User:JohnHarrisonDoe/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
British Hong Kong

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article, because I am interested in the colonial period and the article could be intriguing. It is an important article as details a significant former colony. Hong Kong remains an interesting city that is highly contentious politically, largely due to some of the policies imposed by the British.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section:

The lead sentence is good enough, but it could have been a bit more descriptive of the article. As a whole, the lead section does not lay out a brief description of all the different sections of the article. It only focuses on the history of British Hong Kong, omitting information regarding the economy, culture, dissent, and even government. The Second Opium war is explicitly named in the lead section of the article, but it is only described in the article, not named. The lead is, in fact, concise. However, it may be too concise as it does very little to describe the rest of the article.

Content:

The content of the article seems to be all relevant to the topic. Being as this all happened in the past, the article seems to be up to date as well. However, the weight of the content is not evenly distributed throughout the article. Instead, the history section seems to have much more information than any other section. Ideally, the other sections would contain more information that would balance the article better.

Tone and Balance:

The article seems to be largely neutral. It does not show any distinct biases one way or another. However, there seems to be an imbalance in the amount of information about the British as opposed to the people of Hong Kong. Ideally, there would be more information about the population of Hong Kong and not just the colonizers. Still, the article does not try to persuade the reader one way or another as to whether certain policies were good or bad. The main flaw in terms of balance is that the information provided is almost exclusively about the British Empire's actions and not about the people of Hong Kong.

Sources and References:

A big issue with this article is that there needs to be more sources used at different parts of the article. Particularly under the transfer of sovereignty section, the cultural section, and the economy section. All of those sections either have no sources or too little. In terms of the sources themselves, there needs to be more. One source is used 14 times. Perhaps a use of wider sources would help balance out the disparity in both viewpoint and content. To give some credit, a few of the sources appear to be written by Chinese people. Also, the sources used appear to be of good quality, all published books or academic papers.

Organization and Writing Quality:

The article is easy to read through and has no major grammar problems. The section breakdown makes sense; the only problem is the disparity in the amount of content in each section.

Images and Media:

The images provided are germane to the topic, well captioned, and appear to follow Wikipedia copyright policy. They are also visually appealing.

Talk Page:

The article is rated as C-Class. The main conversation is about when to label the establishment of Hong Kong. It is actually quite interesting as there are multiple opinions, both with good evidence.

Overall Impressions:

The article is an interesting read about the history of British Hong Kong. However, it needs some more sources and more content about the economy and culture. I would say the article is about 60-70% complete, being underdeveloped but not poorly developed. While it does a good job on the political history, the other sections lack information.