User:Bluekat343/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2022 Pakistan floods

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I was interested in the environmental humanities part of our course syllabus, and when looking through a list of Class-C articles to find an article to evaluate, I came upon the category of climate change. Within the category of climate change, I decided to focus on the 2022 Pakistan floods, since it is a recent (and ongoing) climate crisis that has devastated an entire country, and one that I had heard about through social media from friends and classmates who have family or relations to Pakistan. My initial impression of the article was that it was very statistical, providing a list of casualties for every area affected.

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 is brief, but contains a holistic overview of the general facts about the event. It details when the floods started, the number of casualties, the flood's place in history, its general cause, as well as the monetary losses to Pakistan's government. The background section effectively expounds on the lead section with more detail about the cause of the floods. The talk page has been proactive in making sure the background statistics are accurate as well; for example, correcting the conversion command that incorrectly represented the temperature in Fahrenheit. The background also acts to fill Wikipedia's equity gap as it does note that Pakistan "contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is one of the places most vulnerable to climate change." This is important information that not many people may consider when thinking about Pakistan's role in the global climate conditions.

The main body of the article consists detailing the impact of the floods by means of listing out the number of adult and child casualties, facilities affected, such as schools, and financial cost (in USD) to the Pakistani government. There are also brief sections on the economy and health issues caused by the flood that could perhaps be listed under their own heading, since it distracts from the list of districts and provinces affected by the floods. The health section could perhaps also be removed and integrated into the sections on the various districts since those sections also delve into health impacts, and this could minimize repetitive information. The economics section could be better placed with the national and international response details, since those also primarily focus on economic aid and response.

The tone and organization of the article is very neutral and straightforward. There are almost no public/social viewpoints discussed, and the article is almost entirely comprised of numerical statistics alone. There are no major spelling errors. Images are used to show diagrams of weather conditions and aerial views of flooded cities, which is helpful in understanding the magnitude of the crisis. Most of the sources used include official government reports and reports from the United Nations; however, several sources seem to indicate criticism of the government or political partisanship, while the article does little to expound on these points in a neutral manner. This is something that can be improved with the article in the future, though, given that the crisis is still developing, such socio-political and retrospective analysis may take time to fully manifest.

Overall, I think this article is sufficient for the point of the crisis that Pakistan is in at the moment. It is still developing and there has not been sufficient time nor resources to analyze the effects of the disaster beyond the straightforward, numerical details. However, such a national crisis will certainly have socio-political ramifications that can and should be fleshed out further in the future within the article.