User:EBCarleton/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Marine Protected Areas of Canada

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I've discussed marine protected areas a lot in my courses this year, and I was interested to see how in-depth the Wikipedia article on this subject would be since it is such a broad topic. My preliminary impression of this article is that is covers all the general information/key points about marine protected areas, but doesn't necessarily go beyond that.

Evaluate the article
The introductory sentence of the lead concisely summarizes the article, and the lead includes brief descriptions of the article's major sections. However, it also includes a point about the Oceans Act of 1996, which is never mentioned or explained in the body of the article.

The content of the article is relevant to the subject, but does not have enough detail. It discusses the involvement of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in creating marine protected areas for the sake of their interests and states that they collaborate with other groups who have relevant interests, but does not explain who those other groups are or what their interests could be. Particularly, the article should include a description of indigenous peoples that are involved and what their interests are, to balance the overrepresented interests of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, thereby, the federal government. Although the tone of the article is neutral on the views of all relevant groups (such as industrial corporations, the government, and other parties), it underrepresents all views on the subject, heavily relying on information about the activities of Fisheries and Oceans Canada to fill the content of the article. It does not include information about activities undertaken by any other groups to aid in the conservation of marine protected areas, for example, non-profit organizations.

The sourcing of facts in the article is thorough and current, however, nearly all citations are of Government of Canada webpages. Therefore, they do not represent all the available resources on the subject, such as the many scholarly peer-reviewed articles on the subject published by a range of non-government sources that are available easily through Google Scholar. Because the majority of this article was based only on Government of Canada publications, it is essentially just a summary of the Government of Canada's publications on this subject rather than a summary of the subject itself.

The article is well-written, does not have any noticeable spelling errors, and is broken down into major points that make sense for the subject. The images and media are lacking though - the only image included in the article is of hydrothermal vents at one marine protected area, which although interesting, does not enhance my overall understanding of the subject the way a map would. Ideally, the article would have included a map of the marine protected areas of Canada to convey their sizes and locations, which would have been more relevant to this article since it is a general overview of marine protected areas and not about a particular one (most of which have their own article pages where images specific to each are included).

The article does not have any activity on its Talk page, but is part of two WikiProjects: "Protected Areas", and "Canada: Geography", and is rated of low-importance in both of these WikiProjects. It provides a solid framework on the subject of marine protected areas of Canada, but needs to be rounded out with details and additional viewpoints. It is especially critical that a wider variety of sources are consulted in the growth of this article. Due to the lack of details and source variety, overall it is not well-developed. There is no mention of developments for this article on either of its WikiProject pages' task lists at all. The source and detail issues of this article should be included on both of these.