User:Emblanx/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Reforestation in Nigeria

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
After hearing Maimoni Ubrei-Joe speak, I began exploring various articles related to environmental issues in Nigeria, and found articles on deforestation and reforestation. Deforestation is one of many interconnected environmental issues in Nigeria. In the global context, reforestation can be an important combatting climate change and biodiversity loss, but there are many diverging viewpoints on its efficacy and how it should be implemented. I wanted to see how this article both explained these complex global debates surrounding deforestation and reforestation and how they situated it within context of Nigeria's ongoing struggles for environmental justice.

Evaluate the article
Starting with the lead section, I struggled to find a clear synthesis of what the article was about in the first sentence. The majority of the paragraph explained reforestation, and I thought the context of the section might have been better suited for a section about introducing principles for reforestation. Near the end of the section, it finally mentioned reforestation in Nigeria being driven by existing resources in seed banks and budgetary conditions, which I thought could have been condensed and moved to be the first sentence.

Content-wise, I thought the article had a strong overview of the political history of reforestation efforts, and it provided a clear timeline of the history of deforestation and reforestation and described the key individuals and institutions involved. The article contained very sparse context about environmental issues in Nigeria broadly or in the Niger Delta, which they reference multiple times as a key site of deforestation and biodiversity loss. The "Environmental Context" section explained the concept of environmental context but failed to adequately explain the environmental context of Nigeria, simply stating its location and that it has a tropical climate.

The article showed bias by presenting row cropping as the solution to deforestation, without saying who actually supports this solution and without mentioning any other proposed solutions. It also assumes slash-and-burn agriculture is the primary cause of deforestation without backing up this claim and without considering how different industries and policies can contribute to the problem.

While there was one citation that was missing a link, the article overall was well-sourced mostly from peer-reviewed scholarly articles or government reports. The links all worked, and most led to articles or books that were behind paywalls.

The article contains a clearly captioned image of a university-owned forest nursery, but the reader does not gain much relevant information from the image or caption, and I was left with more questions than answers. Is this forest a part of a reforestation effort? If so, are universities playing a role in reforestation? What methods were used for planting in this case? There was another image of tree planting but the caption was very short and didn’t provide much description of the process that I was looking at. As a reader, I felt it would be helpful to have more images showing the reforestation process or different reforestation methods.

There was minimal talk page discussion, with only one comment which praised the article. The article rated start-class and has been flagged for possible copyright violations.

Overall, I thought this article was provided well-researched foundation and contained information that got to the heart of some of the different political and environmental dimensions of the topic but struggled to put together a well-structured overview, especially for readers who may not come in with background knowledge about Nigerian environmental issues.