User:Katya Olsen/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sponge City

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose to evaluate this article because I am very interested in the intersection of sustainability, technology, and city development. Sponge cities are important as they can help to alleviate issues with climate change, like the urban heat island effect. They also help to mitigate the drainage problems that come with the impermeable, concrete city surfaces. Through a reusing and repurposing of stormwater, this method of city design can help to solve water shortages, increase biodiversity in the region, reduce chances of flooding, and create more green space for residents to enjoy. The Wikipedia page for sponge cities is currently underdeveloped as it is in need of citations, grammatical fixes, photos and figures, updated policy events, and an engineering section. The article is off to a strong start, however, with some interesting content and statistics that simply need to be reorganized a little.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Sponge Cities (C-class article)

Lead Section

The lead-off sentence for this article does a pretty good job of covering what a sponge city is and when it was first proposed. It includes the benefits of this design method and briefly describes how the system works.

The second paragraph of the introduction is where things get messy. There is a substantial amount of duplication of information. It notes China’s role in proposing this plan multiple times and overuses words like “initiate” in every sentence. I would suggest cleaning up grammar and sentence structure to make these lines more concise and remove the duplication of pre-mentioned information.

The lead section is also missing citations for the lines: “It can alleviate the city's water-logging, water resources shortage, and urban heat island effect and improve the ecological environment and biodiversity by absorbing and capturing rain water and utilizing it to reduce floods” and “the country plans for 80 percent of its urban cities to harvest and reuse 70 percent of rainwater.” These are direct facts so they must be attributed to a scholarly source. I would also recommend taking out the line stating that a sponge city “requires huge investments, but has a lot of benefits.” This creates a value statement. The effects of this technology have already been listed above in a neutral manner so this information becomes redundant. If financing is a substantial issue in the implementation of sponge cities, it also deserves a section covering it, as the positives are mentioned numerous times throughout the article.

The last line of this introduction, “funding sponge cities has been a challenge”, not only has poor grammar but also seems out of place in the article. It would be better mentioned where all the benefits are described in the first paragraph. Even though this article does have a “Contents” box listing the sections, it would be beneficial to include a wrap-up sentence going more in depth as to what elements of sponge cities will be covered on the page.

Content

The “Background” section does a solid job of addressing the stormwater drainage problems at hand with the most current urban architecture. It covers ties between water-logging and rapid urban growth, the central motivator for sponge city development. Informative statistics are also included, although the section is still in need of a couple in-text citations.

The “Policy” section clearly states a chronology of the major events related to sponge cities in China. While it is lacking in in-text citations, the level of detail is sufficient to give the reader an overview on how long the project has been going on for, what progress has been made, and what the goals are for the future. This content, however, is not up to date as the last major event listed is the selection of pilot cities in 2016.

The one significant segment that I believe is missing from this paper is an environmental and civil engineering one that covers the technical aspects of how a sponge city functions. The “Designing for Sponge Cities” section gives a good top-level overview but could go into more detail on why certain land features and topography are beneficial. There is also no mention of how China plans to set up a system to reuse the rainwater which it collects. It would help to include more hyperlinks in this paragraph to link readers to related Wikipedia pages. Overall, the article covers a good amount of governmental actions but simply becomes a case study on Chinese sponge cities as there is no mention of this green design practice occurring elsewhere.

Sources

The sources that are cited in this article all seem to work properly, however many are from mainstream news sites. Including more academic sources and those found in peer reviewed journals could help to boost the integrity of the facts mentioned in this page. There is diversity in the type of publication as some sources are from Chinese news outlets while others are American. The articles are all relatively current but could be updated along with the information in the “Policy” section of this article. Attributing in-text facts to their corresponding source is also one of the major weak points of this page.

Talk Page

When going to the Talk Page for the sponge city article, no conversations appeared. Readers are told that the project is listed under the scope of WikiProjects for Climate Change, Urban Studies and Planning, and Cities. Even when searching under these project pages, no talk about sponge cities was shown. It seems as if this page is not frequented very regularly.

Summary

Overall, this article provided a solid top-level overview of sponge cities. Information was presented in a way that made it clear to an everyday reader and all details were kept relevant to the chosen topic.

I’d strongly recommend the addition of charts, figures, and photos for this page. These would be extremely beneficial in giving readers a deeper understanding of how a system like this would work and a layout of future development goals. Grammar and paragraph organization also stand out as a major weak spot in this writing so I would prioritize that when editing. I’d also develop the content section to include more about the technical functioning of this design. Lastly, going more in depth with the financing issues of this project would help to give the page a more even-handed, neutral perspective. As it is, this article is currently underdeveloped but holds a lot of potential given the complexity of the project and the major impacts that sponge cities could have on urban sustainability.