User:Nicksalanitri/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2018 Anchorage Earthquake

Talk:2018 Anchorage earthquake

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I picked this article because I thought it has a lot of relevance to this class. With our final exam being a project where we write a wikipedia page for an "unknown" earthquake, I thought that a wikipedia article that is very brief about a specific earthquake in Alaska would be the perfect one to pick. Not only is it an interesting read, but it will also give me an idea of what these wikipedia pages that have little information about an event look like. After evaluating this article I hope to have a better understanding about how to write a proper wikipedia article for this final.

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.)

The lead to this article is poorly written as it does not use proper english and talkes in very short sentences that do not connect ideas in any fashion. Reading it leads me to believe that this earthquake was of great magnitude because of the first word being "odd" but no where in the article does it state the magnitude of the earthquake. It can immedietly be seen that this article was written by someone who had experience the earthquake due to the language they use and how they describe how they specifically felt the earthquake. It mentions a city but does not give the reader the slightest clue to where this city is in Alaska, creating nothing but confusion for me.

The articles content is focused on event of the earthquake in a way that tells the reader how residents of this area may respond to this earthquake. From a storytelling perspective however, it lacks numerous details that are necessary to describe basic information like how strong it was, how big the felt area was, and what caused it. I thought it was interesting how they added a section about his personal response to the situation in case readers were wondering what their next move would be; and as they stated in the article, they do not have any plans to move.

Their tone throughout the article is relatively consistent; they are writing in an informative but also pondering tone. This tone lets the reader understand his thought process easily and take note that they are looking for more help in describing the event that occurred. It seems it would be useful if other residents of Alaska who experienced the earthquake added onto this article so that more views on what happened and future steps in response to this can be provided to the reader.

The article does not have any images associated with it, however, in the "image" section of the article they are asking for anyone with pictures of the damage to upload them to the article. He describes a few scenes he recalls seeing and asks for them to add pictures of these events if they had any of them. There is one link where an image is present, however, the image is not captioned and it is impossible to know for sure that this photo was of damage from this specific earthquake.

There are a few sources provided throughout the article but it seems that the majority of the information is coming from the primary source, the author. We do not know this mans credibility so it would be in the best interest of wikipedia and the reader for other users who felt the earthquake to add onto the information provided and fact check it with data and their own personal experiences. Images of the damage he is describing would also be of use and another good way to confirm the information is accurate. This article is still very much so in the planning phase as the author poses many questions in the opening sentences of paragraphs. With more work this article has the potential to accurately describe the events of this article in a cool way considering the author is a person who directly felt the effects of the earthquake.