User:R. Culverwell/Evaluate an Article

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1700 Cascadia earthquake

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The 1700 Cascadia Earthquake is interesting both for its geological importance and for its cultural significance to Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. This article focuses heavily on the dating of the earthquake, using indigenous oral traditions as a key line of evidence. Since my background is in geology, I feel relatively qualified to evaluate this article’s quality, but I will try to focus on anthropological aspects. While the content is interesting, the article initially appears to be poorly organized and relies on non-academic sources.

Note: I accidentally clicked a link on the page and lost all my work just before publishing. I have done my best to recreate it, but this evaluation may not be quite as complete.

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: The lead section is concise and would be more appropriate if the article were written differently. It outlines some geological characteristics of the earthquake, some of which are uncited and not referenced again in the body or in the right-hand column. The lead section fails to address the dating of the earthquake, to which much of the article is dedicated; I would expect a sentence outlining the geological and cultural evidence for the earthquake. Conversely, some of the body text should be dedicated to the characteristics and tectonic setting of the earthquake to align more with the lead section.

Content: While the content is mostly relevant, it is somewhat unbalanced. The article lacks a section on the geologic background and would benefit from an explanation of what a megathrust earthquake is and the tectonic setting in which it occurs. It goes into much more detail on the dating of the earthquake and the techniques used; while this is an interesting and relevant subtopic, a comparable level of detail should be provided on other topics. The article does not cite any scholarly work from the last 15 years, calling into question its accuracy since paleoseismology is a field of active research. There is some content that seems inappropriate; the “Bridge of the Gods – Bonneville Slide” section merely mentions two unrelated events, a landslide in Washington and a volcanic eruption in British Columbia, thought to be associated with the earthquake, then dismisses the landslide’s connection in the second sentence. The article should either explain these cases as possible effects of the earthquake in another relevant section or omit them altogether. The article does detail specific oral traditions of specific Native American groups, but also makes broad, uncited generalizations such as that “virtually all of the native peoples in the region have at least one traditional story of an event much stronger and more destructive than any other that their community had ever experienced.”

Tone and balance: The article is not especially biased, but it does have some sensationalist tones. The “Future Threats” section states, without context, that “Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA's Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, put it quite dramatically: ‘Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.’” This is copied nearly word-for-word from the source and fails to explain the specific threat and how bad “toast” is.

Sources and references: Most claims, with a few notable exceptions, are cited; the sources, however, are not always reliable or relevant. The article relies heavily on non-academic sources, namely news and magazine articles. Many statements about the geology of the event cite a 2015 New Yorker article which is written for a non-scientifically literate audience and includes several inaccurate statements, including broad generalizations about earthquake characteristics and a reference to the obsolete Richter magnitude scale. Even when sources are academic, they are not always from an appropriate field; some claims about indigenous oral history cite a 2005 paper from a seismology journal, yet the article does not appear to cite any anthropological studies or the works of Native American researchers. At least one source link does not work, although most do.

Organization and writing quality: The article does not appear to have any spelling or grammar errors, but the organization is generally poor at both fine and broad scales. Within sections, some barely relevant sentences appear to have been appended with little regard for context; the article would benefit from reworking of most sections to present information in a logical fashion. The overall structure of the article also needs work. First, it would be appropriate to start the article with a section on the basic geologic background and an explanation of how and why megathrust earthquakes occur. This section could also outline the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami and their effects on humans in the region. Some of the content of the “Future Threats” section would be more appropriate here, though most of that section could be preserved later in the article. In its current state, the article has separate sections titled “Scientific research,” “Cultural research,” and “Evidence,” all of which deal mainly with the dating of the earthquake; these would be more appropriately combined under one “Evidence” or “Dating” heading with subheadings for geological and anthropological evidence. Curiously, the article was arranged this way until 2021, when an editor split the section into three and left what was its introduction as an independent section. The current “Evidence” section is consequently only three lines long, is located near the end, and adds little to the article. The “Scientific research” heading is also somewhat problematic in that it implies that anthropology is not scientific, hence the proposed replacement of “scientific” with “geological.” The “Bridge of the Gods – Bonneville Slide” section should be removed and its contents either omitted or incorporate into the “Geologic background” section.

Images and media: Beyond the initial map, which is useful, the diagrams are generally unclear and not especially relevant. The map and block diagram of the subduction zone are both useful for explaining the geology of the event, but the captions offer no explanation and the relevant text is absent. As such, they would serve only to confuse a reader not already familiar with earthquakes. The figures can be kept, but should be given detailed, explanatory captions and incorporated into the new “Geologic background” section. The final figure is marginally more relevant but could benefit from better explanation in the caption.

Talk page discussion: The talk page contains twelve conversations, most of which consist of one unanswered question unrelated to the improvement of the article. Few editors have discussed problems with the article’s content and format, and only two comments have been made since 2012. A 2015 comment notes the lack of citations. The article is part of six WikiProjects, which variously rate it as start-class or C-class. With regard to Native American oral traditions which we have discussed in class, the article gives surprisingly adequate weight to this line of evidence.

Overall impressions: This article includes some good sections, especially regarding the earthquake’s dating, but its overall quality is low. Organization is a major problem, as is the quality of sources. This is an underdeveloped article which, although it is probably not relevant enough to use for my Wikipedia project, I may choose to edit in my own time since the subject is interesting to me.