User:Tayyy123/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2009 swine flu pandemic in Africa

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This is a C-class article under articles about Africa, meaning the article needs more work. I chose it because the article is about a pandemic, and we are currently living through another pandemic. My first impression is that it looks like an okay article, so I'm curious to see what makes it C-class. There are subsections discussing the flu in various countries. It looks like some countries have more information written about them than others.

Evaluate the article
First, I will evaluate the lead. The introductory sentence of the lead describes the article's topic. However, the lead does not include a description of the article's major sections. The lead includes information about symptoms, which is not included elsewhere in the article. Lastly, the lead is overly detailed and not concise.

The article's content is relevant to the topic. However, the content is not up to date, as most information cited comes from 2009. Some countries, such as Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa have much more information written about them. There is key content missing for the other countries. Lastly, the article deals with a historically underrepresented group, as there are fewer articles written about African politics than U.S. politics for example.

In terms of neutrality, the article seems to have a negative opinion of Egypt's pig-killings. Besides that part, the article has a neutral tone. I do not think the article attempts to persuade the reader in one direction.

Most, but not all, facts are backed up by citations. Most sources are from 2009, which makes them outdated. The author mainly cited WHO and news articles, but no scholarly articles. The links I clicked on worked.

The article is not very concise. Some of the language is informal rather than written in an academic style of writing. There are also typos and grammar issues. Each section feels very different. I think the author added whatever facts they could find for each country. It would have been clearer if each subsection followed a similar format and style. For example, they could have started each section explaining the number of deaths in the country, rather than putting that information at random places in each section.

The maps are not captioned well, making it unclear what is being shown. The only images are maps.

On the talk page, someone requested that a section be added for Cote d'Ivoire. Overall, there are not many comments on the talk page. This article is a part of WikiProject Medicine. We have not talked about this topic in class, so I am unsure if Wikipedia is discussing it differently than we would.

Overall, the article is okay but it needs work. The article could be improved by making the subsections feel more uniform, rather than thrown together. The article is underdeveloped.