User:MccEmma/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The article I have chosen to evaluate is Mountaintop removal mining.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate Mountaintop removal mining because I remembered some discussion of it in previous courses I have taken, but I did not recall much of the specifics. An important reason to choose this topic is that it is a controversial practice, so I wanted to better educate myself on the process, benefits, and concerns. From a preliminary read-through of this article, it seems to do a good job of providing these explanations, including from economic as well as environmental perspectives.

Evaluate the article
The lead section of this article does provide a clear and concise overview of the topic of mountaintop removal mining. It explains what it is, then also provides a look into the sections of the article, including the process and the economic and environmental perspectives of the practice. However, I believe the sentence on the controversy could be expanded upon slightly so that a reader looking for a quick overview from the lead section can understand what the economic benefits and environmental/human health concerns are without reading the entire article.

The content of this article is all relevant to the topic and does a good job of covering the important aspects. It is structured well, with many sub-headings to organize the content in a logical manner. The "Economics" section does thoroughly explain the economic benefits side of the controversy with relevant and plentiful sources, while the "Environmental impacts" and "Health impacts" sections thoroughly explain their respective content as well, without coming across as biased on either side. It can be hard to maintain neutrality in a controversial topic, but this article does provide many facts, not opinions, supporting both "sides" of the argument. I do not feel that the article was trying to persuade me as a reader to support one position or the other, since a plethora of facts were provided for both and allowed me to draw my own conclusions. The section pertaining to economics does appear more sparse than the environmental/health impact sections, so there is potentially room for more research and support for this perspective. I also appreciate the "Art, entertainment, and media" section for providing references to many other sources that one can check out to learn more about the subject in different forms.

The facts in this article generally seem to be supported by reliable sources of information. There is a good variety in the forms of sources, including scientific journal articles (such as Journal of Community Health, Environment International, and Annals of the New York Academy of Science), books, magazines (such as National Geographic), and government websites, as well as some news coverage. However, many (if not the majority) of sources are from more than a decade ago, so some updating of information could be valuable. Also, in a quick check of a few links, multiple led to "Page does not exist" errors which further supports that some of these sources could use some updating. I also found that the "Process" section of this article was slightly lacking in sources, as it did not sufficiently back up the explanation of the technique. I found a peer-reviewed article "Mountaintop Removal and Job Creation: Exploring the Relationship Using Spatial Regression" by Woods and Gordon (2011), and it does a good job of briefly explaining the process, but I am sure there are more in-depth sources out there.

As a whole, the article is well-written. All of the sections flow well enough together to paint a cohesive picture of mountaintop removal mining. The only section that feels dramatically underdeveloped is the "Other sites", which simply says "Laciana Valley, Spain (1994 - 2014)". This could be significantly expanded upon, describing what the process is like in that region as well as the region-specific impacts and perspectives. There are no noticeable grammatical or spelling errors to take away from the clarity and professionalism of the article.

This article is rated as B-Class and Mid-importance in the WikiProject Mining and WikiProject Environment, B-Class in the WikiProject Appalachia, and B-Class and Low-importance in the WikiProject Energy. In the talk page, there have been a significant number of conversations about neutrality, or lack thereof, in the article. Most of these discussions are 5-15 years old and have since been sufficiently resolved, but there seemed to be a lot of difficulty presenting the information in this article in a non-biased manner. As aforementioned, and as with any controversial subject, it is challenging to ensure the article is providing legitimate facts from both "sides" of the debate. This was resolved in this article by including distinct sections labelled "Economics", "Environmental impacts", and "Health impacts" in an attempt to look at the situation from multiple perspectives. Something that should be discussed in the talk page is the proposed introduction of mountaintop removal mining in Alberta. There was already some talk page discussion about how US-centric the article is, but it was claimed that is just because there are no other sources of this being practiced elsewhere in the world. Now that, as of Fall 2020, there has been discussion of practicing MTR in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, some perspectives surrounding that could be included.

The key strengths of this article are its ability to present a thorough explanation of what mountaintop removal mining is in understandable terms, as well as providing multiple unbiased perspectives on the benefits and costs associated with the act, all the while being well-supported with peer-reviewed literature. However, the weaknesses of this paper include the age of some of the sources, since I feel more recent sources of information could hopefully be used. Relatedly, some of the links on the article lead to page errors and are no longer useful. Additionally, to make the paper less US-centric, the section on MTR in Laciana Valley, Spain and the proposed introduction of MTR in Alberta could be included to provide a more global perspective of the topic.