User:Cv1620/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
1981 Gambian coup d'état attempt

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the Wikipedia article, “1981 Gambian coup d’état attempt,” because in my African Politics course, I recently learned about the rise of authoritarianism in sub-Saharan Africa and one of the regime types that emerged was the military regime mainly through a coup d’état. Thus, I was curious to learn about how these instantaneously and often brutal events unfolded when they were not successful. The article’s existence is important because it highlights the history of an event before Africa’s massive democratization period which could serve as an general case study for someone who studies postcolonial Africa, trying to see what were the general political conditions in the region and why states could not democratize sooner. My first impression of the article is that it is too short and too rushed. The lead is okay, but I believe that the major sections are lacking a lot of information to actually be useful.

Evaluate the article
The lead for the Wikipedia article, “1981 Gambian coup d’état,” provides the necessary amount of introductory information to the topic. It gives when the coup starts and ends as well as states the actors involved which include the Senegalese military, members of the Gambian Socialist Revolutionary Party, and some members of the Gambia Field Force. Overall, the overview is concise and easy to follow. However, I believe that the detail of the Gambian president being out of the country to attend the royal wedding in the UK is irrelevant to the coup’s unfolding and the lead could have been made without it. Also, the lead could have benefited from a brief summary of the article's major sections as it currently does not prepare the reader for what it’s to come in the article.

When it comes to the article’s content, it focuses too heavily on the factors that started a coup and the government’s response to it while totally neglecting information on the coup’s failure and the immediate aftermath of it. The above is important because a user of Wikipedia is looking for an overview of the entire event as a starting point for further research and only having an article merely focusing on its start does not generate a lot of questions for further research. Thus, what is missing from the article is a more thorough discussion of the coup, its failure, and it’s intermediate effects on the country. Perhaps expanding the two headings under, “Timeline,” would be a good start to achieve the above. The thoroughness of a more developed discussion would provide a more holistic overview of the event and would allow a user to read more into the most important aspects of the coup as would be highlighted by a more developed Wikipedia article.

In regards to its tone and delivery of information, the article does a good job of neutrally summarizing the event. It keeps the delivery of information objective by not presenting controversial viewpoints and merely stating facts. For example, it could have easily fallen into the temptation of presenting an argument about the Gambian government’s fear of Libya’s influence on domestic politics and speculate that fear’s basis, but it objectively explains the fear by not presenting unrealistic motives for it. Overall, the neutral tone invites people to further research the event if interested without normatively weighing in on whether the coup was good or bad for the country.

Not all facts are backed by reliable sources. Although the books that are cited are reliable academic sources whose links work, I have two major concerns regarding the current usage of these sources in the article. Firstly, the article relies only on these two sources which fails to acknowledge the existence or universe of other equally credible sources that may be useful fact checkers for facts already stated in the  article. It is impossible to learn and summarize an event from merely two sources as they can run the risk of only focusing on one aspect of the event when in reality, especially since the article is trying to summarize the coup d’état happening in The Gambia in 1981, the Wikipedia article should aim to survey all aspects of the event in some way or another. Equally important to note is that the article does not have all of its facts cited which is a problem because without proper citations, one considers the facts as being in violation of Wikipedia’s copyright laws. Also, proper citations are important to encourage people to engage in further research.

The article is well-written, there being no major writing or grammatical errors, and organized into neat sections. However, its sections definitely need further expansion to, as previously stated, help researchers expand their own projects on the topic. Also, including the coup’s aftermath as its own well-developed section in the article would be definitely valuable to researchers who want to study such topics as the long-term effects of coups in sub-Saharan Africa.

On the article’s talk page, it is rated as a C-Class article which in summary means that it has meaningful information, but has some problems that need to be addressed. The above makes intuitive sense considering the article’s strengths and weaknesses that I noted above, including but not limited to its neutrality and objectivity, its wrongful reliance on only two sources, and its need for more citations to back up facts. The article’s talk page only includes a user suggesting additional sources to use in the article. I went ahead and looked at some of the sources which, to be sincere, are not reliable. Most of them were not academic or peer-reviewed sources, but were journalistic and blogg-style sources. In other words, the article’s talk page hardly offers some sort of guidance on how to improve the article.

In sum, I would say that the Wikipedia article, “1981 Gambian coup d’état,” is underdeveloped as a whole. The above is because although its strengths include objectivity, organization, and a good lead paragraph, it clearly has many weaknesses including that its sections need to be expanded more for the article to be useful for further research, there needs to be more citation of all facts, and there needs to be further research for more reliable sources beyond the two currently existing sources.