilateral engagement.

Organization and Writing Quality: While the article was organized chronologically, I think that it would have been helpful to have sub-sections to better compartmentalize different issues. For example, having a section entitled environmental policy under a decade being discussed would have been useful in distinguishing information and separating out content that might be pertinent for someone to skim over. I just think this would have made the extremely long article far more digestible.

Talk Page: It seemed like the talk page was pretty weak and no one was really contributing to the article. One comment mentions that the article needs a lot of work and the other comment left was mine discussing a couple shortcomings in the article. I don't think either of these comments is really tht constructive or interactive and both commenters (myself included) should begin to take strides to edit portion of the article that we deemed inadequate.