User:Benmardis1/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2007 Gasoline Rationing Plan in Iran - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I wanted to learn a bit more about the politics surrounding gasoline. Understanding the gas rationing plan of Iran can help one also understand some of the political pressures the country has. It's interesting to learn how something like a gas rationing plan ties into the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the U.S.

My initial opinions of the article are that it is well written with a lot statistics, references, and quotes from relevant individuals.

Evaluate the article
The lead section does give an easy to understand introduction and I can get the gist of the article from the first paragraph. The lead doesn't clearly overview the different sections of the article, however.

The content of the article is mostly relevant. The only sections that I question are the sections about fuel smuggling and the economic damage caused by it. It's clear that fuel smuggling is a problem in Iran but these sections don't make it clear how this relates to the Gas Rationing Plan.

It seems that the article takes a neutral position about the Gas Rationing Plan. The content provided doesn't seem to reflect the article authors opinions about the subject.

The sources are mostly from news reports that were made within the relevant years that this event occurred which in this context seems to be appropriate. There was only one dead link in the sources. I checked several others and they were good links.

Overall the writing quality and organization was good. There was one statement at the end of the article that didn't seem like it had correct sentence structure. "By July 2010, Iran had managed to save 11 billion dollars since the rationing began, thanks to the gasoline rationing plan, which has spared the need for excessive imports of the commodity." I had to read it several times and I understand the statement but it just seems like the sentence structure is odd.

After reviewing the Talk page it seems that there is a bit of political discussion happening and some critiques of the accuracy of some statements made that lacked citations. There were also discrepancies mentioned about some of the numbers that were provided, mostly due to different numbers given by different news sources.

Overall as someone who knew nothing about the Gas Rationing Plan in Iran, I feel like this article gives the reader a good basic understanding of what happened. To make this article better I would suggest at least mentioning that other news sources provided different statistics for some of the data points. I would also take out the sections on fuel smuggling and the economic problems associated with it. Those sections seem like they should be their own article. Now that I'm looking back through the article again I'm seeing a few more minor grammatical corrections that should be made. "In mid-November 2008, the prices super gasoline in the neighboring Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Turkey and the UAE were 105, 108, 74, 84, 187 and 45 cents per liter. Whereas, in Iran motorists are allowed 100 liters (26.4 US gallons) of gasoline each month at the subsidized price of about 10 cents per liter (37.9 cents per US gallons) and an unlimited amount at 40 cents per liter ($1.52 per US gallons)." These two sentences have some issues that should be addressed. It should say "the prices of super gasoline.... and the second sentence shouldn't start with Whereas. Instead It should say something like In contrast,.