User:Catjhy/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I will be evaluating the Wikipedia article about Canada in the Cold War.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article is of interest because of the significance of the Cold War and the interesting role of Canada as a world power coming out of the Second World War. The Cold War was an event that many people were likely surprised about, especially as the world had since come out of a Second World War, and from a revisionist perspective, it serves as one of the prime examples of near nuclear warfare in modern history. Moreover, Canada's role is interesting because as a country closely connected to both the British Empire and the United States, both of which who were involved in the geopolitical change that is observed after 1945, there is a unique space and period where Canada had crafted its own identity coming out of the two prior World Wars.

At first glance, this article was well-thought through, but the lack of citations was blatant and made me question the content.

Evaluate the article
The content in this article was all relevant to the topic of Canada's role in the Cold War, and had a holistic survey of both the domestic and international context. It was especially detailed in the areas of the American-Canadian relationship, and also Canadian contributions to international affairs and peacekeeping during this era. A possible area of improvement could be in the "Domestic anti-Communism" section that could touch on the impact of Canadians, the general populous, more since there is a heavy focus on the politics of the war but there inevitably is information and reaction from the general public about the threat of nuclear war.

The tone of this article appeared to be neutral and objective as it was difficult to pick up a "voice" throughout the article.

There were no overrepresented views but I think an underrepresented point was whether or not there were Communist sympathizers and organizations within Canada as well and how that, at the community level, could have contributed to the Cold War tensions too. There is a heavy focus on the international political effects of the Cold War, which is sensible as it was a largely political conflict that affected numerous world powers, but war and conflict often always entail societal consequences. Inclusion of how the Cold War was received by the people would have rounded the article well.

Looking at the citations list, the sources do come from mostly academic journals and presses and books. However, going through the article, I initially noticed that many paragraphs were missing citations, which made me skeptical of where the information had come from since this is not everyday common sense knowledge that would not require citations. It is also difficult to distinguish, if people were looking for the original information themselves, where the content could have come from since the citations list goes over multiple specific topics. Moreover, the number of references to the length of the article is questionable.

On the Talk page, there is very little up-to-date discussion as records pre-date 2010, which suggests that this is a topic that not been possibly as relevant as others. The edit history has also been very sparse, with less than 15 edits made after its conception in 2004. Moreover, the article has been included in the WikiProjects of Canada, Socialism and military history but all of C-class rating, which suggests that this is a low-importance topic.