User:Brendan Bell-Earle/sandbox

Article Evaluation

The article that I chose to write a review on was the Wolseley Expedition. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement on this article. The first aspect that caught my attention was the mentioning of Louis Riel and the Métis in the modern province of Manitoba. There is a lot of room to get into what brought Riel and the Métis to that particular area as well as what their goal was. If the overall goal was American expansion, then it needs to be plainly stated instead making it sound like an additional goal by saying "it also". Another aspect that I think could be covered in more detail is the abandonment of Fort Garry by Riel. What led to his decision to abandon the fort? Was it because he knew he would lose? In that case why did he bother taking the fort at all? When it comes to biases, there may be a little bit of bias geared toward the expedition's success. I do not know enough about the subject to say for sure but it sounds as though it was an overwhelming victory for the Wolseley Expedition that did not appear to have any negative encounters at all. Stemming on my earlier comment, I think there needs to be more of a focus on the American side of the Expedition. Why was Riel put in charge of this operation? What were the drawbacks for the Americans and Métis losing against the expedition? I think this article would be greatly improved with this addition alone, never mind all of the room for expanding on the expedition itself.

In terms of sources, most of the links work but some do not. This is something that can be improved by the individual working on this topic for the article assignment. Personally, I find it highly annoying when a link does not work or it leads to something other than the source that was listed. The ones that are listed appear to all be relevant to the topic but I cannot confirm all of them because not all of the links work. The article itself is a part on the military history wikiproject and has been rated as mid-important on the importance scale so it can be expected that more work will be done on it eventually.

With these aspects in mind, I think this was a solid article that did not focus too much on a particular event and I look forward to seeing how it is expanded over the next few months. ~