User:Emily J. L./Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
National Forest Management Act of 1976

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose the article because I am interested in environmental policy, which I think is becoming even more important with climate change. My initial reactions are that the article is fairly well-written, though possibly a bit wandering in some areas.

Evaluate the article
The introductory sentence does explain what the article is about, but it could be more concise. The lead does not give a clear overview of the rest of the article, and does seem to contain information that is not found in the rest of the article.

The content of the article is relevant, though I think it could use more background information, specifically about the incidents leading up to the passing of the legislation. The content goes up to the year 2012, but this is up to date since the recent information is about court challenges and I do not think there have been any challenges since 2012.

The article does focus somewhat more on the pro-NFMA viewpoints. There are also a couple of cases of loaded language (particularly the use of the word "attacked" in the Sierra Club v. Marita, 1995 section). The article did not include any fringe viewpoints, and I'm not sure any exist regarding the NFMA.

The quality of many of these sources is poor. Though some of the sources are taken directly from court cases (many through the website Justia) or are other government documents, others are from unknown pages with no way to verify their trustworthiness. Citation #16 also does not work. Most of these sources do not include an author, so I cannot verify whether they are diverse.

The article is fairly clear and concise, though the first paragraph needs to be rewritten and the background is wandering and needs more information. I can't find any grammatical or spelling errors, and it is otherwise well-organized.

The only image the article contains is the one saying that the article is part of the environmental law series. It could benefit from more images.

The article is included in two WikiProjects. It is a C-class, and considered low-importance. There are conversations saying that the background section needs to be improved (as I mentioned), that the page is unclear about how the law actually operates, and several comments about improving the sources (especially for the court cases). However, there are only four conversation threads overall.

Overall, I think the article is decent, but could be improved. The lead section needs to be edited to include a brief summary of the contents of the article, and the background section needs to be more detailed (including adding the information given in the lead section). It could also use better sources.