User:Ashlopez101/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Desertification

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I wanted to quickly learn what areas are most affected by desertification when compared to others. This is a relevant environmental justice issue because nation wide people are impacted by desertification and we may see more climate refugees due to this. Nationally we need to consider how we are going to care for more and more people who are considered to be climate refugees. At a fist glance this article seemed to have well balanced sections and followed the Wikipedia article formatting guidelines.

Evaluate the article
Lead section: The first word was bolded, which is a requirement for starting Wikipedia articles. I appreciate how the lead section provided imbedded links to terms that might be helpful for us to further understand desertification. Although the lead section is concise I would have liked a brief description stating what the rest of the article would be covering. Lastly, this section provided images although I would recommend updating the U.S. Department of Agriculture Map as it was from 1998.

Content: I felt that the content quickly provided me with a better understanding of desertification and all provided content/ information related back to the broad topic of desertification. Given the increasing changes in climate change I would like to see more up-to-date sources to support some of the claims made throughout the article. The article does not explicitly address Wikipedia's equity gaps, although it does highlight that developing countries who are suffering from poverty and food insecurity are disproportionately impacted by desertification.

Tone and Balance: For most of the article the tone and point of view was neutral. In the "causes" section I felt that the article could have used a more neutral tone when describing the different factors and causes of desertification. I felt the article had a strong point of view in regards to overgrazing and then went on to present a compare and contrast of other causes. It would have come across in a more neutral tone if the causes/ factors were all explained equally instead of being used to contrast one another.

Sources and References: The article cited various sources which made the information being cited seem of higher quality. However, not all of the information was cited and some of the sources were from 20+ years ago. With the ever changing impact from climate change I would expect there to be more current sources. The reference list had 100+ different sources and when I clicked on some of the links they worked.

Organization and Writing Quality: The organization and quality of the article is comparable to other Wikipedia articles that I have read. The writing was easy to read and the sections were well organized. However, I would recommend that the sections be more balanced. For example, under the "history" section I would recommend providing more information as the article noted desertification has been a topic sense 1814. Also, when describing the affected areas, some areas were given a more thorough description than others. I would also recommend describing more of the affected areas that were represented on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Map.

Images and Media: The images provided do a great job to support the information being discussed throughout the article. As mentioned, I would ensure that the images provided are the most up to date as desertification is an ever changing environmental issue.

Talk page discussion: There are not any conversations going on behind the scenes. The talk page showed that the article was created in 2013 and then a minor change was added in 2022 to help explain desertification more. The article belongs to 5 different WikiProjects and has not been rated yet. In class we talk about environmental issues with more of a holistic point of view and way of thinking. We incorporate past, present, and future and also talk about the environment as a place where people live, work, and play. The article posed the topic of desertification as an issue that happens to the physical environment, but did not include much of a discussion on what happens to the people impacted my desertification. I felt that the justice part of environmental justice was lacking from this article.

Overall impressions: The article followed the Wikipedia section guidelines to provide an easy to read article to understand the basics of desertification. I appreciated how the article provide a "see also" section at the end for readers to click on relevant links to get more information. Since this was my first Wikipedia article evaluation and critique I do not have anything to compare this article to. However, based on my previous comments I feel that some sections could have been strengthen by balancing the information to reflect those sections (i.e., history, areas affected). In order to greatly improve the article I recommend going back through to update the out of date sources.