User:Mineolafrenchie/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Deforestation in Costa Rica

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it was a c-class article that didn't have very much information that I actually knew a good amount about. I spent 3 months living and studying in Costa Rica in which we spoke with many interest groups that discussed deforestation for the purpose of agriculture and I had a particular interest in it for some independent research I did. I would be able to then look at the article and see what kind of information was included, how important it might be, and what information would be necessary to add to make it a more reliable resource. It has three good sections but it is a long and complex issue that needs some more information.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section: The first sentence is very concise and gives exactly what the page is going to be about. The full first paragraph is just one more sentence that mentions the species that might be affected by deforestation but it doesn't talk about causes or any other information. I believe this intro could be longer to include a single main point from each of the other sections so a casual reader could read the lead section and get the general idea of what the rest of the article is about.

Content: The content is not completely up to date with some of the last data cited from 2004, and while that data might still be accurate, it has been too long for that to be the primary source of information. Most of the content is good, it is just really vague so it will say something like "due to government corruption" but then not follow up at all about what that means in Costa Rica or how that specifically applies to deforestation. I think what it is missing is depth and not necessarily the topics. However, I would have broken the sections down differently to include a history, government, and NGO sections.

Tone/Balance: This article is written as an impartial information source and there isn't any opinion given. There does not seem to be bias and the facts that are stated are followed up with sources so they are not just generalizations made by a writer of the page.

Sources/References: All information is tagged to a source, but overall the sources are lacking. There is not very much length of content and so a few sentences in a paragraph might all be connected to a single source making the references look rather sparse for such a big concept. The links work and they all seem to come from peer reviewed papers or another page that then references peer reviewed papers.

Organization and writing quality: Overall, this page is written well, there are no spelling or grammar mistakes that I could find and the writing is clear and concise. This being said, there isn't very much writing to go off of, and overall is pretty sparse and vague. It could work on pulling in more examples and integrating the examples into the points that they are making rather than just citing the source and being done with it. I would say it's concise but maybe too concise.

Images/Media: This page uses a few pictures of forested areas but I'm not sure they really add much to the content other than to show that Costa Rica has forested areas that are large. The pictures are captioned and well cited.

Talk page discussion: on the talk page there are some messages that deal with citing sources and making some claims a little bit more clear about what they are directly referring to. There isn't too much back and forth but there are messages from different writers to all future writers that might work on the page.

Overall impressions: This is a c-class article and it reads like a c-class article. It is a part of a few Wikiprojects. I think that the work there so far is really good, it is just really incomplete. There is so much more information that could be added if someone puts in the work.