User:Saxifragerussell/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
(Provide a link to the article here.)

4 Degrees and Beyond International Climate Conference

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 found a long list of articles about climate change conferences that all seemed to have relatively little information on Wikipedia. I chose this one specifically because the name of the conference was more interesting than a typical scientific collaboration. This conference was important because it was one of the first public fora to consider the consequences of the upper limits (4 ˚C) on possible global temperature rise by the end of the century. The article seems to mostly have the relevant information present on the page, but is not formatted or organized particularly 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.)

The lead section is not organized well. The first sentence, which is supposed to identify the topic clearly, only gives the title and subtitle of the conference and where it was held. The identification of it (with broad information about who participated) is doled out over the next several lines. There are four separate "paragraphs" within the lead section for seemingly no reason: three of them should be combined -- papers produced and a follow-up conference definitely fit in the lead paragraph -- and the fourth just describes how to access video of the oral presentations, which is awkwardly worded and should be placed either at the end of the section or lower on the page.

The next section is titled "Rationale for the Conference" and contains no original text, but rather one block quotes of the description the organizers of the event themselves gave. It is properly cited, but this is a misuse of quoting. The information in this quote should have been at the very least framed by original work, and it would be better to remove some information from the quotes, as the way it is phrased is not particularly important in this context. The next section, "Participation Invitation," is exactly the same: it simply gives a (poorly formatted) block quote of the invitation given to conference participants. There is again no framing and in fact no original text at all. It is attributed to the same source as the previous section, and is properly cited, but there is no attempt to give context or use the author's own words. Both sections are also very short and formatted badly, making them difficult to read.

The final section, about a follow-up conference in Australia, is better than the first three, though it still uses a long block quote with little purpose. It uses many more sources, actually frames the topic of discussion, and provides useful context (e.g. that protests disrupted the event briefly) in the author's words.

Overall, this article is not well written and primarily does not adhere to the guidelines for good Wikipedia writing. There is only one interaction on the talks page, which discusses a former heavy use of bolding and links, which have been cut out by the version I saw, but there is no discussion of the formatting problems or overuse of long quotes where not necessary. The best way to develop this article would be to reorganize each section to actually use original text, and better distribute the sources through the article.