User:HarvardGrandpa/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Jefferson (proposed Pacific state)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it is really relevant for my research about the State of Jefferson. It provides reliable information about the subject, and a list of reliable sources that I can use to springboard my own exploration of the topic. My preliminary impression of the article was that it provided a thorough, non-biased discussion of the facts surrounding both the historical and modern movement. It would be easy to use dismissive language and write with bias against this controversial movement, but the tone seems very objective.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section:

I though the lead section did a good job optimizing information content and length. It summarized key ideas that the rest of the article expands upon. The only part that might be an issue is that it introduces ideas that aren't talked about later (e.g. "Cascadia").

Content:

The content is thorough and relatively up to date. It spans from the 20th century story of the State of Jefferson and continues up through the 2016 election. I think it would benefit from expanding to more recent news about how the State of Jefferson and COVID have interacted.

Tone and Balance:

The article tries its best to be neutral, but I see a tiny bit of unintentional bias. The title of the article is very clear that the State of Jefferson is only a proposed state, but it also includes an info table that other actual States have with limited language prefacing that all the information is purely hypothetical. There is some language indicating this, but I feel like it may be slightly misleading.

Sources and References:

While the article is very well sourced (almost 50 references!), many of the sources that it references are newspaper articles. To a certain degree, this is unavoidable, but I would like to see more books and historical records as opposed to potentially biased popular articles.

Organization and writing quality:

The article is well organized and well written. There are no mistakes that I can see.

Images and Media:

The images that the article includes are useful to contextualize the information, and they are well captioned and sourced. The map is especially useful to see exactly where the State of Jefferson would be.

Talk Page Discussion:

It was rated "start class" and "mid importance". Discussions included debate over the information table I previously mentioned.

Overall Impressions:

My overall impressions are that the authors of this article did a great job working with the sources that exist for this subject! The only thing I would say is that it would be nice to see more recent information than from 2016.