User:Entomological/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Kursk Magnetic Anomaly

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate because the topic itself was interesting to me and because it seemed like it could use more citations and information. The only reference in it was from 2003 so I thought taking a closer look at the article could be beneficial.

Evaluate the article
This article starts out well, with the first section explaining what the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly is in simple terms and presenting it in a short and straightforward way. It presents important background information such as where the Anomaly is located and what it is known for. The content of the article however could be better. It only uses one reference, and it is an article from the year 2003. The content is lacking new and important discoveries made and mentions information that is not needed for the topic at hand, such as discussing an award that a particular person received for their discovery which is not necessary to mention when talking about the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly.

The article is neutral, it doesn’t seem to have the authors personal opinions embedded in it, and instead approaches the topic by presenting facts. However, I would say there is an underrepresentation of other research because of the lack of additional sources. While the one source provided does have a link that works, it takes you to a strange page with not much information in it, so it is unclear where the Wikipedia author got all of their information from. The images used to show the area of the anomaly could be better as well. Through doing some research, I discovered a better visual representation of it published in a recent peer-reviewed paper by Savko et al. The images are well captioned but have not been referenced properly, while one of the images references where it was taken from, the link to the website is not working, and the other image has no source to it at all.

The grammar of the article seems proper, it has a good flow and no mistakes. The content is broken down into a few paragraphs, however there are no subheadings to further clarify what is being discussed, which could be added to improve the writing.

The talk page barely has any discussion. The only two things posted is someone ranking the article to be of high importance and someone else suggesting delving into what a magnetic anomaly is without actually adding that into the article. However, I do find that unnecessary since the “Magnetic Anomaly” Wikipedia article has been linked already which can explain it more thoroughly for those who want to explore it. The article is a part of WikiProject Russia and is rated as a start-class article, as well as a Low-importance article in the Geology portal however of High-importance in the Russian portal. We have not spoken about this exact topic in class, however it relates to what we have discussed about ores, although it focuses more on the history of the site and its discovery.

Overall, I would say this article is underdeveloped. While the information it has is conveyed in a correct manner and easy to read and understand, its lack of sources and depth makes it difficult to be trusted fully. This article can be improved through further literature search on the topic from recent studies and updating the images it portrays to have accurate referencing and better visuals.