User:Frances Mamman/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Environmental effects of mining

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article is related to this courses which is resources of the earth. this article notes the effect of various mineral mining operations of different ecosystems as well as the what problems caused by mining operations. my first impression of the article was that it was well structured with enough information on the main points. for the longest time mining activities has is what has given us assess to the minerals found in the earths crust, and this process have proven to have various effects on various ecosystems. its important to understand these process and their effects to come up with mining methods with less impacts on the environment.

Evaluate the article
From the beginning of the article, the lead section tells us what the article is about but doesn’t give an overall overview of the article. In this case, the lead section is too short. The article speaks on some negative effects of mining such as erosion, acid-rock drainage, sinkholes etc. Each of these examples were explained with a few of them with actual examples of similar cases, such as the Erosion caused by mining at the giant Ok Tedi Mine in Papua New Guinea and release of heavy metals from the Britannia mine in Vancouver, BC. The article also draws light on the effect it has on aquatic, terrestrial and human populations. This gives us an idea of the effects of mining on the various ecosystems on earth. By speaking on these effects it keeps the article neutral in all aspects without shifting important on just one ecosystem. The article also uses peer-reviewed papers as reference which means the information is accurate in most cases where only a few aren’t working anymore, an example of a reference link which was not working is the "Logging of forests and debris dumping". An example of where they used a peer-review reference is at the sinkholes section with the paper called "Sinkhole subsidence due to mining"[1].

In general, I would say the paper did its best to keep its flow neutral and the overall structure of the paper was in order and easy to understand. I would say the article was balanced to a certain extent except for the mitigation section of the article, not many mitigation processes are explained in this section.

I would recommend more discussions on the mitigation processes in the talk page and also more mitigation processes should be included in the article. The use of working and updated references should be used. The use of more case studies should be included in the article so more people can learn of new ways to mitigate the effects of mining activities.