User:Bradley Silvernail/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Constitution of Nigeria

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 to evaluate this article because I'm interested in the structure of governments in general, particularly federal systems of government such as Nigeria. The Constitution of Nigeria is important because it's the supreme law of the land in the country, dictating the rules which their government must abide by. The people of Nigeria have to be knowledgeable about their system of government in order to be effective at creating change and understanding why certain things occur. My first impression of the article is that it's very weak and short, and is in desperate need of citations and general clean up for spelling, grammar, etc. The longest and cleanest section of it is just a copy/paste of the current Nigerian Constitution, and even then it seems like a rather random excerpt to include. It's overall a mess.

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.)


 * In the lead section we can see many of the problems the article is plagued with throughout. The lead itself is short, only lasting for 4 sentences, and even then the last sentence technically doesn't end because it lacks a period. It makes many claims, but only provides a source for one and links to other wikipedia articles for the part that's cited and two other key phrases, which isn't enough. It also sees an inconsistency at the end of this section by making the features of a constitution a numbered list, but then only numbering the first point and not the others. It's short overall but does provide key information, despite the lack of sources.
 * The content of the article is relevant and brings in some good information, but once again most claims lack citations. The Colonial Era section is definitely the largest and most well written section of the article, while every other section is much to short and under-developed. Everything seems to be up to date as far as what has been written, however I'm no expert on Nigeria so I could be wrong on that. Nothing seems to be out of place except the part that just copy/pastes the Fundamental Rights section of the Constitution in what seems to be its entirety.
 * Tone and balance wise, the article does a good job overall in staying neutral. Again I'm no expert in Nigerian politics, but nothing seems particularly biased or one-sided, although of course a lack of citations does make this harder to tell. My main concern for this section isn't what was written, but what wasn't written. This applies to citations, as well as general political and scholarly thought on the constitution.
 * As I've been saying many, many times above, this article needs so many citations for most of the claims it makes. The article isn't particularly long, but despite that it would take some time to get all the sources needed for this to be considered properly cited. The sources that are there appear to work and be relatively up to date as far as I can tell, and what's cited is generally either other wikipedia articles, the constitution itself, and a single book (once). Nothing wrong with what's cited (although I'm unsure how scholarly that book mentioned is), it's just that many more citations are needed.
 * The spelling is mostly ok, but again there are numerous, noticeable spelling mistakes throughout, along with poor grammar in some areas. The pacing is overall just too short, or too long and unnecessary in the case of the copy/paste part of the article. It could also use more sections, although the sections that are there are pretty good and helpful.
 * It provides very few pictures, but the ones provided are useful in grounding what the article discusses. The images there are well captioned, and they should adhere to the copyright guidelines given that they're either the Coat of Arms of Nigeria or a picture of former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo. They could be laid out on the page a bit more seamlessly.
 * The article states at the top that it has multiple issues, which is quickly apparent just by scanning the piece. The talk page is basically empty, only having 2 comments. One gives a short sentence about civic education, and the other simply says "Gk". A truly riveting talk page.
 * Overall the article seems to give some good points, but is far to short and needs citations to be trusted. I think it does a decent job laying the framework of what some sections could be about and what might be important to look into when expanding upon the article, but most everything else it does rather poorly. There's not much else to say here that hasn't been said again and again above.