User:Maeveflynn/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Cannel Coal

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this topic to evaluate because I was interested in the classification of something that is technically oil shale as 'coal'

Evaluate the article
The lead or opening sentence is highly informative and gives you the proper base information that will help the reader have the proper base knowledge to be able to understand the rest of the article. The lead doesn't really have any explanation to the multiple sections of cannel coal which makes sense because there isn't many fields within the discussion of cannel coal because it is already a subset of the larger discussion of oil shale. There is nothing discussed in the lead that is not discussed and more flushed out within the rest of the article. It is very concise and short, not overly detailed but detailed enough to provide understanding.

It is a very short article and I feel as though there has to be more that could be talked about, there must be more information about the specific purposes of cannel coal and the industry surrounding it, it is an oil product so it is nearly impossible for it to not have any controversy surrounding it and yet it only discusses the history. I think that the industry needs to be discussed more in this article because it is very heavy on the history of the uses but not if it is still used or if it has multiple purposes outside of jewelry making. The article is not biased one way or another politically, there are not heavy or weighted comments. I would say that there is likely some content missing because it doesn't include how cannel coal is retrieved and it should because that likely has lots of important information in it and likely some history of power abuse and I feel as though that should be included. There is no persuasion taking place in this article, its facts and information, not propaganda.

All the sources were creditable, either scientific reports and academic journals or information put out from the government itself. The only thing that i noted was that most of the articles seemed to be upwards of 40 years old, one as old as 103 years. I know that a lot of the information must not have changed since then but I still believe that there should be updated information used just to seem even more creditable. Most of the links worked though there were a some that took me to a sad little error page.

The writing is a coherent and understandable scientific piece, it lacks emotion and bias and follows that grammatical guidelines of todays world. It is organized nicely and in a way that easily flows, the history section reading from oldest to recent which is largely accepted to be the way to format that kind of paper. There was no discussion taking place in the talk page and it seems as though it was highly unedited with only a couple revisions a year since 2014. The article is overall simple and concise, I would resort back to it if need be and I would send it to someone to explain what cannel coal is. I think that it is strongly written and not convoluted and an easy read, not too advanced so a person with base scientific knowledge would be able to navigate through it. I would say that the history of cannel coal and the industry surrounding it could be fleshed out a little further than it was in the article. It is not part of any wikiprojects and it talks about oil much more scientifically than we have in class because we often bring in the emotional or political view point.