User:Juliacat728/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Climate change denial

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I have been studying climate change for about three years now and it surprises me how many people can still deny that climate change exists or that it is going to greatly affect humans. Also, I learned in my previous climate change class about how climate deniers misconstrue scientific uncertainty; hiding from their readers that the term "uncertainty" is used differently in scientific papers than it is in everyday conversations. Finally, the fact that fossil fuel industries are funding climate change denial campaigns merely because they don't want to lose their business upsets me due to the potential catastrophic consequences of climate change for human, animal, and plant life.

Lead Section:
The introductory sentence concisely and clearly describes what climate change denial is and another name for it (global warming denial). The lead section more-or-less gives a brief description of what's to come but does not cover some sections as it is a relatively long article. This is fine because it is meant to be an overview of the main topics and not a table of contents. It doesn't contain any information that is not in the article and it is concise and not overly detailed.

Content:
All of the content of the article is relevant to climate change denial and looks up-to-date for the most part. However, I would consider adding a section on how climate change denial has recently subsided (but not disappeared completely). Also, I would add to the "Denial Networks" "international" section because the page seems a bit biased towards the United States, but perhaps that is because there is not as much climate denial in other countries. If this is the case, perhaps changing the lead section to make clear that this is an American concept would be good.

Tone and Balance:
The tone of the article remains neutral throughout. Again, it seems like an international viewpoint may be slightly underrepresented. One may want to change the focus of the entire article to only be on the United States or incorporate more information about denialism internationally.

Evaluating Sources:
Sources on the page are relatively recent, but I am interested in whether there is one from after 2016 which makes claims about how climate change denial has been decreasing in recent years. All claims from the article are cited by their respective sources, and there is a good variety of peer-reviewed journals, books, and reliable news articles. All the links seem to work.

Organization and Writing Quality:
The page is organized quite nicely and the writing is clear, concise, and unbiased. There is a brief summary in the lead section which sets up the rest of the article. The article begins with the history of climate change denial and continues with other relevant aspects of the issue such as denial networks, the arguments used by climate change deniers, and concludes with the effects of climate denial. I am unable to locate any spelling or gramatical errors at the moment.

Images and Media:
The images used are mostly graphs and charts although there is one of an American politician and another showing a clipping from an old magazine article. Further, there is a video in the "Public Sector" category that I found really interesting and think is a good contribution to the article. All media are labeled and include source links.

Talk Page Discussion:
Because of its controversial nature, this page is rated as contentious and notifies the viewer that content may be in dispute. This just means that editors need to be cautious when adding or removing content and when discussing in the forum. There are multiple archived talk pages with good discussion, but recently there hasn't been much action.

Overall Impression:
In its entirety, it is a well-written article that gives readers a good overview of the topic. It is not overbearing and is easy for someone who has never heard of the topic to get a strong idea of what it means by merely reading the lead section. Further, for more experienced readers the article includes a lot of details that are not commonly discussed in the news, and does so in a neutral, unbiased way. However, the article lacks in its discussion of climate change denial outside of the United States and should either add foreign climate denial, change the page name to be U.S.-specific, or explain why there are no credible sources citing climate change denial outside the country. Further, a search should be done to see if there are any recent sources explaining that climate denial has decreased in recent years and why that is (or is not) the case.