User:Slomo321/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
The article I am evaluating is the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I wanted to find an event that is well-known by Americans and has detailed enough information on Wikipedia. My prelimiary impression of it was "I know what I'm looking up, and I know everything I see here is verified and credible, especially for a website like Wikipedia.

Evaluate the article
The "American Revolutionary War" article on Wikipedia obeys every "article evaluation" guideline mentioned above.

The lead section includes an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic; in this case, "The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, secured American independence from Great Britain." The lead includes a brief description of the article's major sections: the "prelude to revolution," "war breaks out," "strategy and commanders," the "revolution as civil war," "Britain's 'American War' and peace," and the "aftermath." It does not include information not present in the article, and is concise.

The article also does a great job with the content. All the article's content is relevant to the topic, and is up-to-date constantly; nothing is missing or out of place. It doesn't have any equity gaps, but it does also discuss the Native American nations, who were already underrepresented populations back then, but the Europeans colonized and destroyed them when Christopher Colombus told Europe about the brand new continent he saw. The Natives were treated poorly and were considered inferior to the colonizers, though they helped both sides in the war.

The tone and balance is equally balanced with the Wikipedia article. The article is neutral and does not appear to be heavily biased toward a particular position. There are no viewpoints that are either overrepresented or underrepresented, and all minority or fringe viewpoints are accurately described as such.

The sources and references are excellent overall, but they aren't as updated or current as of right now, since most parts of the war have been covered with as much accuracy as possible. All articles are backed up by a reliable secondary source of information and are thorough; as a result, they reflect the available literature on the American Revolutionary War. The sources were written by a diverse spectrum of authors, though there seems to be very few, if any historically marginalized individuals (Native Americans, in this case); with that being said, I could be wrong. All facts in the article are based on secondary information; just about every source comes from a book or academic journal of some kind.

The organization and quality of the article is great overall, though it may have some errors and may not be obviously for younger people. The article is well-written for the most part; though, some people may have a tough time understanding what some words in the article mean. There are no spelling and grammatical errors that I notice in the article; however, I use Grammarly, and if I applied the entire article to it, the app would probably detect hundreds of grammatical errors, so I'm not going to get into all the details. The article, itself, is absolutely well-organized and is separated into sections that reflect the major points of the topic. Even if there were better sources available, I believe adding them anywhere in the article would throw things off-balance and harm my credibility. Plus, nearly every source that describes every moment in the Revolutionary War sound open and shut. All article links work properly.

The images used in the article are absolutely stupendous and are crystal clear in describing what the American Revolutionary War was like. The article includes images that enhance understand in the topic, are well-captioned, and are laid out in a visual appealing way. Due to the artworks being made between 1776-1783, it would be unlikely that the artworks and documents used in the article would be copyrighted.

The article's talk page is very minimal, most especially because the article is semi-protected by the website itself. Since the "American Revolutionary War" is a familiar event, it can be susceptable to vandalism. The talk page, however, discusses including the U.S. and France not signing a treaty together until NATO's existence in 1949, sequence changes to the article (the Lee Resolution in lead and the Boston Tea Party), and death toll for the British, not counting diseases. There is no rating, and is not part of any WikiProjects. One thing the talk page did that is different from what I learned is that, "it's nice to post things in advance of making your edits, but you don't have to wait for "permission" to make a change." The examples mentioned in the talk didn't do that; instead, they just told an editor to make those changes instead of doing it themselves.

The article is overall is fantastic. The strength is that it's detailed to very end regarding the American Revolutionary War without making it too detailed. I'm not sure about any improvements I would make to it, as it seems perfectly balanced and neatly chronologically ordered. The article is well-developed and practically complete, allowing users to understand what happened that started the American Revolutionary War, as well as what happened throughout it.