User:Efarac01/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
1st Cavalry Regiment (United States)

Why have you chosen this article to evaluate?
I found this article as I was browsing C-class articles about the Cold War, and was surprised that the US would have had a cavalry regiment still being used in the Cold War, as I assumed that cavalries would not have existed by that point. This article contributes to the knowledge of US military activity and intervention during the Cold War. For the purposes of this assignment, I focused only on the sections that relate to the Cold War, as that was most relevant to the class. My initial assessment was that it was for the most part well-written, but I was unsure of its sourcing for information.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead Section

The first sentence does identify the article's subject (the United States 1st Cavalry Regiment) and origins. The rest of the lead, however, does not summarize the main points of the article or describe the major sections of the article. It does not contain information that can't be found elsewhere in the article, but the information it does contain is barely relevant to the rest of the article, only mentioned very briefly later on.

Content The content that I read was related to the Cold War period, specifically the sections "Vietnam", "Arctic Cavalry", and "The Cold War Inner German Iron Curtain Border Surveillance Mission 1978-1991". The content was relevant to the topic and as far as I could tell was up to date. I do not think that the content fills any significant equity gap in Wikipedia, as American military history, particularly its involvement in the Cold War, is not understudied.

Tone and Balance

The article maintains a neutral tone throughout, and makes no attempt to convince the reader of anything. It details the movements of the 1st Cavalry Regiment without any bias or opinions regarding those movements.

Sources and References

The three sections that I read had only two sources, and they were not academic. The first source appears to be a sort of handbook or short history of the 1st Cavalry meant for its current members to read. The reader is explicitly addressed as a member of this Cavalry unit. As this source, whose name I could not find, was written for and presumably by members of the US army, its information on US army movements is likely accurate. These sections do not have a wide range of diverse sources and points of view, although I'm not sure that would be available for such a specific topic, considering the relatively minor role that the cavalry seemed to play in the Cold War period.

The first paragraph in the "Vietnam" section describes the initial American invasion of Vietnam, prior to the involvement of the 1st Cavalry, and is not sourced at all. The next three paragraphs, divided into the subsections "1st Squadron", "2nd Squadron", and "7th Squadron", have only 2 citations total, of the same source previously mentioned. This section contains some sentences taken directly from the source without quotations, and some sentences containing information that isn't present in the source. The "2nd Squadron" subsection contains no citations, and also contains some information that I could not find in the source provided for the other paragraphs.

The section "The Cold War Inner German Iron Curtain Border Surveillance Mission 1978-1991" has no sources at all.

Organization and writing quality

The writing of the first two sections I read was good. The writing for the third section on the surveillance mission had some small grammatical issues, such as the phrase "often typically", and some unnecessary capitalization. The organization was also fine; with so little information available, there was not too much to organize.

Images and Media

The sections I read used only one picture, which was properly captioned describing what the picture showed. The photo is public domain and put in a good location. It is not particularly educational, but it is relevant to the topic as it depicts the 1st Cavalry while it was deployed in Vietnam.

Talk page discussion

The fact that some of the article is copied directly from books and un-cited, as I saw in the Vietnam section, is mentioned. The other discussions are mostly minor fact-checking or correcting.

The article is rated C-class for the WikiProjects "United States/American Old West/Military History" and "Military history", and Start-class for the WikiProject Tambayan Philippines.

This article differs from out in-class discussions about the Cold War because it focused solely on troop movements, which is not something that we focus on at all.

Overall impressions

Overall, I don't think that this is a very good article, or at least the Cold War era sections are not. They are sourced very poorly, with significant plagiarism throughout, and the very few sources actually cited are not academic ones. It has some good specific information regarding locations and movements of the 1st Cavalry. It could be improved with proper citations, and if possible more sources. Overall I'd say its lack of sources makes it an underdeveloped article.