User:Rumrunner3210/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Water

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 chose to look at this article because it's a resource that's becoming increasingly more important as time goes on, partial proof of this is the fact that California water futures can now be traded, which is in all honesty, a troubling concept since it's a resource that people actually need to live. My initial perception of this article was that it seemed to be of a pretty high quality and summarized the topic fairly 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.)

Leading Section"The leading section of this article looks pretty good, all of the topics mentioned are covered in the actual article and facts are properly sourced (except where obvious). I feel that the lead section served as a good introduction to the rest of the article and introduced the topics in a concise way. Only criticism that I have of it is that ' It is vital for all known forms of life, even though it provides no calories or organic nutrients.' doesn't really seem to provide anything useful to the introduction.  This is also mentioned on the talk page."Content For the most part the information on this page is up to date and pretty complete, I'm not really able to think of anything that I would add in the majority of sections. The exception to this is in the Law, politics, and crisis section where the latest issue has the date of 2006, and there have for sure been more recent issues that should be mentioned, the controversy around companies coming and pumping fresh water from areas for use as bottled water could be covered here as well since it's a pretty major issue surrounding our use of water, and it directly impacts the water cycle for these areas.

The Recreation section seems to be missing citations for sources, a pretty major use of water (hydroelectric power) could be added to the "effects on human civilization section" since it likely has a pretty major impact on human civilization.

In general this article is lacking information regarding access to fresh potable water, and ongoing droughts that are becoming more frequent in certain parts of the world. There is a very short sentence that addresses the issue of access to water in developing countries, but ignores the issue of access to water for marginalized communities even in countries that are considered first world. Sources and References"There are 188 sources that are referenced for this article, many of which are references to academic papers and extremely reputable sites, like the USGS. I checked the links and was not able to find one that was broken (although I didn't check every link on in that section.   The sources didn't seem to be very diverse, but I didn't check the background of the people who were actually cited; However, the sources did seem to be up to date for the most part and I was not able to find sources that would be considered better than the ones that are used in the article."Organization and writing quality"There isn't really much to say regarding the organization and writing quality since this is really well done for the article. For the most part, everything seems to flow really well."Images and Media"The images on the page were either in the public domain or uploaded by the authors as their own work, there doesn't appear to be any copyright issues here. In terms of the layout, the placement of the images followed the standard Wikipedia type style (for the most part appearing on the right hand side of the text)."Talk Page Discussion"The talk page seems pretty dead for the article with not too much discussion going on, but there are recent entries talking about the state of the article. All of the conversations on the page seem to be fairly fact based but there aren't too many of them, I expected an article like this to have more conversation going. The current status of this article is ' Delisted good article' and was delisted on August 31, 2007. The article itself has been rated with as a 'B-Class' article, indicating that it is fairly complete."Overall Impressions This article is well written and currently listed as a delisted good article with a B-Class designation, indicating that it is mostly complete but does require some work to bring it up to the GA designation. Some of the strengths of the article are that it has fairly complete information in respect to the chemical properties of the substance.  In addition to this, it's written from a neutral perspective and isn't attempting to lead the reader to a specific conclusion.  Some of the weaknesses that I noticed are in regards to the issues surrounding water.  The issues in the article are fairly out of date and there really isn't much that's listed to begin with.  In general the article is well written and fairly complete; However, there is some work that needs to be done in regards to citations and the issues.