User:Modernbrooke/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Petroleum transport

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I picked this article because I found it to be an interesting topic in regards to Oil/Petroleum. Transportation of petroleum is very impactful on our environment as well as our economy. Most of the information or interaction that folks have with the Oil industry has to do with transportation. My preliminary impression of this page is that there is the potential to have a lot of good information, but it isn't sourced or presented well.

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.)

Lead Section: There is a good introductory sentence that introduces the topic well. I noticed that there are 2 sections not mentioned in the lead section: Costs:  pipeline vs rail and Pipeline versus rail debate. The lead section also mentions how petroleum spills are toxic to living animals which is not later mentioned on the page. Lead section is concise, but a bit short.

Content: Content is relevant to the topic and seems to be up to date. All of the content does belong, but I do feel that it is missing some information in regards to indigenous Americans protesting pipeline construction. That would connect well to the Pipeline versus rail debate section.

Tone and Balance: The article remains neutral except for the section pipeline versus rail debate. That section seems to lean heavier on rail transportation. All of the viewpoints are pretty balanced except for the ones mention above. The article doesn't persuade the reader one way or another.

Sources and References: The information is not all backed up by reliable sources because there are a few links to sources that don't work anymore. Examples of sources that don't work anymore are:


 * 1) "Oil Transportation". PetroStrategies, Inc. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
 * 2) "Refined Fuel Trucks - Westmor Industries Fuel Delivery Equipment". westmor-ind.com. Retrieved 2017-09-07

Sources are thorough and current. The quality of sources could bd stronger because there aren't enough peer-reviewed articles and a lot of the sources reference information that has occurred in Canada.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is well written and its strength really comes from the fact that it is easy to read. No known grammatical errors and the article has a strong organization of topics.

Images and Media: The images in the article do really enhance the sections that they correspond to as well as the captions are simple and descriptive. Images are visually appealing by being uniform and they follow the wikipedia guidelines.

Talk Page Discussion: Not very many conversations are happening on talk page. For an article that is deemed to have many issues on

Wikipedia, there isn't much that is being discussed about those issues. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: WikiProject Energy, WikiProject Climate change, and WikiProject Transport.

Overall impressions: The article's overall status through Wikipedia is that it has multiple issues that need to be addressed. The article's main strength is that it explains in a simple and uniform manner the different types of transportation options that can be used for petroleum and petroleum products. It can be improved by adding more depth to all of the sections as well as look at how transportation for petroleum is used in different regions of the world. I would say that this article is poorly developed with some great potential.