User:Saxman98/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Polesie State Radioecological Reserve - Wikipedia

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I was looking at articles that had to do about Earth Resources that can be contaminants and I found this article about the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve. This was an area that was affected by Chernobyl and I had not heard of it so I thought I could learn a little from it and it might give me ideas for my final project. This topic is important because nuclear fallout could be potentially catastrophic to human survival if it happens at a large scale and looking at this reserve and how it has changed over time could give us a better idea of what to expect, as radiation linger for very long. This article was interesting in topic but it was very general in it's statements and did not give a lot of details of what and how they are operating in the area, nor of any scientific studies that are being done though they are mentioned.

Evaluate the article
This article has a very good concise lead section. It let's you know what this article is about, where it is in the world, why this Radioecological Reserve is needed and what organization is in charge of it. It mentions most of the key topics that are covered in the article. The content of the article has some notable gaps in it, it is not up to date and does not cover every topic. Many of the settlements that are listed have links to pages that do not exists. Do these places actually exists? Why do they have links if they have no pages? There is a section at the end that mentions future proposed nature reserves with a link to no pages as well. So there is a large gap about what will be done in the future in the reserve. There is also a message at the top saying that most references are general and do not have enough inline citations. I checked some of the links that are provided and they are accurate and are related to the topic but are very general. Some of the references are out of date and do not work, as well as there are not many references to start. They mentioned in the article that mainly biologists study the area, but then they do not elaborate on what type of study they are doing in the area or any papers that may have to do with the topic. They have a statement in quotation but they do not list a source for where they got this from. They only talk about the effect of Chernobyl of the evacuated families and any other effects of Chernobyl. They do not have more weight on one topic rather than another, but that may be due to a lack of references and knowledge.

The tone of the article is very neutral and is not biased at all. They state the facts of what happened as they have it from the information, although that information might be lacking in more diverse references and information. This article is well-written, it is very easy to read and the layout if well done with the topics in an order you can understand and that make it clear. There are no spelling mistakes that I could find, and it does not have difficult language so it is easy to understand.

There are not many images in this article. The two maps help identify the location of the reserve and radiation, they are well captioned and well referenced. The last image was of just a bison on a reserve, which was not very useful as it might not have been in that particular reserve, or the type of byson that they mention in the article. If it had that information it would have had more weight to it. They could have added images or logo or Bellesrad which is in charge of the area, or of the activities in the area to give a more concrete idea of what goes on in the reserve.

There was only one talk section that was posted on the page asking these questions :"Have any radiation maps or readings been published ? What is the level of agriculture in the Reserve, and is it increasing ? Are there any plans to reduce the size of the reserve ever ?" These were posted in 2021 and they ask some very good questions that I was wondering about when I first looked at the page and I thought would get answered. The article is part of WikiProject Belarus and WikiProject Protected Areas, both of these were low-importance. This could be a reason that there has not been as many references added to this page.

Overall I think that this article is underdeveloped in the sense that there is not a lot of actual information about the reserve. There is a lot of general information but there are no specifics. The article was very well written and neutral, as well as the layout was well done. The biggest and best way to improve this article would be to add more references on the activities and studies going on at this reserve. If they could answer why this became an radioecological reserve and give concrete reason why or even why not would lend more credit to this article.