User:Primary resource/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sugar beet

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am very interested in this very specific agricultural industry and have had a chance to learn a lot about it over the last few months. I'd like to see how the industry is represented on Wikipedia and whether there is anything I can learn or contribute to it.

Evaluate the article
Lead section:

The first sentence is a good overview of the main points about sugar beets and the whole opening paragraph is well written and covers the main points about sugar beets including biological classification, seeding and farming practices, brief history and commodity industry. Lead also does a pretty good job of overviewing the main headings the Wiki articles goes into more detail about, but doesn't cover every single heading, without adding information that's not present in the discussion paragraphs below. It's relatively concise, and written at a very readable level.

Content

Taking a look at the talk section, for a relatively specialized topic, there is quite a lot of consistent editing and discussion over the years. There has been discussion this year, along with some changes. The statistics presented are from 2020, which is quite recent, though there are also older statistics that should be updated.

The whole article sticks very closely to the topic of sugar beets, though there are some sections that go into a lot of detail that is likely redundant for a Wikipedia article. There are some things that the article could add focus to, which is more about the culture of sugar beet farming - what it's like for the farmers, etc.

Tone and balance

Due to the natural neutrality of this topic, it is fairly reasonable to assume that none of the authors have a bias. When reading the article, this is very true. There isn't any real bias in the article, and it does seem to represent the main points about sugar beets. Overall tone is good, though there could be some more discussion about different viewpoints on the sugar beet market.

Sources and references

There are 56 sources for this article, which seems like a decent number, give the length of the article, however, there is a statement at the top of the page that states there aren't enough citations for all the sentences. This means more citations are needed to make the article more credible. This banner is from 2021 and doesn't seem to have been removed since. Many of the sources are data documents from government data or national and international agriculture associations. There are a few books cited, as well as scientific articles which provide more in-depth scientific information for the more technical sections of the document. There are also a few magazine articles and newspaper/blog articles referenced, which is not ideal for Wikipedia citations. Furthermore, most of the cited sources are quite old - a majority around a decade old. Updating these sources and adding more evidence to support the statistics and in-depth analytical data would greatly improve the article.

Organization and writing quality

Overall, the writing and organization and writing is concise, clear and well written. There aren't any major spelling or grammar errors, and is well organized. The only area of improvement here would be to cut down the "Culture" section, as it is quite long and contains very specific information that could be cut down and improve readability for the average reader.

Images and media

The images provided do help the readability and understandability of the article, though there are relatively few. The images are well captioned and give a thorough description of what the images depict, as well as how they relate to the main topic at hand.

Talk page discussion

There is quite a lot of discussion about editing information and wording throughout the years. It was most active about a decade ago, but there has been talk more recently as well. The article is generally rated quite highly and is located on several WikiPages, including Plants, Food and Drink and Wikipedia 1.0, where it is of high, mid and low importance respectively.

Overall impressions

Overall, this article is quite specific and therefore hasn't been worked vicariously. However, for the amount of contributors and for the amount of interest, it is well written and relatively well laid out. Overall strengths are the content and writing, and the overall weaknesses are the lack of citations and age of most of the content, writing and citations.