User:Astranle/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

2022 California wildfires

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article because I care about climate change, and studies have found that wildfires can be caused my climate change. The wildfires in California specifically matter because they affect people directly in this country, and the side effects of them can also impact animals and how they develop to a certain degree. My initial impression of the article was that it looked up to date because there were many dates listed of recent events within the article. It also seemed fairly easy to read because of how brief and condensed the information was.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section of this article is satisfactory in that it clearly introduces an overview on the topic of California wildfires in a clear and concise manner. It covers the general outlines of the topic including the context, cause, and effects of the fire without going too far in depth about it, and the lead section does not include any information that won’t be found in the article. The contents of the article are relevant to the topic, and it seems mostly up to date, specifically with the listing of dates and statistics of each wildfire that occurred recently. However, certain contents of the article seemed to be more detailed than others with some sections having little information while others went more in depth about the topic. The article only presented facts and did not present any bias or particular view on the topic. Many of the references included in the article were random websites, which could mean that the information may not be as accurate. There were only a few peer-reviewed articles from scholarly journals referenced in the article, but most of the information came from current websites varying from online news articles to government websites. The article should have included more peer-reviewed articles, but this may be because the events were too recent to have been written about in many scholarly journals. The article is organized well with the content being clear, concise, and free of any grammatical errors. However, the content seemed a bit too concise in that it did not go into much detail about certain topics, and there should have been more sections added to the article that would have provided more information about the topic. There is only one image in the article, and it was captioned well and helped to better understand the topic while also adhering to copyright regulations. Most of the Talk page conversations were about whether to keep/delete certain information written in the article due to issues on things like accuracy. There were also discussions about adding other relevant information to the article to keep the article more up to date, and the conversations altogether seemed straightforward yet respectful. Overall, the article is good in that it provides a concise summary about the wildfires with what seems to be up-to-date information about specific wildfires. However, the article seems a bit underdeveloped, and it could improve in the amount of detail written about certain topics within the article.