User:Coolpanda456/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Oil spill

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I typed Oil into the search bar and navigated to the option that I was most interested in out of the search results that popped up. I wanted to learn a bit more about why oil spills happen, and what kind of effects they can have.

Evaluate the article
Lead

The lead does have a introductory sentence that explain what oil spills are, as well as some possible causes of oil spills, and some effects on the enviroment.

It appears to be concise and to the point, providing just enough information for me to grasp the basics of oil spills.

Content

All of the listed content in the Contents tab seem relevant to the topic of Oil Spills, either relating to previous (or current) oil spills, their causes, or their effects, as well as how to estimate just how big a spill is. There is no content that is obviously out of place, and nothing that seems missing, as History, Causes, Size, and Effect, as well as Recovery and Prevention are covered in the article.

Tone and Balance

The article appears to be neutral, most of if is talking about facts and numbers like oil spill sizes, or definition of certain words. There are claims that push the reader towards the idea of "Oil spill are bad for the enviroment" but I think that's more of a fact as oil spills do cause a lot of damage to local species of animals and plants. I didn't notice any minority or fringe viewpoints in the article, though I can imagine that they might exist. There might be some people that think that Oil spills are good, or necessary.

Sources and Refrences

There are a large amount of refrences and sources, So I did not check every single one as that would take a large amount of time, but the sources that I did look at (Sources 2, 4, 58, and 87) did have working links and are by different authors. Source 79 was broken and led to a not existent page however. Most of the sources appear to be relatively current, with the earlier sources dating to around 2000, while some of the latest sources are 2019.

Organization and writing quality

The article is cleanly split into many content sections and one can easily find something specific, for example if someone was only looking for oil spill sizes, there's a table that lists oil spills, as well as information like dates and how big the oil spill was. As for the actual writing, I did not encounter any paragraphs that were particularly hard to read or inherently confusing, nor did I notice and grammar or spelling errors.

Images and Media

Many of the images are highlighting how big the oil spills are, or the effects of them. Images like the one showing the Kelp or Animals after being affected by an oil spill is helpful in helping the reader understand just how the oil spills can affect the enviroment. The image captions are short and concise and I didn't have any problems trying to figure out what the images were showing.

Talk page discussion

Many of the talk pages are about making edits, sources, and fixing errors or mistakes, There are also a few discussing the classifications of what makes a "Large" oil spill. The Oil spill article is rated as B class low importance in WikiProject Enviroments, as well as 3 other WikiProjects.

Overall impressions

I think that overall, the article is relatively easy to read and understand, and if a reader wants general information regarding oil spills, the article makes a good starting point to get the basic knowledge to jump start research. I think a particular strength is the images used by the article that lets the reader see the effects of the oil spills, instead of having to imagine them. Besides the always present improvement of fidning more sources and adding more information, I don't see any obvious improvements that could be made to the article currently.