User:James.Gough.93/sandbox

Article Evaluation
The article that I chose to evaluate was the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The article is a former featured article on the front page of Wikipedia, it gained this distinction on April 23, 2005. Since that point in time, there have been many changes to the article as time passes by and further events happen to create further detail on this particular topic. However, it is still interesting to note that as this article was a featured article at one time on Wikipedia, there have therefore been in the past many sets of eyeballs trained on this particular topic. Therefore, some people in the world (however small a denomination that may be) have some sort of semblance of what this particular article discusses.

From what I can tell, everything in the article is relevant to the topic of the article. All of the image files in the article are relevant to the Canadian Pacific Railway. For example, when the article describes the different types of locomotives that are in use throughout the Canadian Pacific Railway network, there are relevant image files that describe through a visual point of view the different types of locomotives. In terms of the actual content of the article, all of the text (at least from what I can tell after closely reading the article) is relevant to the Canadian Pacific Railway. The article traces the history of the CP Rail company, beginning with the construction of the railway from 1881-1885, and concluding with the present state of the railway. Along the way, the text meanders through information related to the types of trains that the company utilizes, and the various non-railway related services that are considered to be a part of the Canadian Pacific Railway system (e.g. telegraph, radio, steamships, etc).

Further examination of the article allows me to make the determination that the article was written with an encyclopedic viewpoint in mind. There is little to no evidence of bias or problematic content in the article. Instead, the article is told as if one was reading from an encyclopedia in a library. Interestingly, one portion of the article covers the use of Chinese workers in the building of the railway's main lines and branches, which is a potentially troublesome topic for some. However, those who wrote out this article have clearly refined the article to the point that there is no evidence of racism or bias to one side of the conflict. It would be very easy for an individual to navigate to this particular page and input some choice comments about the labour that the Chinese immigrant workers in British Columbia partook in. However, there is no evidence of untoward content whether that is defined as racism or as bias. Some may argue that the article reads a little bit too much into the government and corporate sector of the company - there are plenty of references to the government proceedings and corporate dealings that led to the creation of the railway. However, the argument can be made that it is extremely important to ensure that all of the relevant dealings that took place in the lead up to the creation of the idea of a Pacific railway system that linked the Western half of Canada with the Eastern portions of the country.

Nearly all of the important facts and details are referenced properly using both a link to the relevant Wikipedia article that the phrase is speaking about and a citation to the bottom of the page. The References portion of the page hosts some one-hundred and fifteen citations, all properly sourced and formatted. Upon closer inspection (e.g. clicking some of the links in the references section) I made the discovery that much of the information for the article originates from research by reputable sources, such as scholarly articles that have been peer-reviewed by members of the academic community. Other sources of information for the article as referenced in the citations area came from government publications on the Canadian Pacific Railway. In most or all of the cases as near as I can tell, there is no evidence of plagiarism or other various forms of infringement in any of the articles.

Overall, it is safe to assume that this is an article that is well on its way to meeting the entirety of Wikipedia's quality standards, as well as its standards that are based around citations, bias, and other such concepts. Although there is some chatter on the Talk page of the article that may raise some eyebrows (e.g. an individual posted a sarcastic comment on the Talk page of this article in response to another individual's question, leading to a rather contentious retort from the original poster of the comment), this is generally not the case. In general, the Talk page of the article is a positive space that discusses updates to the article in a respectful manner that is consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines that are set out very clearly by Wikipedia's staff members.

The article on Wikipedia that discusses the Canadian Pacific Railway is a clean and consistently proper article that very clearly meets Wikipedia's standards for quality assurance and for content accuracy. Although there are some minor edits that can potentially be made (e.g. removing distracting images that do not offer much in the way of general information, such as the portrait of John A. Macdonald that is placed rather prominently in the second section of the article that references the history of the railway), this article is in general a very good source of information. It should be noted that it is a much better idea to write information for an academic recipient from original research that has been compiled into a bank of facts, not a Wikipedia article. However - if one was writing an article on the CP Railway, this is a great place to begin the process of research.