User:Cadentf/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Operation Barbarossa

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I those this article because I have interest in history, especially history surrounding famous operations/battles throughout the different wars in European history, as well as American history. At first glance it doesn't look like much, I was expecting more but after going through the article I realized how all of the other subtopics they mentioned within this article all ties to Operation Barbarossa.

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.)

Lead Section:

The introduction to this article clearly describes what Operation Barbarossa is, and what to expect throughout the rest of the article. The author(s) of this article also outline different subsections that are related to Operation Barbarossa, organized by the timeline of events that occurred during this time period. It is neatly organized and explains very well what each of the major events during this time are, and the impact they had on Operation Barbarossa. I don't believe that this article's lead was overly detailed, I believe is did a very good job giving a brief summary of what Operation Barbarossa is, and what we can expect throughout the article.

Content:

There is a lot of information to digest in this article, all relevant to Nazi Germany turning on the Soviet Union during World War II ultimately leading the numerous battles on the Western Front of Germany. During this time period, as we should all be aware, the Jewish people were the victim of an extremely racist government, being Nazi Germany. Furthermore, it goes into Germany's history of dislike for Slavic people, deeming them as an intolerable race of individuals. It somewhat went off track towards the end of the article when it began going into detail about the regulations of the Geneva Convention and the war crimes Nazi Germany committed during World War II, which I believe strays off the topic of Operation Barbarossa.

Tone and Balance:

The tone of this Wikipedia article is definitely informative, but unfortunately because of the nature of this article it is hard to say that there isn't some bias. This article definitely skews towards the favor of the Soviet Union towards the end of the article, however for majority of the article the tone remains neutral and informative. The most noticeable claim I see is towards the end of the article when we start reading about the regulations of the Geneva Convention, and it claims that soldiers belonging to Nazi Germany committed numerous war crimes, but didn't even mention whether or not the Soviet Union had done anything similar, I'm not sure if they did or not because the article didn't mention it. I will say it's hard to read this article from a nonbiased perspective because Nazi Germany in World War II is typically viewed negatively.

Sources and References:

This article utilized many sources, of the ones I went through they seemed very thorough and the authors of the articles appear to have credible backgrounds. However, there were many sources that I could not verify the credibility due to it being in a different language, but even then it appeared that they were published by credible sources/authors, however because I could not verify exactly what was in each of the articles due to language limitations I cannot say if it is or isn't credible. Of the sources reviewed, they seem current and up to date with any new findings regarding this subject. Due to this article being about an event during World War II, we aren't going to see any 'new' information be brought forward unless something from history is missed and brought back up.

Organization and Writing Quality

Throughout this article I didn't notice any grammar errors, and the article is very well organized I don't believe that there is anything I would change in regards to how it is written. I think they did a very good job portraying the events that unfolded during Operation Barbarossa very clearly and in a timeline organized manner.

Images and Media

This article provides multiple pictures that relate to this time period, and I believe it does help people understand what is being described in the article. The pictures do not appear to be copyrighted, so there wouldn't be any issues within Wikipedia. Overall the images are laid out in a relatively organized manner, the images posted follow the progression of explanation of what Operation Barbarossa is.

Talk Image Discussion

The talk section of this article is pretty interesting to read, due to the popularity of this article there's hundreds of different postings discussing and adding additional information regarding Operation Barbarossa. Through Wikipedia it's rated as a level-5, vital historical article, furthermore it meets the Wikipedia good article criteria, and additionally is apart of five different WikiProjects.

Overall Impressions

I believe this article did a very good job overall informing readers about the history of Operation Barbarossa, it does a very good job going into detail about the events that lead up to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the events during the invasion, and the aftermath of the invasion. It maintains a fairly nonbiased tone throughout the article, the only thing I would remove is mentioning anything about the Geneva Convention since it did not apply to the Soviet Union. Overall it is a very well developed article that clearly has a lot of time and effort put into it, furthermore the never-ending references really show just how much effort was put into ensuring that this article was accurate to maintain credibility.