User:DullestStimpy/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Mining

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I have chosen this article because it was a part of the lecture content, and a question on the quiz featured it. Mining is a key industry in todays society with many positives and negatives. My first imporession of the articel is a good one as it it somewhat lengthy and seems to cover a lot of content.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of this article is somewhat brief while still giving a definition of mining and including some examples of different things that are mined and different methods used. The lead section is overall quite clear and concise. The overall content of the article covers everything I could think of in relation to mining. It includes the history of mining and how ancients conducted mining activities. It also covers the many different mining methods as well as including some of the negative environmental and social aspects of mining. All of the content within the page seemed to be up to date. The information portrayed is balanced as some sections display the pros of mining, such as the jobs and materials it supplies us with. On the other hand, the article also shows some negatives of mining as children and slaves are sometimes used and also the environmental consequences are negative in some cases. There does not appear to be any fringe information or biases in this section. About 90% of the article is well referenced with the exception of the section “Mine development and life cycle”. This section has a warning at the top which states it does not cite ay sources. Reviewing the other sources at the bottom of the page, of the 100 sources many are hyperlinked for easy access and the ones that I checked were all still active. The sources seem to be from all different authors ranging from investment sites to scholarly books and the dates of the sources are all fairly current. From what I could review there were minimal news article references so the reliability of the information appears to be strong. The writing style and organization of the article is well put together. It is all broken up into easy to access sections at the beginning and flows quite nicely throughout. No grammatical errors were noticed throughout. The use of images in this page is quite prominent, with almost every sub point having supporting images, which are all referenced. The images used add to the article as they show some of the massive mining equipment and one image is a kind of panoramic shot displaying a vast mining complex area. The talk page on the article is somewhat small with people just pointing out some irrelevant/confusing content and adding some changes which clarify some of the content, and also clarifying external links. This article is rated as vital to society and appears to have been a part of a course assignment at one point or another. The way this article is on Wikipedia is somewhat different than what it talked about in class as in class we went over much less information than what is displayed here in the article. Overall, the article does an excellent job at breaking down mining and its related subcategories and related topics. The only potential for improvement I see in the article would be an addition to the history of mining subsection. Some of the sub sections do not include a lot of detail and I’m sure that other eras in history have had some unique mining activities. On a scale of 1-10 I would rate the articles completeness a 7.5 out of 10 being well developed but it seems that some content could still be added and more properly referenced.