User:Yvon Secord/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Nickel

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Having worked at a nickel mine/mill (Liberty Mines, Timmins, ON) I thought it would be interesting to see what Wikipedia page on the metal would look like. I was an environmental technician but was able to work closely with the mill and got to see how the ore was processed at our facility. Our "final" product was a "pulp" what we would bag and ship out that usually contained less than %50 nickel content and I found it interesting when I asked why not higher and really wasn't able to get a straight answer. Already in the extraction and purification section of the Nickel Wikipedia page some claims are uncited and clearly needs work.

Evaluate the article
While most of the information on the article is relevant to the topic, the article could benefit from reworking and reorganization of content and subsections. The introductory section is rather long, contains relevant information but much of it is repeated again later or may be better placed in an already designated subsection. For example, it mentions occurrences but the article has a section on occurrences. Some historical mentions are brought up which might benefit from being separated from the introduction and placed into the already existing history section.

There are other examples in the fourth and fifth paragraph in the introduction of information that may be distracting, irrelevant, repeated or may be better placed in a different section. The former speaks of oxidation properties, some historical uses and makes a claim on what proportion of nickel production is used for corrosion-resistant nickel plating without clearly citing or citing at all. The latter paragraph is well cited but it begins by speaking of magnetic properties, then jumps from value and production uses, and finished by speaking on biological roles. Both these paragraphs appear to be designed to "introduce" relevant information but they are not cohesive and could be distracting overall.

Aside from restructuring, there are a number of claims that require citations or are outdated. For example it mentions the rising price of nickel as cause for a shift away from its use in coin production - which may refer to the increase seen from 2000 to 2010, but after looking at the trend of nickel price over time the high price was short-lived and the price of nickel has since dropped which is also mentioned further on in the article. On the topic of coinage, this page has a section with that title which may be an artefact of the use of nickel for 5 cents. While mentioning nickel use in coinage may be relevant, some of the content presented here may be distracting or irrelevant and better suited under a completely different Wikipedia article designated for coinage. Interestingly enough, there is a disambiguation notification that reflects this at the beginning.

The properties and compounds sections are well laid out but the Nickel(ii) subsection of the compounds section in lacks citations entirely. The production, extraction and purification, and applications sections are also poorly cited and lacking. These section could use the most work but more importantly the article lacks any references to social and environmental implications of these activities.

The sections on the history, toxicity and biological role of nickel are well developed and well cited. Like the majority of the article, most of the sources can be found come from wide range of scientific journals, textbooks and government documents. These sections represents a good example of how the rest of the article should be.

The article is listed as a good article and is part of 6 WikiProjects: Elements, Mining, Editorial Team, Geology, Chemicals and Numistatics. Aside from mentioning a mislabelled image and minor grammatical corrections, the talk section appears sparse and some of the conversation could be argued as being distracting or irrelevant.

In relation to the way we've been discussing in class, this article lacks the social and environmental implications associated with this resource.