User:Mesopotamianqueen/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2015–2018 Iraqi protests

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because during the summer 2018 protests, I was on a visit to my grandmother's house in the city of Najaf, located in the southeast part of the country. The protests were so prevalent when I was there, including the fact that we frequently heard gunshots pointed at the sky, watched the TV blasting news all day, and had to change our flights due to the Al Najaf International Airport being shut down. This article is significant for my class because the 2015-2018 protests alone represent a collection of the many issues that currently exist inside the country. Therefore, I was not surprised to find this article incredibly lengthy, with not only an overview of the protests but also an entire section for each year.

Evaluate the article
The lead section effectively introduces the topic, considering how difficult it is to concisely cover complex, nationwide protests happening over the course of three years. The only improvements that I would make would be to give the two sentence chunks a less overwhelming, run-on feel by breaking them into multiple sentences. In addition, I would introduce the first sentence of the second chunk with "The root of most of those Iraqi problems..." following along with a more brief mentioning of the muhasasa quota agreements.

Before chronologically diving into the details of the protests throughout each year, the article initially gives readers context by explaining the political situation at the time as well as the problems that led up to the political tension. This was an effective organization because the information gradually becomes more specific the farther down one would scroll, making it easy for readers to choose between a broad and thorough analysis. Since this is such a nuanced topic, I find it difficult finding information that does not belong. Instead, I would recommend writing less in detail about the cabinet and parliament under the "2016" section if the other three years are not given as much attention (which they are not). In addition, under the "Long-running problems" section, there should be some context as to why Iraq is as underdeveloped as it is due to past wars and imperialism from outside western countries.

That brings me to my next case about the tone and balance of this article. Although the article seems to be generally fair, I see more attention being put on the issues inflicted by Iran yet not as much towards the relevant political interventions of the United States and the United Kingdom. Details about the anger that Iraqis have towards the Irani government are indeed crucial, but perhaps some about their anger towards long-running western military intervention would also be useful.

Most of the sources are news headline articles, which is usually frowned upon in Wikipedia. Usually, the alternative to news headline articles would be scholarly books and journals, yet the the topic of 2015-2018 Iraqi protests is so new. These news articles also seem to come from a fair balance of right-leaning, neutral, and left-leaning news articles. Therefore, their use of news articles is reasonable. In addition, this article still uses a couple scholarly sources, including a reviewed publication in the CMI U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, called "Iraq: Overview of corruption and anti-corruption," as well as the Final Draft of the Iraqi Constitution under web.archive.org.

One important feature of this article also includes its use of an infographic, "Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Major Tribes." For it being one of only two graphics used in this article, this image seems to represent such niche information about the different religious and cultural groups that exist in Iraq. It indeed gives context to the "Shiite heartland" when discussing the 2018 protests, but perhaps the article does not need to place much attention on the religious sect of the protesters in order to showcase their fight for accessible water, electricity, and employment. Instead, the article could highlight some statistics about the issues that Iraqi households face on a daily basis.

On the talk page, there is discussion about relating/merging this article with Iraqi 2015-2016 protests and the Iraqi October 2019 protests. Some agree/disagree with the merging due to how similar/different the causes behind the protest are. Since the existing 2015-2018 article is already as long and nuanced as it is, then adding protests from more years would make it excessive.

Overall, this article was well-developed considering how difficult the topic is to research, understand, and explain concisely and efficiently. It has the strength of covering important details in chronological format while still making it understandable for the readers in the throughout the beginning of the article. Some improvements include placing slightly less importance on the sectarian aspects of the protests and more on the statistics that underly the struggle of Iraqis accessing basic needs and why the country is in such an underdeveloped state in the first place.